The Democratic Party and the media simply never tire of this approach. It hadn’t worked when Bertha Lewis defended ACORN, because we’d had videotapes. Here, without video, the Dems were free to conjure racism from thin air. Suddenly, every liberal outlet in the country—which is to say, virtually every outlet in the country—was simultaneously arguing that the Tea Party was racist and violent, a divisive and irresponsible contention lacking any shred of supporting evidence, except for the observation that the majority of the Tea Partiers were white. Well, so is the country. This was Duke Lacrosse politics at its worst.
The press went directly to petrified Republican leaders, who offered the predictable fearful apologies they weren’t qualified to give. I was becoming more Tea Party than GOP every day.
It was all a setup, and I knew it. I smelled a rat. Time to hone my media chops again.
Five days after the highly publicized incidents supposedly happened, I publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone for any evidence of use of the N word at the March 20 Tea Party rally. I wrote:
If we let them get away with Saturday’s stunt—using the imagery of the Civil Rights era and hurtful lies to cast aspersions upon the Tea Party whole—then they really will have won the day. It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N-word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point. And surely if those cameras did not capture such abhorrence, then someone from the mainstream media—those who printed and broadcast his assertions without any reasonable questioning or investigation—must themselves surely have it on camera. Of course we already know they don’t. If they did, you’d have seen it by now. THOUSANDS OF TIMES. Rep. Lewis, if you can’t do that, I’ll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test. If you provide verifiable video evidence showing that a single racist epithet was hurled as you walked among the Tea Partiers, or you pass a simple lie detector test, I will provide a $10K check to the United Negro College Fund.2
There was not one response.
Predictably, we were five full news days into this major controversy and there was still no evidence of such outrageous charges. In fact, the existing footage from that day showed members of the CBC walking through the crowd, never once moving their heads in reaction to any outbursts. Is it conceivable that all of them stoically walked by as the N word was hurled at them fifteen times—even as the media were holding up cameras, practically begging the crowd to do something awful?
After my offer was mentioned on both The Sean Hannity Show and The O’Reilly Factor, I raised my offer to twenty thousand dollars. A few days later, at the Tea Party in Searchlight, Nevada, I upped the ante to one hundred thousand dollars. As of November 2010, nobody has stepped forward to claim the money. When Ken Vogel of Politico.com covered my offer, he said that calls to Rep. John Lewis weren’t returned.
We called their bluff. And for several weeks, they tried to back off it. They even refused to answer any questions about it. Then they tried the usual Media Matters tactic of attacking an ancillary issue and trying to discredit the whole story with it. This time, the contention was that when I posted video from the March 20 rallies of Lewis and Co. walking through the crowd, the video was of them walking away from—not to—the Capitol. Well, here’s my considered response: Who cares? I can’t prove a negative with any videos I create—it’s up to them to prove their allegations. They haven’t done it and they won’t do it, because what they claim happened never happened.
We even found four videos from the exact place and time showing Representatives Carson and Lewis walking briskly and unobstructed. Four videos. Four angles. No N word. And even then the congressmen and the media refused to take it back. It was an epic victory for truth and absolute proof that the media are the problem.
But what if I hadn’t offered the reward, or shown the four videos, and called them on it? How many more times would the left invoke these fake “racism” charges? Do they never learn? It failed with the Duke University lacrosse team; as it did with Professor Madonna Constantine and her faked noose incident at Columbia University (in which Constantine, under investigation by the university for plagiarism, attempted to misdirect and manufacture a hate crime by placing a noose on her own door); as it did with the Sergeant Crowley boner by Barack Obama, who reflexively suggested that a white police officer had behaved “stupidly.” The first Alinsky president was using surrogates in the press and in the Congress to split this nation into two hostile parties so he could puppeteer the Have-Nots against the perceived Haves. The silence over the hundred-thousand-dollar challenge, though, was a tacit acknowledgment that the Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama don’t have the stomach for doubling down. They got caught, pure and simple. But they’ll try it again. Which is when they must be challenged. Again.
The other half of the strategy that was built into the N-Word Capitol Hill Walk was the desire to incite an overreaction, or even violence. The media did their part by labeling and slandering the Tea Partiers as racist knuckle-draggers, of course (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referred to the Tea Partiers’ missing “white hoods”). Absent any evidence other than creatively selected, handcrafted signs from the fringe of the audience that were taken to represent the whole, Reid and Pelosi’s media hand puppets regurgitated the Obama opinion that everyone who doesn’t agree with the One is a bitter clinger who relies on God, guns, and racism to get through his or her humdrum little life out in flyover country. This was hardcore media elitism mixed with politically correct class warfare. Pure Alinsky.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m a tad paranoid? A little story for you.
The events at the Searchlight, Nevada, Tea Party on March 27, 2010, is the Rosetta Stone of the Democratic Party strategy—a key to understanding how they operate in the trenches. Searchlight is Harry Reid’s hometown, and in March of 2010 Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express rolled into town on the beginning of their cross-country tour. I was invited to speak, and a team of fellow Tea Partiers were actually following me around to film the whole event. Now, none of us were going to Senator Harry Reid’s office building to threaten individuals that March day—Harry doesn’t even have an office there. We went that day to the middle of the desert to talk up the Constitution and founding documents, and to express our dismay with the current political class. The real astroturf, the bought-and-paid-for union support network that does the heavy lifting and the bone breaking, traveled to Searchlight for one reason: a fight.
Now, I’m by nature a pretty garrulous and easygoing guy, and I don’t look for a fight. But somehow, since ACORN, the fight seemed to find me. That was the way it happened on the way to Searchlight. As part of the Express wagon train, I was driving my car from Laughlin to Searchlight, which is truly in the middle of nowhere. As we entered town I saw some of the camera crew, who were ahead of me in the caravan, in a parking lot. They directed me into the lot, and I parked there—I thought we were going to walk to the main event from here. What the hell did I know? Like I’ve been to Searchlight before?
Getting out of the car, I saw that among the crowds beginning to fill the area up were approximately fifty Harry Reid supporters holding up various union-printed placards. As it began to dawn on me that I might not be where I was supposed to be, I spotted a man who looked liked Children of the Corn meets River’s Edge holding up a sign that read “SEARCHLIGHT →.” Problem was, it seemed to be pointing away from where I thought we were headed. When I approached him and asked him about it, he told me with a leer that he was directing Tea Party people down the wrong road.
“Now why would you do that?” I asked him.
That’s when things started to go south. As if they’d received a psychic signal from this astroturf rabble-rouser in front of me, the entire group of Reid supporters suddenly thronged me, a few shouting, “Hey, I’
ve seen you on TV! I’ve seen you on MSNBC on Dylan Ratigan’s show!” Uh-oh.
As this happened, a Tea Party Express bus drove past. Distracted from me for the moment, some of the crowd started flinging eggs against the side of the bus. As I realized this had been what they were waiting for all along, I yelled, “What are you doing? Who did that?” The crowd began to push the perpetrators away, then created a wall of people to obscure the egg throwers from our cameras (yes, the crew was rolling tape). