Dakota Beacon

I have a confession to make; sometimes I am ready to quit and give up.

Some of you might ask why?

I have been reading the various media reports and comments from the Rockefeller Republicans. They are doing all they can to shut down the conservatives wanting answers and trying to participate in the process.

When I first got involved in the GOP 40 years ago it was all about involvement and firing up the grassroots.

No more!

As I read the articles about the state GOP convention, I had ask myself was I at the same convention?

Delegates were respectful in spite of being disrespected by the leadership. All I heard were some delegates asking some basic questions and seeking answers.

Despite having plain clothes law enforcement ready to arrest and remove delegates - it didn't happen.

Conventions can get a bit raucous; this was perhaps one of the more boring in recent history.

But reading media... well... you decide see article below: Note my highlights in Red.

Jack Zaleski - Inforum - April 8, 2022

(click on Link to the left or read below)

InForum - Reprint

Jack Zaleski

Republicans better pay attention

April 8, 2022

Despite its dominance, the North Dakota Republican Party is not in good health. While all the routine indicators – fundraising and winning elections, for example – look great, GOP leadership is not doing enough to excise a cancer that threatens to fracture the party’s traditional base. The grassroots power of that cancer was on display at the party endorsing convention a few days ago in Bismarck. It wasn’t pretty. If it wasn’t instructive for establishment Republican leaders, then they are playing a head-in-the-sand game that, in time, they will lose.

Loosely defined, the factions can be identified as the Sen. John Hoeven mainstream Republicans and the Rick Becker faux Republicans. Hoeven, a former governor and incumbent two-term U.S. senator, is among the most popular politicians in the state’s history. State Rep. Becker, founder of the libertarian-leaning Bastiat Caucus, has parlayed his insufferable ego into a political movement that seems intent on undermining 30 years of Republican gains at the polls, and on minimizing a record of mostly sound state governance.

Becker challenged Hoeven for the Senate nomination, lost, but only by 187 votes in a convention that turned out a record number of delegates. In other words, Becker came close to wresting the endorsement from an effective and popular senator (who had the endorsement of former president Donald Trump), at an allegedly Republican gathering in which nearly half the delegates were aligned with Becker’s gang.

This is no small matter for Republicans. Hoeven has been in public office for two decades. He inhabits the best of all possible political realms: he’s a household name. Becker, up to now an appropriately obscure legislator with an undistinguished record, has emerged as leader of a movement that has evolved from a noisome sideshow into a purposefully divisive political threat.

The show of force at the state convention by the Becker cabal was no fluke. In order to pack the session with his supporters, significant spade work was done in local districts. His people turned out at those meetings in numbers sufficient to elect delegates of his ilk: that is, activists who were willing, eager even, to deny the party’s endorsement to a conservative two-term senator. Dozens of local delegate-selection meetings were hijacked by Becker’s Bastiats.

Which suggests apathy among establishment Republicans. Or was it reluctance to be abused by the ill-mannered Becker swarm?