Time was wasting—we had to get moving. James had, at this point, four other videos (Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—he was an incredible four-for-four), and we had to get them out there before they leaked and ACORN lawyered up and began devising some bullshit defense. We pledged to work nose to nose to bring the videos out, feeding off of each other’s excitement. As James left, I knew I had just had a watershed encounter in my life.
“I want it. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it,” I told Larry. “This is great. This is huge. The media don’t want it, but we’ll force them to watch it.” Even Larry agreed. I think I saw his pupils dilate.
What made it all so huge was the unthinkably awful nature of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s proposition. I mean, underaged Salvadoran sex slaves? I remember asking Larry if he knew a single person in his life—and we know some pretty depraved people—who would sit there and not bat an eye or look at the person beside them and blurt out, “Are you friggin’ kidding me? I’m calling the cops!” What kind of people were these? After all, they weren’t just helpful, they were skilled: “social justice” operatives with specialized training to help clients navigate complex governmental assistance programs. These were employees with entrepreneurial know-how and an understanding of the tax code (assuming such an understanding is possible). And they were using all this ability to undermine and exploit the very society that supported them. The footage was so damning, I felt sure that if the American people could see this, it would be impossible for the media to continue rejecting conservatives’ cries for investigations of ACORN. I thought the videos could even instigate criminal investigations and inspire whistle-blowers within ACORN itself.
James and Hannah had done their part; now it was up to me to figure out how we would get there from here. How could I get this to the American public? For it was a piece of work both braver and more incisive than whatever twaddle will win the Pulitzers this year.
So over a long night of pacing and cold Chinese food, we devised a strategy. We understood this was not about a few short-term bucks. This was bigger. There were two targets, essentially: ACORN first, of course, but then the bigger target of a media that would refuse the story. Break the media, and the story breaks.
We also surmised that there was no real exposure to be had on the Internet from a video being seen a million times. The goal couldn’t simply be to get as many clicks as possible at Big Government, which would be launched simultaneously with the release of the ACORN videos—that would be a fundamental mistake.* I was thinking now with my news aggregator hat on. I knew there was a weird value in nurturing the Internet ecosystem, much more value than there was in simply trying to get people to come to one website to watch one video. In a word, the goal was: ubiquity.
On that basis, the arrangement quickly fell into place. James would be compensated for his work by retaining the rights to it, so that if it hit the stratosphere, he and Hannah would get paid big-time. For my part, I’d be in charge of the rollout, and I would get to launch Big Government with the videos. He’d get the bucks; I’d get the buzz.
For my part, it was a godsend. Big Government was designed to have a limited-government mission, to counter the emerging Obama health-care reform, to stop the expansion of government. The story fit that agenda perfectly. We would create this new website around an emerging, multipart, explosive news item. Big Government would serve as the story’s mother ship, seeding what we hoped would be hundreds of news and politics websites simultaneously. For an Internet launch, it was unprecedented.
“You know what, James?” I told him. “We’re mutually incentivized to get this story out there.” (I actually talk like that.) “If it becomes huge and you own the rights to it, you can make your own documentary. Maybe you guys will make some money here. And I don’t get anything if I don’t help.” It was the fairest arrangement I could imagine. All I had to do now was make “those unbelievable ACORN videos” a household phrase.
Luckily, I had a sterling team on board. Big Gov was headed up by a good friend, Mike Flynn (Maura’s husband). Aside from being an outstanding writer and editor himself, Mike was by far my number one connector in Washington circles when it came to limited-government and fiscal-responsibility types. His last job had been with the Reason Foundation, so his conservative/libertarian credentials were intact. He understood state government because he’d worked there; he understood the federal government as well. He knew the best writers and researchers. So I asked Mike to fly out to California for “an important meeting”; I wanted to do this in person. Sitting across from him, I had only one question that mattered: “What do you know about ACORN?”
A smile broke across his face. “A lot.”
Mike, it turns out, understood ACORN and its connectivity to the Democratic Party much better than I did—perhaps better than anyone else alive did. He knew that community organizer was a pregnant term, stood for a great deal more than most people know, and that we were about to dip our toes into one vast, corrupt ocean.
So we talked. A long time.
Of course, while all this heady momentum was gathering, we were all willfully blind to one little item: Big Government didn’t actually exist yet. Yes, the pieces were all in place. The concept was honed, the domain name secured, the web interface constructed. But a multitiered news website costs money. Where would we get the scratch to actually create this thing?
The issue could be ignored no longer; we’d been planning Big Government for a long time, and the site would either happen now or it wouldn’t. I reached out to one of the only “money” people I knew, told her what we were up to, and told her we needed help. She turned me down flat. She was afraid of the Alinsky playbook, the Richard Mellon Scaife treatment in particular. She has a family, has some public exposure. I couldn’t blame her. In her position, who wouldn’t be afraid?
It was then I made up my mind. I boldly declared to Larry, “Let’s put our money where our mouth is.” Larry said, “Okay, but what money?”
