Guy on the right sent from the future by our soy overlords??
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Yes, quite possibly. He’s a bulldog and had to endure a lot of Terminator jokes in his campaign.
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at least you understood the reference
Look at the margins. If Bates College students who don’t register their cars in Lewiston (which is almost all) and non-citizens weren’t able break Maine law and vote in our elections it would have been landslide Connor victory.
It doesn’t entirely line up this way, but needy state dependents, non-citizens and Bates college students picked the mayor (and many other candidates). It’s been that way for a while now.
There are many aspects of Lewiston’s history and present that I would like to tie together to make my case that Lewiston has been the victim of ill-intentioned grifters who bullied the population into accepting a burden that wasn’t their responsibility.
The other aspect of this that I want to draw attention to is the commoditization of the most troubled and needy people we can attract to Lewiston, along with explaining what allows this human trafficking to take place. I’ve never blamed anyone for wanting a better life and taking up Maine Democrats on their sinister offer.
I have no quarrel with any of Lewiston’s lawful residents. My quarrel is with the cult that is in charge of Maine’s government. Explaining what makes it a cult is something I’d like to tackle too, but that might be too big of a bite for me to take in a book about Lewiston.
This town is a very unique American story that I believe would be beneficial for people to know more about. I am the best bouncer in town and I’m happy to do everything I can to toss these intoxicated cretins out.
Every Lewiston needs the proverbial Dalton cleaning house
I guess I gotta show folks how it’s done.
On a purely cynical level, a book like this could conceivably sell well if I can make it compelling reading with even-handed and well-supported arguments. It is to be a very political book in that I want to examine the actual policies, but not in a partisan hack kind of way.
If I come across Republicans who contributed to this situation, they shall be named too. It’s just obviously a Democrat-driven set of policies and rhetoric.
@squating_bear I have a serious question for you.
The book I’m imagining centers the reader on the perspective of Lewiston, Maine as an entire town. Point A will be sometime roughly 20-30 years ago. I want to explain, in the most accurate terms possible, how we got to Point B, today.
Telling this story has to include a lot of information about the Muslim migration to Lewiston and the means by which it occurred.
It also has to include a lot of information about Maine as it existed before that.
It also has to include a lot of local color I find interesting.
The conclusion I want the reader to draw is that woke ideology was used to bludgeon the people of Maine into accepting a burden that was not theirs to shoulder and they were never equipped to handle, but I don’t want to beat anyone over the head with me saying that, either.
In addition to telling the story of how Lewiston Public School enrollment went from less than 1 percent Muslim to roughly 46 percent Muslim in roughly 25 years, I want to examine what more of the same means for normal Muslim American citizens who live in town today, along with other normal people.
Above all, I want to highlight the grift that has been taking place and how needy people of all kinds, many of whom happen to be Muslims and Africans, are trafficked to Lewiston and then turned into revenue streams for non-profiteers and examine how all of that is funded.
Plus, crooked election stuff needs to be highlighted.
Legalizing all drugs will be a part of the story as well.
I want to tie stories like this together to paint a colorful but accurate picture of what this town has been through. I would like to somehow do this without painting normal Lewiston voters, citizens and even our more recent migrants as the bad guys. That’s where the subversive ideology comes in.
All while keeping the perspective centered on the town, so I can always keep challenging the reader to think about one simple question…
Why would a town want more woke policy?
If you’re still with me, thanks, and here’s my question for you.
With what you can quickly learn or may already know about Lewiston, would writing a book like that have any chance to either be misinterpreted entirely or possibly place me in any danger?
Also, any other thoughts you might have are welcome.
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I’m also toying with the idea of presenting my perspective in a rather accurate way, by simply being myself. I’m writing this book for Lewiston and the process that led me to want to write it is the same basic process that led me to want to throw people out of the bar.
When I see someone being an asshole and causing problems for my neighbors, that asshole gets confronted. If they need help finding the exit, I provide it.
Anyway, here’s this afternoon’s first take at an introduction or perhaps chapter 1. Any feedback is requested, especially an answer to the question of: Does this make you want to read more?
Out of every job I’ve ever held in several different states, I enjoyed being a bouncer in Lewiston, Maine the most. I did it part-time for a few years in the second half of the 2010’s, when I was in my mid to late 30’s.
My father was a bouncer at the Stone Toad in Milwaukee, Wisconsin sometime in the late 1960’s. He went on to retire from a long career in the construction industry after settling in Morgan Township, Indiana. He built most of our house himself and raised me and my two siblings in it with our mother in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It was always apparent to me that my dad, like most dads on our road, was a tough man, but I had no idea someone used to pay him to be a tough man.
I first learned about dad’s old job as a young adult when I began going camping with him, family, and an old friend of his in Northern Wisconsin. His friend Scott gave me the impression that my old man was quite the force to be reckoned with back in the 1960’s. Vague stories about his exploits were told sitting around that campfire in Northern Wisconsin, but I never got too much information about it. Those details can be difficult to pin down when bourbon is involved.
