5 MAGA policy objectives for the 2024 election cycle

Let me first state that I strongly endorse the America First MAGA agenda pretty much as it is. But I have some ideas for new policy objectives, strategies and tactics (and tweaks to existing ones) that could help President Trump and the MAGA movement refine the message and broaden the base over the next two years. My last article of this type was published 10 years ago just after the 2012 election – two years before my first of two runs for governor of Massachusetts. I titled it "Time For a New Coalition in the GOP" – and some of its ideas were (coincidentally) adopted by Trump in 2015 and '16.

1) We should work to reform the corporate media and force it back into the role of informing the public with honest and balanced reporting of the news, and end the corrupt and manipulative social-engineering agenda that exists today. How? MAGA should add a new standard talking point that the First Amendment's protections for a "free press" presuppose actual freedom by journalists and the media organs that employ them, and that top-down coercive ideological conformity (in news reporting as opposed to editorials and "advocacy journalism" that is clearly labeled as such) is a form of intellectual/political slavery that falls outside of constitutional protections – perhaps even violating the 13th Amendment. When media cry foul, remind them that all other First Amendment rights have been narrowed except for the press, and they have endorsed or even championed those revisions.

Further, remembering that the Bill of Rights is a set of restrictions on government, not the citizenry, any ideological media bias that is directly influenced by government actors or agencies should be deemed constitutionally violative on its face. ALL government employees, including especially intelligence agents and agencies, should be required to formally disclose to the public under threat of meaningful personal financial penalty any relationships with journalists or media entities in which they advocate for or lobby for public policy objectives. Government-manipulated media are NOT free. And there is nothing that stops government agencies from advocating their policies through their own official media organs except fear of transparency and public suspicion.

Legislation should add the tort of "False Light" to defamation statutes, making it far easier for victims of press misrepresentation to win damages from journalists and media entities, with specific early-stage litigation protections for media that maintain and can document a high standard of balance and fairness in news reporting on a case-by-case basis. Laws governing fair-trade practices and civil rights should allow for news media entities, which engage in public commerce (while expressly or implicitly purporting to be neutral reporters), to be legally accountable for religious and political discrimination in hiring and the workplace.

Legislation regarding PUBLIC media should limit public funding to only those entities that meet clear objective standards for fair and balanced coverage in which all significant stakeholders in a matter of public interest have their views accurately represented in reasonably equal measure. Public media should be actively reshaped in this regard to become a model for private media to follow, and their new and improved standards for such things as journalistic ethics and editorial board balance/nonpartisanship should be widely published and promoted as a guide for the citizens to judge the social responsibility of the private media.

2) MAGA should build a non-sectarian "natural rights" coalition to, first, defend and conserve the monogamous one-man, one woman, child-cherishing natural family as the universally recognized foundation of civilization, and second, to promote all the related "self-evident" natural rights that are enumerated and implied in our Declaration of Independence as "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." This must include the right to life, the right of children to a real mom and a real dad, the right of parents to direct the lives of their children, including education, the right of family-centered communities to set their own family-related policies, the right to greater local control of government and ALL its policies, and the right of all people to bodily self-determination regarding such things as medical care and "vaccines."

As I wrote in my recent WND column Tulsi Gabbard and the need for a MAGA natural rights coalition, "[I]f we normal people who love marriage, children and family all banded together and restored those natural rights across the world, 95% of our social and geopolitical problems would be resolved, and the elites would be exposed for the tiny, insane radical fringe they have always been." A diplomatically facilitated natural rights coalition would draw people from every ethnicity and world religion as well as clear-thinking secularists to the redemptive, world-reshaping world-view that "Our Bond is Family."

3) We should adopt and promote "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT) as a culture-wide policy on LGBT matters. The military had brilliantly solved the thorny problem of balancing individual right on private sexual conduct with the need for public affirmation of the majority's sexual normalcy in the DADT compromise. After Obama forced the repeal of that policy, our military quickly degenerated into the woke nightmare the entire world now rightfully mocks and our enemies celebrate. The same thing happened to our whole society when we ended the de facto culture-wide DADT that existed in the 1950s and early '60s. We need a return to that workable compromise before we collapse like sexually-anarchistic Weimar Germany did into the hell-scape of homofascist Nazism.

MAGA conservatives with a homosexual "orientation" should set the example for the society by opposing the public normalization of LGBT political goals and insisting that private sexual choices remain private to preserve the primacy of natural family values as the social norm. Personal discretion should be the price of public tolerance for private lifestyles. MYOB (mind your own business) should replace LGBT as the motto of conservatives who suffer with same-sex attraction disorder and their allies.

4) We should pass legislation requiring transparency and formal third-party citizen oversight of all contractual agreements involving public officials and public employee unions, including the power of the citizen overseers to require public ratification of contracts they deem tainted by actual or perceived conflicts of interest. This legislation should also ensure that no public official can represent the public in union contract negotiations whose own election prospects could be substantially affected by the votes of public employee union members.

5) We should revive and prioritize some variation of President Trump's "Platinum Plan" for facilitating entrepreneurialism and self-reliance in the inner cities. Breaking inner-city families free from government dependency is the right and smart thing to do both morally and politically.

I will continue this list in a future article.

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