“That’s bullshit,” I insisted. “You’re allowed to have independent thought in this country, and this type of intimidation by the Black Studies intelligentsia crowd that intimidates black people who are conservative… That’s why I became conservative.”
Dyson went on another iambic pentameter def poetry slam filibuster for the next three minutes. There was simply no way to stop him. Critical-theory phrases flowed from his mouth like water from a fountain. He babbled about institutional injustice. He called Clarence Thomas a ventriloquist dummy for white supremacy. He called Obama a black man in public housing. I started to answer. And Maher cut me off: “I will let you answer, but I just want to say, that is some motherfucking articulateness!” And the audience, of course, clapped wildly.
Then I brought out my best skill: researching. I had done my Lexis-Nexis searching before the program—I knew that somebody was likely to attack Rush that week, since the Obama Complex had put Rush in its Alinsky crosshairs that week. I also knew that back around 9/11, Maher had made some controversial comments that got him boycotted in several markets, and that Rush had defended him. So before the show, I e-mailed Rush and asked him about it. “Yes,” Rush told me, “I even received a handwritten thank-you note from Bill Maher.”
“Let me end on this note,” I said. “Back in 2001, when you were attacked by two yahoos down in Houston when you said what you said on Politically Incorrect, it was a Republican establishment, it was Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, [and] Dennis Prager who came to your defense, and you sent Rush Limbaugh a letter, a note thanking him for this.” You could actually sense the air go out of the room as the audience stared at Maher, Holy shit! written over each and every face. “You’re part of the bullying tactic,” I continued. “Calling a person a racist is the worst thing you can call somebody in this country.”
Maher was silent. I could see he wanted to reach across the table and strangle me. Finally he answered, weakly, “You’re saying that if I actually think he has racist tendencies, that’s off-limits—”
Now I cut him off. “What racist tendencies?”
And Maher answered: “He sang ‘Barack the Magic Negro.’ ”
My heart leaped with joy. I had suspected that Maher would bring up “Barack the Magic Negro,” and once again, I had done my research—thank God Arianna had hired me under those false pretenses. “Barack the Magic Negro” was a parody song Rush had based on a column of the same title by leftist Los Angeles Times columnist David Ehrenstein, an absurdist essay in which he sarcastically praised Obama as an ethereal, magical black man who could perform political wizardry because of his intellect and mixed racial heritage. Maher clearly didn’t know what he was talking about.
It devolved from there. Maher asked a question about stem cells and Dyson delivered stem-cell iambic pentameter def poetry slam filibuster remix. I cut through the crap with prepackaged talking points I had cribbed from the estimable Charles Krauthammer, whose work on the subject seemed eminently plagiarizable. It stopped them in their tracks. If they had asked one follow-up question, of course, I would have fallen to the ground in a puddle of water and curled up in a fetal position and admitted I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But they didn’t. I even challenged his audience at one point when they booed me before I was able to finish my sentence. Even Maher reacted; his Achilles’ heel is that even though he’s a leftie, he exhibits clear contempt for the astroturfed audience he relies upon for his laughs.
The awkwardness continued for a full, commercial-free half hour, defusing the show’s usual comedic touch.1 As I walked offstage, comedian Sarah Silverman passed by me on her way onstage without making eye contact, but she did touch Professor Dyson on the arm and tell him he was amazing. She then sat down in the chair I had been sitting in, looked down, swiped the tabletop, and for comedic effect said to Maher and his MoveOn audience, “It’s icky here.”
I walked back to my dressing room, passing the same staffers who had greeted me amicably before the show but who were now looking at me like I had just passed gas at their dinner table. Back in my dressing room, I was received by horror-stricken family and friends. Their collective look was one of being at a loss for words to console me. To them, it was clear that I had been set up.
My BlackBerry started to overflow with texts and e-mails. Dwight Schultz, who played “Howling Mad” Murdock on the hit ’80s show The A-Team, was the only one who immediately saw things the way I did. The verdict was otherwise unanimous, and everybody was trying to put the best spin on what appeared to be a horrific car crash of a show. A veteran comedy writer friend of mine who is a longtime Maher aficionado reminds me to this day that it was by far the strangest episode of the show he ever watched. Even Maher had clearly been thrown off his game.
I felt something different: an almost druglike and ethereal and divine exultation. Recognition that I had been born, publicly and politically, for the first time. It was like looking into a mirror and recognizing, This is who I am. I’m not going to tap-dance around what I believe in anymore. Even though I had secretly believed in conservative ideas, and even though I had used different tactics to push them, and even though I had insinuated my ideas into the marketplace and effectively circumvented the Complex by contributing to the New Media, I had never been willing to stick my neck out like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity. I had never been willing to stand out there and be the object of public ridicule. I had feared what it would be like, feared what retribution would come, feared what the social consternation would be, feared what the swords and the slings and the arrows and the rocks upon my body would feel like, feared a comedienne whose work I enjoyed mocking me in her presence. I had feared in both my waking and sleeping hours what it would be like.
And now, walking out of the Maher show, I realized that what I had feared most—expulsion and derision—didn’t really even hurt, not when you are standing up for what you believe. I raised my Cactus Cooler in honor of the individual who came up with the aphorism “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Nietzsche, by the way. I realized that while adulation has its moments and can be like a bath in warm water after coming in from a snowstorm, the psychic high from standing up for what you believe in and being attacked for it far surpassed the comfort to be derived from that bath of praise.
I had passed what I call the Coulter Threshold: the point where you understand that Ann Coulter and those like her are standing up for what they believe in, feeling the righteousness of living without fear of missing a dinner invite from Tina Brown or fund-raisers with Steve Capus or Ben Sherwood or Steven Spielberg or Jeffrey Katzenberg—or worse, the agony of being excoriated by those conservatives who fret that their liberal overlords will start admonishing them for keeping company with you. Feeling the thrill of sending a message to these people that we reject their worldview the way they reject ours.
I want to bottle that and get it out to every American. I want to teach everyone I know that there’s nothing to fear but fear itself, and that there’s strength in numbers. I’ve been looking directly forward instead of into the rearview mirror, not worrying about what people think about me, and it has empowered me. And it can empower you. Not only can you take assaults, you can weather them and be strengthened by them—and gain the power to punch back, to go on the offensive. Our opponents have spent so many years on the offensive with people lying prone at their feet that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the defensive. If we come after them, they won’t know how to respond.
My transformation from empty-headed, pop-culture-infused, talking-points-parroting liberal to New Media warrior took me four decades. But those years in the wilderness taught me some basic rules that I have applied steadily and steadfastly, and that are bearing tremendous results. Before we get to the application of the tactics, and before I lay out my game plan for the next few years, let’s summarize the rules every conservative activist needs to use when fighting the left:
; 1. Don’t be afraid to go into enemy territory. This is perhaps the most important rule you’ll read in this book, and the one most likely to be ignored by the Republican Party and the Old Guard in the conservative movement. They would say I shouldn’t have appeared on Maher, because it was an audience stacked against me. But that’s the same mentality that led the right to abandon Hollywood, academia, and the media—and the effects have been disastrous. The right figures that talk radio, Fox News, and some independent Internet sites will allow us to distribute our ideas to the masses. There’s one problem: those outlets are exponentially outnumbered and outgunned by the Complex. They’re Alinsky-ed by the activist left, which insists Fox News is Faux News and talk radio is hate radio. Obama is leading the charge, targeting specific hosts and specific outlets. Remember Rush Limbaugh? Or their insistence that Fox News isn’t a real news outlet like CNN or MSNBC?
The problem is that it works with the vast majority of apolitical voters in America. In my neighborhood, our strategy of disengagement isn’t working too well. People who don’t watch Fox News or listen to Rush have strong, defiant, negative opinions about those outlets, just like I did when I was a liberal. I’d never listened to Rush in my life, but I knew—I knew!—that Rush was the epitome of evil. I knew, just as the Complex wanted me to know, that Rush was a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot that only KKKers listened to while driving their broken-down pickups and drinking moonshine.
The army of the emboldened and gleefully ill-informed is growing. Groupthink happens, and we have to take it head-on. We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war. The Frankfurt School knew that—that’s why they won the cultural war and then, on its back, the political war. We can do the same, but we have to be willing to enter the arena. By neglecting The View or, worse, by ignoring Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Maher, and David Letterman—we allow them to distort and demean us as they romanticize and elevate themselves. It’s harder to attack people to their faces than behind their backs, and we have to confront them face-to-face. Young people suckle at the teat of pop culture—but by refusing to fight for their attention, we lose by default.
Our most articulate voices, likable faces, and best idea-makers need to go into hostile territory and plant the seeds of doubt in our ideological enemy and the apolitical masses who simply go with the media flow. Our babysitter has an Obama bumper sticker on her car, but admits she knows nothing about politics. How did that happen? It’s what the Complex tells her to do to be cool. We have to use their media control against them by walking into the lion’s den, heads held high, proud of who we are and what we stand for.
There’s no time to continue backing away. If we’re standing still, we’re moving backward. Get in the game. Get in the fight.
2. Expose the left for who they are—in their own words. It’s easy to label the left, to analyze them, to take them apart using your rationality—their program fails every time it’s tried, and their lexicon, once you know it, is as predictable as the sun rising in the east. What’s much harder than understanding the left is exposing it.
That’s where citizen journalists come in. Drudge was a citizen journalist, and he took on a president. Today, we all have the power to be citizen journalists via the Internet—there’s no Complex gatekeeper to stop us from posting the truth about enemies of freedom and liberty in this country. In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and baseless attacks on George W. Bush; exposed John Kerry’s true war record during the 2004 election cycle; debunked Reuters’s photography fraud in the Middle East; raised the question whether Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was ghostwritten by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers; gotten rid of communist Van Jones; and the list goes on. The Internet has become the shining beacon of journalistic freedom, tearing apart congressional bills piece by piece for the benefit of the public, even when our own legislators won’t read them.
