Despite having so many of their stories against the Trump administration proved false, the media have not lessened their attacks; if anything, the lies, the vituperation, and perfidious mendacity have increased. So, no it’s highly unlikely that the media will suddenly develop a conscience and become apolitical.
The second scenario is that market forces will prevail and that the news media will reform because it is in their economic interest. Well, you would think so. But will they?
CNN on a good night has around 600,000 viewers. That’s less than half a percent of the U.S. population. So why does CNN still function? Well, because the market is rigged. CNN is routinely bundled on cable packages, so CNN does not have to satisfy market forces. People don’t have to pay for CNN; they get CNN automatically when they order essentially any cable package. That is why Social Media is all the more important, and why everyone—and I mean everyone—who believes in the Make America Great Again agenda must be on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, supporting the president, calling out the lies of the media and highlighting the corruption of the Democrats.
Q: From your perspective, as a son of refugees from a totalitarian society, can you comment on the intolerance of free speech exhibited by many on the American Left?
GORKA: It’s absolutely stunning. There’s a reason that the First Amendment is about freedom of speech and religion. There’s a reason that the Second Amendment is about the right to keep and bear arms. These are fundamental. They are connected at the hip: the capacity to protect your freedom and the capacity to express your freedom.
The Left is only tolerant insofar as you agree with their views. In the now famous words of U.S. soccer player Megan Rapinoe, she (and other Leftists) are happy to have “a real, substantive conversation” with anyone who “believes in the same things we believe in.”5 As for anyone else, they are bigots, of course. A patriot like John F. Kennedy would not be allowed in the Democrat party of today. Instead, he would be labeled a fascist for his anti-Communist, pro-national security stances. How did this happen?
I think in many cases this is a natural function of how Leftist philosophy is built on the idea of “collectivism”—that is, favoring the group over the individual—and “statism,” giving power to the state. Conservatives, people on the political Right, focus on the God-given rights of the individual. On the Left, they focus on favored groups—Communists, National Socialists, the various self-declared “identity politics” or “victim” groups today in the West—whose collective interests outweigh individual rights (including the natural rights guaranteed us by the Constitution).
In all sincerity, all politics boils down to one question: do you believe man is perfectable, and therefore do you believe in social engineering? The Right says, no, man is fallen and cannot be made “perfect,” however you define that. “Conservatism” comes from this realistic vision and a desire to “conserve” traditions that have proven their worth. The Left believes the opposite—that man is like putty, infinitely malleable, and can be reconfigured into homo Sovieticus if you’re in the USSR, or into an androgynous, socialist snowflake if you’re in the West today. Only one of these views is supported by the last six thousand years of human history that we have available to us, and it’s stunning that so few people have learned the lesson of recent millennia: not only is man limited in his capacity to shape and engineer his fellow man, but when he tries to do so, intolerance, tyranny, oppression, and even genocide are the results.
Q: Will we ever see Hillary Clinton behind bars?
GORKA: I don’t know. I think people around her may see jailtime or be prosecuted. I think people in the DOJ and FBI of the Obama administration—such as Andrew McCabe—who are clearly corrupt, will face federal charges now that William Barr is the attorney general. I dearly hope that Lady Justice is blind. I try not to make predictions, but the idea that your last name will protect you from prosecution is fundamentally un-American.
Q: How do we heal the hate that supporters of the Left have for supporters of the Right?
GORKA: That’s a topic for a Ph.D. dissertation!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Left is fueled today by hate, while our fuel on the Right is love, love of country.
Take Michelle Obama, who actually said that the first time she was ever proud of her country was when Democrats started rallying around her husband in the primaries in 2008.6 What does that tell you about a person’s perspective on America?
There is a reason that the Left has become so aggressive and destructive. It is because they truly believe that the ends justify the means; and since they believe they can make the perfect society, then all means are justified to achieve that goal. And, as such, they will hate you if you stand against them. So, what do we do about it?
I don’t think there is much we can do for the most hard-bitten of our adversaries in the political sphere. It’s very hard to imagine an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or a Charles Schumer being respectful in a debate. Just look at the video of Schumer and Nancy Pelosi in the Oval Office with the President before the government shutdown at the end of 2018. Charles Schumer doesn’t even make eye contact with the president. He is disdainful of his interlocutor. That tells you everything you need to know. Ask yourself, when do you stop hating someone? The answer is when you have enough self-awareness to know that it’s wrong. I don’t expect to see that from the key figures on the Left.
Many who have been indoctrinated by the Left don’t want to engage in dialogue because they have no ideas that stand up to scrutiny. Look at the videos of my friend, Austin Fletcher, who goes by “Fleccas” on YouTube. When he goes with a camera and a microphone to the demonstrations of the radical Left, if you look at the young people, their indoctrination is very, very shallow. After two or three questions posed by Austin, these young Leftists have nothing left. They have no argument. They have no facts. It’s just slogans about “Trump is a Nazi,” and those who vote for him are “racists.” With people who are literally brainwashed, you deal with their hatred by using what the Left so effectively exploits: emotion. It’s not facts that will bring them around. It’s emotions, sadly.