Or rather, Let’s put my dad’s money where our mouth is. Yup, I went to Daddy. I told Dad I needed to borrow twenty-five thousand dollars to kick off a website, that it could be a very big thing in my career (whatever that career actually was), and that I would never ask him for anything like it again. He didn’t ask questions, God bless him; he just ponied up and wished me luck. I doubt he had any expectations of ever seeing that money again—a lot of money, frankly, to a retired restaurateur. But Dad came through. He wasn’t afraid. (Yes, we’ve since paid him back.)
And we were rolling.
The day after James came to my house with the Baltimore video, I took a once-in-a-lifetime week off to be a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. It is basically a program where you sit around in a luxury hotel and learn about the Founders from some of the world’s best thinkers on American history.
Because of my (somewhat understated) approach to academics during college, I now function in a sort of guilty read-everything mode born of guilt. So the opportunity to be taught about the Founding Fathers by people like Harry Jaffa filled a void left by an American Studies experience at Tulane that had really been a major in anti-American Studies. The Claremont program was fantasy baseball camp for constitutional junkies, and packing to go, I couldn’t have been more excited. I did everything but bring a James Madison lunch box.
I checked in to the beautiful Island Hotel in Newport Beach on a warm summer day, feeling like a kid at camp. As soon as I checked in to the room, thinking about the pool and the bar more than Thomas Jefferson just then, I got a call from a guy named Patrick Courrielche. Now, I had just read a piece in Reason magazine by Courrielche. Patrick is an artist who started off as a liberal and moved toward libertarianism.* His Reason piece suggested that his brethren in the art world needed to diversify their ideological holdings, that it was just flat-out boring for everyone to think and create according to the same leftist orthodoxy. Reading his piece, I recognized that at t
he most basic level, that was my argument about the larger culture, too: this is boring. For everybody to have the exact same PC point of view, reinforcing the growth of the state, runs so contrary to what artists should be about—which is challenging conformity. Yet in 2009, conservatives, libertarians, and other rebels found themselves in this ideological ghetto.
For a while after I’d read his piece, Patrick and I had been corresponding. Talking to him now from Claremont, he casually mentioned that he had received an e-mail from the National Endowment for the Arts. It was an invitation to a conference call hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and a group called “United We Serve.” According to the e-mail, the call was designed to bring together “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders, or just plain cool people to… work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” Patrick asked me whether he should tape it. I told him absolutely.
That was because James O’Keefe had already changed my thinking. I had always been a text-based guy—I had founded Breitbart.tv, but that was merely a video aggregator. James had shown me that tape was the most damaging evidence you could have. The conference call took place three days later. And on that conference call, members of the White House staff and the NEA openly asked artists to help promote the Obama agenda.
And Courrielche had it on tape.
If you think about it, the timing was crazy. If you’re a conservative and you pay attention to the conservative news cycle, you know that huge stories are relatively rare. And here was a huge story in ACORN, and a pretty big story in the NEA, back-to-back. (Had these been liberal-oriented news items, they would have been presented as somewhere between V-J Day and the moon landing.) Some reporters dine out on a story they did forty years ago, and to put these two stories together at the exact same moment, both of them representing the Democrat-Media Complex’s corruption and propagandizing and ends-justify-the-means tactics—it was a breakthrough moment for the New Media. I’m not a religious man, but if anything makes me believe in Divine Providence, it was that convergence.
Because this was the moment. Monica Lewinsky had started it, Swift Boat had continued it by end-running around the media and keeping Kerry out of office, Dan Rather had lost his job, and Clark Hoyt of the New York Times would soon admit that the mainstream media were late to the party on Van Jones. But in my mind, it seemed that if the ACORN story and the NEA story could be paired and weaponized, maximized and forced into the eye of the American public, they could serve as a case study demonstrating that the New Media could supplant Ye Olde Media. These paired stories could serve as notice that if the mainstream wouldn’t take helpful hints to right the ship, they were going to experience something akin to a mutiny. I felt like Fletcher Christian with an impending case of carpal tunnel.
Incidentally, I was thinking in these grandiose, metaphorically violent terms—in these revolutionary terms, really—because I was simultaneously being taught about the Founding Fathers and the risks that they took and the stakes that were in play during the American Revolution. While the other Lincoln Fellows were sitting there writing notes furiously, like the brilliant academics that they were—these were the next Newt Gingriches or Antonin Scalias or Clarence Thomases of the world—I was sitting there with my New Media mind taking it all in like it was Avatar in 3-D. I started listening to the stories of the Founding Fathers, the conditions that they found themselves in, their interactions with the monarchy and their fellow citizens. I heard that they were a loose band of malcontents who didn’t have a mass movement behind them.
And I realized that right in front of me—right in front of me—I had the same opportunity, at a critical time in our nation’s history, to go against the grain and to fight a revolution against the Complex. I had a chance to exploit a crack that had been growing in the mainstream media with the exposure of the Democratic Party–media collusion. I had a chance to demonstrate that the Complex is a unitary, tyrannical organism that serves to suffocate those who disagree with its collective worldview and silly utopian aphorisms.