Imagining my father as Dalton in the movie Roadhouse was a special part of what made him a special man to me. When he passed away in 2013, so did my opportunity to learn more about my dad’s experiences as a bouncer.
When the opportunity for me to take a job bouncing at my neighborhood bar came up a few years after that, I had to take it. It was, by all accounts, a foolish decision. I had a steady job as a systems analyst with good benefits and financial stability. I’m not really sure if it was all of the conversations I never got to have with dad, a desire to do something besides white collar work, wanting to know if I am up to the job or what, but something was compelling me to take that job.
I grew to enjoy doing it one or two nights per week. We could spend a lot of time talking about what being a bouncer in Lewiston, Maine entailed, but I kept coming back for shifts because I enjoyed the role of being the adult in the room. I found satisfaction in telling people who were behaving poorly or being violent to leave, and I also found satisfaction in being the one to use reasonable force to make them leave if they didn’t want to. Unfortunately for the lawyers of Lewiston, I never acted in a way that might result in some extra cash for them.
I’ve always liked my neighbors here in Lewiston, Maine, even the lawyers. I’ve also never liked bullies. Bouncing was perfect for me. If only it paid like the business systems support work did, I would have probably done it full-time.
I haven’t picked up a shift at any bars in Lewiston since before the COVID-19 pandemic, but I never stopped liking my neighbors and never began liking bullies. Throughout my 15 years of living in Lewiston, I’ve watched the conditions in my town deteriorate in ways I never would have imagined possible when I moved here. Many of our public areas have become dangerous habitats of drug abuse and despair, which is just the visible tip of the iceberg that is the dysfunction of Lewiston, Maine in 2024.
How did Lewiston, Maine go from one of the least violent cities of its size in the USA to a town where multiple shootings can happen in a week? How did our public school go from a high-ranking, well-functioning asset for generations of Lewistonians to a sprawling, secretive institution ranked among the worst in the USA? How could this happen to people like Mainers? How did this happen in only 25 years?
These were the questions I was asking myself as I tried to make sense of the situation I saw around me. These are the questions I am trying to answer in this book. The temptation is there to try and point fingers in all directions at all kinds of people, but that has always been difficult for me to do because I look around me in Lewiston and don’t see many bad people doing bad things, except for our now very obvious criminals. I see a lot of good people trying to do good things, but it’s somehow coming out all wrong.
To put my old systems analyst hat back on for a minute, I believe we have a problem with the software, not the people running it. To be specific, there is an ideology that has succeeded in subverting the government of Maine and Lewiston. This ideology has replaced the town charter with a different set of unstated priorities while dishonestly attempting to redefine the very concept of citizenship under our noses. The new priorities imposed on Lewiston are centered on ideas like the inherent goodness of diversity, an obligation for the community to provide for the needs of others, and the idea that there was a problem with Maine’s 20th century demographics that needed to be solved through social engineering.
As the people of Lewiston learned, challenging any of those ideas doesn’t come without consequences.
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. It does. Solid read. I’m not much of a critic. If I like it, its good. If I don’t, its bad.
This is good.
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A comfortable read. I like the language and your way with words. Please continue.
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Thanks guys.
I’m letting this idea rip and will try to match yesterday’s output most days until I finish. Anyone who has gotten a 1,000 word reply from me a few minutes after posting on T-Nation knows that banging out words on a keyboard comes pretty easily to me. The ideas I need for this one have been banging around upstairs for a while now.
Shaping them into a compelling story that’s accessible to readers, well-supported, entertaining and powerful will be the challenge. I’ll be my own worst enemy, in that regard. My new friend and writing coach will surely help me work through those problems.
I’ll worry about death threats after finishing the book. I’m probably more worried about woke leftists in Maine than Muslim radicals. I don’t see any need to insult any prophets to tell Lewiston’s story and it is my intention to tell it in a way that it sympathetic to the plight of my neighbors who came here from lands even more distant than Indiana.
The villain in this book is to be the ideology, because it is true. I could certainly start naming names and making the case against the architects of Lewiston’s social experiment, but I don’t think that’s the book Lewiston needs.
Someone might actually be willing to publish a book like this in 2024.
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Yes and no problem. I saw this last night and there is a lot of possible ways to answer, a lot has popped into my head. I don’t want to rush
Obviously yes and yes. There’s just no way of honestly saying no.
Well, look at this
A key point is that I would expect you to be judged mostly not on what you wrote, nor how you wrote it, but what other’s said or did after reading your writing
I would like to say more and thank you for asking.
If it were to get big, how you speak might matter more than how you write. You’d wind up on podcasts and shows. At first how others speak about what you wrote matters most I think.
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wow, you’re a really good writer. That’s all I have to say
@squating_bear Thanks for the answer. I more or less knew that this would be controversial and easy to misinterpret, but it’s nice to hear I’m not crazy for thinking it.
