The Strange Game

The Neoconfederate alliance is smaller, weaker, and more brittle than it was in the Gingrich–Bush era, but it is not gone. What survives are the institutional husks and funding pipelines that don’t require Big Oil’s old sovereignty to function.

So once you remove Big Oil as an independent sovereign bloc,

The MIC as a semi-autonomous policy‑setting actor, NAM as a unified industrial front, and the GOP donor ecosystem as a coherent class project, what’s left is a patchwork of legacy institutions, ideological mills, and regional power centers that still animate the Neoconfederate project even after its economic base collapsed.

👴 Koch Network — the last fully functional command node. The Koch apparatus is the closest thing to a surviving sovereign in the old Neoconfederate coalition. (The emoji is supposed to be Bob Welch.)

What they still control:

■ Americans for Prosperity (ground game + candidate pipeline)

⏹️State Policy Network (50‑state ALEC‑style policy shops)

✳️Donor Trusts (dark‑money routing infrastructure)

#️⃣University capture** (GMU, Mercatus, and dozens of satellite programs)

What changed: They no longer speak for “business” as a whole. They speak for extractive libertarianism, a narrower but still potent faction.

𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗖 — the legislative factory that never died. ALEC is the model‑bill engine that keeps the Neoconfederate project alive at the state level. It survives because:

☣It doesn’t need Big Oil’s sovereignty

☣It only needs statehouses, and those remain deeply Neoconfederate

☣It is funded by a mix of Koch, DeVos, Bradley, and regional corporate donors

ALEC is the procedural skeleton of the movement.

🐛Heritage Foundation and the New Right think‑tank archipelago:

Heritage, Claremont, Hillsdale, and the Manhattan Institute form the ideological priesthood of the Neoconfederate bloc.

They provide:

〰Constitutional revisionism  

〰Deregulatory doctrine  

〰Christian‑nationalist jurisprudence  

〰Personnel pipelines for administrations  

They are weaker than in the Bush era, but they remain the myth‑making engine.

😈Christian Nationalist networks — the cultural base that outlived its patrons. This is the part people underestimate.

Even after Big Oil’s fall, the evangelical–charismatic–dominionist ecosystem remains:

👹Family Research Council

👹Council for National Policy  

👹Liberty University orbit  

👹New Apostolic Reformation networks  

This bloc provides:

👹Voter mobilization

👹Narrative cohesion

👹A mythic frame for the Neoconfederate project  

They don’t need oil money. They need pulpits, media, and grievance (ressentiment)

🛢️Regional extractive capital — the “Little Oil” and resource‑state remnants. Even if Exxon and Chevron now obey financial markets, regional extractive elites still operate as political actors:

⛽Fracking billionaires  

🛢Petrochemical corridor families  

🧴Coal and gas holdouts  

🥫Agribusiness oligarchs  

These are not sovereign blocs. They are feudal barons who provide money, media, and local patronage.

🎓DeVos–Prince network — the education + private‑security axis.

This faction is often overlooked but remains structurally important:

皿Charter school privatization  

⛓Anti‑union education policy  

皿Private military contracting  

⛓Christian nationalist philanthropy  

They are the bridge between the religious right and the libertarian right.

📺Right‑wing media ecosystem — the propaganda infrastructure:

Fox, Sinclair, Salem, Daily Wire, and the influencer sphere form the narrative battlefield.

This is the part of the Neoconfederate alliance that:

📻Costs the least  

📻Reaches the most people  

📻Requires no coherent donor bloc  

It is the cultural amplifier of the movement.

🅿State-level GOP machines — the last true power centers. The Neoconfederate project is now state‑sovereign, not nationally sovereign. The strongest nodes:

- Texas  

- Florida  

- Tennessee  

- Alabama  

- South Carolina  

- Oklahoma  

These states provide:

- Gerrymandered legislatures  

- Captured courts  

- Policy laboratories  

- Patronage networks  

This is where the movement still has real governing power.

Every office game pool has "the strange game." Box # 9 is for the sferiff–militia–county networks — the paramunicipal layer.

This is the “constitutional sheriff” movement, Oath Keeper remnants, and county‑level sovereignty ideology.

They provide:

- Local enforcement  

- Election administration pressure  

- Rural mobilization  

- A mythic frontier identity  

This is the folk‑sovereignty wing of the Neoconfederate alliance.

Once you remove Big Oil and the MIC as independent actors, the Neoconfederate alliance becomes a decentralized coalition of:

- Koch‑style libertarian extractive capital  

- Christian nationalist institutions  

- State‑level GOP machines  

- Right‑wing media  

- ALEC + Heritage policy mills  

- Regional resource elites  

- County‑level sovereignty networks  

What I left out: The cultural and institutional infrastructure that doesn’t require a sovereign economic base to survive. The Neoconfederate project is no longer an elite bloc. It is a distributed insurgent governance model.

With enuf pushpins and strings, mebbe I kin display this on my bulletin board of my larger three‑sovereignty geometry — finance, tech, and the residual Neoconfederate “folk‑state” — and show how they interact.

The Birch ideological substrate still animates all of them. Welch is the ghost in this machine.