Call it delusions of grandeur. Call it the “Walking Out of Rocky Syndrome,” where you shadowbox the air after you see the film, feeling like a giant dork but also feeling you can take on the world. The Claremont Institute inspired me to realize that I had an obligation to fight the battle against the oppression and total control of the national airwaves by the champagne class who seek to build a false and demeaning narrative of what America is and what it should be, who trample on the First Amendment with their Frankfurt School philosophy and Alinsky tactics. The battle against them was a righteous cause. I was certain. And I recognized that by whatever accident of circumstance, I was well-trained and well-positioned for this battle against them, a battle that would take place in the New Media theater of war. And it was my obligation to take up those weapons at my disposal.
I left Claremont prepared for combat. I would need to be.
A Plan took shape.
The release of the Courrielche tape created an online and talkradio sensation and forced the resignation of an NEA appointee. As predicted, the mainstream media did their best to ignore it. It was New Media—including Big Hollywood—that forced the Obama administration to finally do some damage control and take some action. It was an excellent softening up, the “one” in the “one-two” punch we were planning. It did its job.
Now for the haymaker. Of course, I knew the press wasn’t going to give credit where it was due on the ACORN story, and that they wouldn’t believe that the Plan hadn’t all been preconceived. So I took precautions in my Washington Times column released September 7, 2009—the Monday before we launched the story.
The piece followed hard on the heels of the Van Jones story. Jones, Obama’s appointed “Green Czar,” as well as a celebrated communist and “9/11 Truther,” had stepped down on September 5 because of conservative media pressure from Glenn Beck, Breitbart.tv, and others. (Beck, by the way, already knew about the ACORN videos at this point—when I showed them to him, he told me, “You need a bodyguard.”) Clark Hoyt had written that the New York Times had to pay more attention to the conservative media, that the mainstream media had ignored the Van Jones story until it crawled up and bit them on the ass, when Jones was ultimately forced to resign.
Despite that, I knew they were going to ignore the ACORN story, too, despite their newfound “commitment” to a wider news angle. So I wrote a column entitled, “Couric Should Look in Mirror.” In it, I laid out the entire Plan, getting it into the public record as evidence that I had warned the mainstream media what was coming. In the column, I mentioned the NEA story and I mentioned ACORN. Then I gave them the big clue: “When the next big scandal hits—and it will, and it most certainly won’t come from traditional journalism—all eyes will be on ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger [New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr.] to see if he does his job. All eyes are on the media. We are judging them by the standard they taught us during Watergate: ‘The cover-up is worse than the crime.’ ”1
The timing was carefully chosen, and with the backdraft of Jones and Hoyt, sailing conditions were ideal. We launched the week Barack Obama was trying to reset the conversation on health care. This was one month after the violent town hall experiences in which a finger was bitten off in Thousand Oaks by a crazed Obama follower, where a black guy was called the N word and was beaten up by two Service Employees International Union (SEIU) thugs. At this point Obama wanted to reframe the health-care debate, because his original effort had been a muddled failure. Obama was due to make his unprecedented speech to all schoolchildren on Tuesday, September 8; the next day he was set to address a joint session of Congress on health care, all in an attempt to create a fake groundswell where the following conversation would take place between America’s kids and their parents:
“Mommy, Mommy! The president spoke. He’s so wonderful! Please do w
hatever it takes to make his presidency a success!”
“Yes, darling. I shall support health-care reform, because the day after you heard the president in school, I heard him on television telling me that government-controlled health care is the most important thing in the world, even though every poll shows the American people want jobs and economic recovery rather than a new multi-trillion-dollar entitlement. Hey, isn’t that Joy Behar wonderful?”
I had learned from John McCain’s choosing Sarah Palin the day after Obama’s Invesco Speech—the speech with the Greek columns, the speech that was supposed to announce Obama’s godlike ascent to power, one of the “biggest” speeches of all time—that you could suck the air out of the room with a breaking, well-timed story. The day after Invesco, nobody was talking about Invesco—everybody was talking about Palin.
And I knew that for the Obama phenomenon to continue, media control was everything. Here was a construct whom the mainstream covered on a routine basis, whom they never vetted, who was in fact elected by them through platitudes and misdirection. That’s why it never crossed my mind whether I should play fair.
Fair loses.
So my goal was to allow Obama to speak on Wednesday night before the joint session of Congress, then drop the first ACORN video early Thursday morning, so that instead of the American public spending the day at the watercooler asking each other, “Did you see the health-care speech? Don’t you feel healthier already?” they’d spend the day asking each other, “Holy shit—did you see that ACORN video?” We’d drop the first video Thursday, the second one Friday. I knew also that on Saturday, September 12, the 9/12 Project and the Tea Party movement were planning rallies all over the country, including a massive rally in Washington, DC. So we’d get an early litmus test—in places like Quincy, Illinois, and Washington, DC, we’d be able to see how ordinary Americans were reacting to the scandal.
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 16