This is a long ways from being done but part of what I’m challenging myself to do is to tell the story of Lewiston without participating in any of the ideology I’m calling to the mat with this book.
I want to avoid as many identity labels as possible, using them only when it is necessary to explain facts. I want anyone to pick this book up, imagine their own town, and be able to relate to it. I think I can write the entire book without using the word republican and democrat. Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t see any particular need to call a great deal of attention to anyone’s religion, either.
What I need to do is explain how the villain - woke ideology - has imposed new priorities on the town as a political entity and challenge the reader to contemplate what a continuation of Lewiston’s current trajectory means for everyone.
A massive part of what has defined Lewiston has been the flow of needy people and their commoditization as both political and financial assets. Obviously, a lot of them share your faith.
I can’t talk about the impacts on the school without calling some sort of attention to the fact that these new people often don’t speak the language and have a different faith, and the fact that it was a tax-funded flow of people, but again I’m going to be pointing the finger at the villain of the story, the ideology. As a quick example of what I mean, it is the ideology that has led Lewiston Public Schools to conclude that the standards and expectations that worked so well for Maine children in the 20th Century should be relaxed for new arrivals. The broad case I’m making is that the ideology operates in service of the ideology, not the citizens who live under it.
Putting complicated and emotionally-charged ideas into the simplest possible terms is another way of looking at what I’m trying to do here.
@anna_5588 Thank you, that means a lot. This will, unfortunately, be delaying the Glantz rabbit hole I wish to dive down, but I’ll still be TIKing away at Stalingrad.
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Good tradeoff if you ask me 
I enjoyed reading it.
I like your idea of focusing on the ideology, rather than the group thing of us vs. them. If weaving a whole book seamlessly proves difficult, you could possibly just illustrate different points with a local color story of some sort (I know I always love a good, colorful story) to start each chapter, just my random .02. Your writing coach is definitely the person to ask that kind of thing though.
You and I share both a bouncing past and a love of writing. I would definitely be up for reading more of whatever you decide to write. You are one of my favorite posters on here.
You’ll need these to build cred. Like, who was Salman Rushdie before he wrote that book?
If all those people didn’t want to murder him, he would just be some guy, wallowing in ignominy.
Not too many though. Just enough to get peoples attention and sell books. Not so many that even if the chances are one in a million that someone might go for it, there are still 7000 people who will.
@punnyguy Thank you. I had the similar idea but for now I’m just going to get the word vomit all out on the table and then start cleaning up the mess.
Weaving in a bar anecdote or bar situation into each chapter could be a way to establish a common thread of simply imaging a rowdy bar as an entire town. I’ve used that device before but I don’t want to make any silly stretches with it, either. We’ll see what takes shape.
I really, really admire my coach and her writing. She recently edited a memoir that was published of an octogenarian Communist. She’s been very encouraging to me for a while now and basically told me to start writing asap when I sent her the same intro I posted here.
@jshaving Thanks. If, by some miracle, this book becomes a success, rest assured a road trip will be taking place. It may be a very sudden one if I need to escape danger. How defensible is your position over there, anyway?
@SkyzykS I think I might be able to thread the needle here and write the book in a way that’s hard to be mad at someone for doing, but that’s not necessarily my goal.
My goal is to write a book for Lewiston, first and foremost. That includes everyone. People need to understand what the town has been through.
In real simple terms, I believe the good people of Lewiston were bullied into it. Not by any of the good people from away, but by an ideology.
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Although I had to say yes and yes to your questions I think the chances are pretty low for violence especially because as I said the way you are perceived has more to do with what other people say and do. If anyone is going to take revenge it would probably be revenge on someone else that might have been (claimed or alleged to be) influenced by you. Those other people (if any) would probably be giving and taking the heat rather than you personally.
I did notice you said “standards and expectations” without specifying academic standards and expectations - so don’t take this as an argument against what I don’t understand.
No Child Left Behind and standardized testing might have a lot to do with it also. I remember my 10th grade World History 2 teacher was all about memorizing the key points efficiently that would “definitely be on the test”. I was in 10th grade back in … 2004 I believe. 20 years later I would expect the whole system to be messed up country wide.
My youngest brother was a TA (teachers aide) while working on his Masters degree. He hated grading the papers of students that he described as whiny, stupid, etc… He had so much stress from students complaining and begging his higher ups to have him regrade stuff, etc. He eventually got to the point where he said that it’s because of multiple choice standardized testing that the kids past a certain point in time just weren’t taught critical thinking.
He was a bit tough and could have suffered less by easing up I think - but I would guess he was on to something.
I was thinking the same idea he said as well. Controversy would sure help with book sales. The best book for Lewistown wouldn’t be too controversial, sure - but if there’s not enough controversy, then what? (answer: nothing)
For some people controversy is an end, but as a means there’s a right amount that could be helpful maybe…
maniacal laughter
(haha I hope I don’t regret saying that)
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