Look at the argument over the border wall. The conservative argument is most often about facts and constitutional first principles: it has to do with arrest rates on the border, the crime rates of illegal immigrants, drug flows, the importance of enforcing our existing laws, the necessity of defending our national sovereignty, and so on. My approach is different. Use the empathetic argument. For example, if you tell a protester against our immigration laws, or somebody who doesn’t want the wall that 60 to 80 percent of the women smuggled by human traffickers across Mexico to our border are raped along the way7—that resonates emotionally. Or tell them this: of the twelve thousand illegal immigrant children being cared for by the HHS in June 2018, ten thousand came here unaccompanied by their parents.8 Their parents had given the children to human smugglers—to agents of the drug cartels—to bring them here. By encouraging illegal immigration, the Left is encouraging this sort of endangerment of children. Then, your argument is a very simple one: Do you care for those young women? Do you care for those children? If you want to protect those young women, if you want to protect the young children of Latin America or South America, then we must build the wall that will be the only thing that discourages people from taking these horrible risks. That’s not a cold, factual response. It is one that appeals to the heart, to the soul, and that is still true, and that is one way to undermine the hate.
Q: How much of a problem is the indoctrination that happens on college campuses today?
GORKA: We have ceded education to the radical Left. The idea today that we have “safe spaces” on university campuses, that we have “Free Speech Zones,” when in fact the Free Speech Zone in America should extend from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific, tells you how things have changed. Berkeley, which prides itself on being the home of the Free Spee
ch Movement is now no longer interested in protecting anybody’s free speech if they are not left-wing, if they are not a radical Leftist.
Look at the experience of individuals like Ben Shapiro, who either are disinvited from speaking at college campuses, or are burdened with such absurd security costs that it makes it almost impossible for a group to finance an event.
Here we have the fruits grown from the seeds of the radical Left of the 1960s. First they tried to ignite in America the kind of violent Marxist overthrow that was attempted on the streets of Paris in 1968, but it failed. They very soon realized that in America, given our unique historic development, our rugged individualism, our individual liberty, and our freedom of speech and religion, this use of Marxist or Maoist tactics would not function in a country like ours. These individuals—some of whom were terrorists, such as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, members of the Weathermen Underground— didn’t retire. They didn’t surrender their objective to turn America into some kind of radical Leftist construct when their “Days of Rage” failed in 1969. Instead, they became educators. They became high school teachers. In some cases, like with Ayers and Dohrn, they became tenured professors at otherwise reputable colleges. Why? Because they knew their Trotsky, they knew their Lenin—in fact, they knew what Hitler had taught his acolytes: “If you give me their children, I will control their future.” So they took the indoctrination from the streets into the classrooms. And that is how today we have courses upon courses that have nothing to do with our heritage, with our Judeo-Christian culture, with patriotic American history, with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Instead, every college that has federal funding for deans of diversity, courses on gender studies, on so-called “Critical Studies” which is really the criticism of all that is Western and good. They’ve created generations obsessed with environmentalism, which is the god of the atheist Left. We have arrived at the point where you can major in English at otherwise serious universities without ever having studied Shakespeare. This is what the conservative surrendering of education has wrought in America.
There were responses, there were resistance movements in the form of the homeschooling movement and amazing institutions like Hillsdale College that do not accept federal funding and therefore have managed to maintain an independent stance that allows them to focus on the truth and teach the founding principles of our Republic and our civilization.
Part of the problem in higher education is tenure. The tenure track system encourages group-think, encourages the hiring, promotion, and finally lifetime appointment of individuals who agree with the radical Leftist agenda.
The good news is that now we have other movements. Turning Point USA is a superb response to the indoctrination that goes on in higher education, and Charlie Kirk, who runs it, has done wonderful things in just a few years to push back the insanity on campus. Campus Reform and others, including individuals like Steven Crowder, are taking the principles of the Founding to campuses. But this will be a very, very long project. It will take at least two generations to get us back to the point where colleges are about challenging thought not about funneling thought into one politically approved agenda.
Q: Have you considered running for office?
GORKA: People have said I should run for president, and I thank them for the compliment, but I can’t because I wasn’t born here! I have toyed with the idea of running for office in Virginia, but I’m having too much fun on my radio show and, I think, doing some good without having to become a political Swamp dweller.
Q: What’s in store after 2024?
GORKA: What’s in store for 2024? That could be the subject for my next book!
Q: Is President Trump’s impact here to stay?
GORKA: There are very few people like Trump out there, but I think that he has changed American politics in ways that are irrevocable. Politics as usual cannot continue in exactly the same way as it did before.
