By Illinois Review
In the two weeks leading up to last Saturday’s State Central Committee (SCC) meeting, committeemen mocked Illinois Review’s leadership for daring to suggest that hundreds of grassroots conservative supporters would be attending the December 10, 2022 quarterly meeting.
And then when more than 200 grassroots conservatives showed up, with more than 60 of them wanting to speak, surpassing all attendance records at past SCC meetings, what did the IL GOP do? Some of the SSC members stole a page out of the liberal elite’s playbook and are now calling those 200 participants the “Fringe Minority.”
Sound familiar? It should, because just last January, when liberal Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blasted thousands of Canadian truckers protesting the vaccine mandate as being the “Fringe Minority” with “unacceptable views.”
The truckers formed convoys across Canada heading to the nation’s capital in Ottawa, where upwards of 120,000 truckers and conservative activists formed blockades lasting for weeks.
And who can forget Hillary Clinton’s accusation that “half” of Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2016 presidential election fit into a “basket of deplorables,” which Clinton described as being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.”
Trump won the 2016 presidency with nearly 63 million votes, “half” of which would be 31.5 million people.
Similarly, during the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama famously said that people who live in small towns are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion.”
At least 46 million Americans live in small towns across the country.
If the IL GOP’s derogatory label were not offensive enough, sources have confirmed to Illinois Review that the SCC’s proposal to pacify the “Fringe Minority” is not to give them a seat at the table, but rather to sit them at the kiddie table.
SCC members have proposed an “Outreach Committee” in which grassroots conservatives would be allowed to join, voice their concerns, though the SCC committeeman chairing the committee would be the only voting member.
That’s right, the IL GOP plans to “reach out” to grassroots conservatives in much the same way that it purportedly has been reaching out to minority communities and other communities that it pretends to care about, with little results.
But after Saturday’s performance by the SCC, the notion of an Outreach Committee is dubious at best. Saturday’s meeting presented the IL GOP with an incredible opportunity to welcome grassroots conservatives with open arms. Instead, the IL GOP did everything to signal to the grassroots that their voices didn’t matter and they weren’t welcome.
Not surprisingly, various grassroots conservatives who have been contacted by SCC members regarding the Outreach Committee have expressed disinterest. It’s no secret that committees are where good ideas go to die.
Illinois Review has given the SCC a roadmap for connecting with the grassroots: start with the “Mama Bears” groups, who organized an impressive ground game from the Collar Counties to Champaign to Cairo. And bring their leadership to the table.
Even consider electing a Mama Bear as IL GOP Chair.
The 17 members of the SCC have a unique opportunity to right these wrongs, or to circle their wagons.
Time will tell.