The key to the success of the New Media, though, is making news by breaking news. And that means that conservatives need to use their new best technological friends: the MP3 recorder, the phone camera, and the blogosphere. It’s one thing to say that the left likes socialism, but it’s a real story to get Barack Obama to admit it on camera, as he did to Joe the Plumber during the 2008 election cycle. Video journalism is the most potent kind of journalism. We live in an age of sound and sight, not text, and we have to adapt to that age.
You are the soldiers in this war against the Institutional Left. You have been issued your weapons. Go out and use them. Make it impossible for the Complex to ignore you.
3. Be open about your secrets. If you’re going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you’ve done in the past. Take a page from Barack Obama, who revealed in his probably Ayers-ghostwritten autobiography2 that he had done a bit of blow, and hung out with commies and assorted lowlifes. Once it was out there, there wasn’t much that the right could do with it—he’d already admitted it.
By way of contrast, take a look at Mark Foley. If he’d admitted he was gay right off the bat, the left wouldn’t have had much to pillory him with. The left never gets cited for hypocrisy (see Clinton, Bill), but the right is cited with it all the time because we actually have standards. That means we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us. In this book, I’ve already admitted to libertine sensibilities that were taken to absurd heights during my collegiate stint in New Orleans. I am not a Puritan. Frankly, John Waters’s movies and Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass series are more up my alley than Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The days of the left forcing us into a small, monolithic, and monochromatic box are over, and we have to fight their caricature of us.
Actually, George W. Bush did the same thing during the 2000 election. “When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid,” he said. Once he had come clean, the left was stuck—they couldn’t do anything.
Hypocrisy is such a powerful argument for the left because it appeals directly to the emotional heart of politics: one standard for you, another for me. It’s no wonder Alinsky relied heavily on his rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. We have more rules than they do with regard to morality, which means we have to live up to them more often. But mistakes in the past don’t need to be skeletons waiting to come out of the closet. If you’ve made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don’t talk about how you regret them—talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.
Just don’t screw up badly now.
4. Don’t let the Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative. If you’ve got a big story, the Complex will do what it always does: attack you personally using the PC lexicon. You immediately become a racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic nativist. Don’t let them do it. The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can’t harm you. You’re Neo in the hallway with Agent Smith after he figures out that the Complex is a sham—the spoon isn’t bending, he’s bending. Once it hits him that he’s not bound by the rules of the game, he can literally stop bullets. You can stop their bullets because their bullets aren’t real.
Leftist assassins like Max Blumenthal, a one-trick hit man, have tried to label me and many of my allies as racists. I don’t let them get away with it. I don’t just call them out, I make sure that my righteous indignation registers on the Richter scale. I don’t pull out my record on civil rights or my black friends. I simply point out that what they’re doing is pure Alinsky and that it has no basis in fact or reality, and that they’re showing themselves to be racists in their own right by citing race every time they meet someone with whom they disagree.
While I was at the 2010 CPAC, I was confronted by Daryle Jenkins of the One People’s Project based on my defense of James O’Keefe—he had been sla
ndered online as a racist by Blumenthal because he had attended a conference at the Georgetown Law Center that included racist Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire of National Review (who ripped into Taylor for his racism during the forum), and African-American conservative Kevin Martin. At the event, O’Keefe sided with Derbyshire and Martin against Taylor.
Anyway, here’s how the incident went down:
Breitbart: Max Blumenthal is a political hit man. What he does is he rapes the reputation of people mercilessly. He makes scurrilous, unsupportable accusations against people and he smears them using the political correctness he learned so well in the post-modern academy and the politics of personal destruction he learned firsthand from his father, Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal. He destroys people. He isolates threats to the reign of the far left and the reign of his father’s cabal of Clinton/Podesta and the organized left. He’s a vicious guy. He falsely slandered James O’Keefe as a racist, we disproved it—
Jenkins: How did you disprove it, sir?
Breitbart: I’m being interviewed right here.
Jenkins: I’m the one who put that story out first.
Breitbart: Well, then, you suck.
Jenkins: You’re lying. You’re lying…. He was at that white supremacist forum.
Breitbart: It wasn’t a white supremacist forum.
Jenkins: Yes it was!
Breitbart: Then why was Kevin Martin there?
At this point, Jenkins started pointing his finger inches from my face and moving his face close to mine. It then devolved into a series of accusations by Jenkins regarding details of the event. Finally, Jenkins got to his point:
Breitbart: Are you accusing me of being a white supremacist?
Jenkins: I’m accusing you of being a racist, yes I am.
Breitbart: Okay, have a nice day, buddy. Will somebody please take this guy out of here? You punk.
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 14