If you look just at the way messaging works, his use of social media, Twitter, how certain interests—the Never-Trumpers—have been totally broken. I don’t know if you’ll see a lot more Trumps—I don’t know that they exist!—but we will certainly see more celebrities and non-politicians running for office.
Trump shredded the rulebook for running a campaign. If you look at how he campaigned—where he won, how he crossed over into Democrat party strongholds, working-class areas, and even beat Mitt Romney among minority voters as a Republican presidential candidate9—that “blue collar conservative”10 Trump Effect has changed American politics in ways that will endure. His presidency is clearly already historic.
Q: What is your favorite, most important American value?
GORKA: That’s so difficult to choose. But, really, I think it’s common sense, which might not exist in crazy, urban areas like Washington, D.C. But if you get out of the groupthink areas and into the areas that are derisively called “flyover states,” the people there are full of common sense. I haven’t seen it exist at such a level anywhere around the world—and I have seen a lot of the world, from Europe to Asia to Africa. Americans are uniquely pragmatic—in a good way. When something is broken, they fix it. They don’t sit down and have a nice cappuccino with biscotti and discuss the various ways to fix it. They actually do it. They don’t have arguments about who should fix it, or why we should fix it. They just fix it. So, common sense allied with a can-do attitude—that really is very, very American.
Q: What can the local citizen or community do to support President Trump’s work to Make America Great Again?
GORKA: That’s such an important question. Everyone, everybody, has a role to play in Making America Great Again—and Keeping America Great. And the easiest way to do so, the most obvious way, is to support local candidates and elections with your time and your money, supporting those who share an agenda that is about eternal principles, eternal truths, getting America back to where it should be in the world.
But, beyond that, everyone should take an active role in representing those values on social media. Conservatives are occasionally “throttled” or censored on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but that only makes it all the more important to be active, to re-tweet the president’s announcements, to call out lies that you see in the media, and to campaign for conservative ideas everywhere from the local school board, to the city council, to the county level, to the state level. American citizens have always taken an active interest in politics at all levels since the inception of our country—and it has never been more important than now. Social media is the pamphlet of the 18th century. Don’t just complain. Don’t be shy. Don’t think, “Oh, I can’t make a difference.” Every individual makes a difference. Get an account on Twitter. Get an account on Facebook. However old you are, however much of a technological klutz you may think you are, stand up for the truth because the stakes couldn’t be higher.
When we see that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation publishes its annual survey last year, and they find that 52 percent of American millennials would like to live in a Socialist or Communist country, then you have a responsibility to help us push back on that shocking and dreadful reality. After the ideology of Karl Marx took the lives of more than one hundred million people in the last century, what are you prepared to do to make sure that doesn’t happen here in America? The least you can do is tell the truth about what socialism does to a country, to any nation where it has been tried. Since Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in 1867, forty countries have tried communism—and the result has always been economic, social, and human catastrophe. So, support the MAGA agenda by being a representative of it in everything you say and do. Don’t get unnecessarily preachy about it. But tell the truth and be part of the solution, not the problem. That’s the Trump Way!
Q: What is your advice for conservatives living in such Democrat strongholds as California and Massachusetts?
GORKA: Never give up. Look at what we achieved in areas we were told would never vote Republican again. I traveled with th
e president to Youngstown, Ohio, to a rally in July 2017, and it was remarkable. We landed at a base, got into a convoy, drove a few miles to the stadium, and on the left-hand side of the road all we saw was broken-down steel mill after broken-down steel mill. On the right-hand side, for miles all we saw were Americans wearing their MAGA hats, waving the American flag. We got to the stadium, and then I saw the power of MAGA and the Trump Effect. These people were clearly manual laborers, salt-of-the-earth, true Americans who had been registered Democrats. Their parents and grandparents had been Democrats—blue-collar Democrats—but when the first lady and the president came out on the stage, he couldn’t start his speech for minutes because they were chanting, “USA! USA! Drain the swamp!” That’s incredible. That’s a billionaire, Republican president in Steel Valley, Ohio. If it can happen there, then don’t give up anywhere—even in San Francisco or Boston. Yes, parts of California and Massachusetts seem to have lost their minds in terms of how they reelect people who want to bankrupt their communities and create conditions that are unlivable. But if the president can win over a Democrat county like Trumbull County, which hasn’t been won by a non-incumbent Republican since 1928,11 and almost win Mahoning County, which two counties divide Youngstown, Ohio, between them, then truly anything is possible. So, hold the line, never give up, keep the faith, and just remember we owe it to the president. He has sacrificed everything for us, so the least we can do is to support him.
BONUS CHAPTER SEVEN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP
April 23, 2019, Oval Office, the White House
GORKA: As the child of parents who escaped Communism, I was very moved when you told Congress that America would never be a Socialist country. Did you ever think that any American president would have to say such a thing to Congress?
The War for America's Soul Page 14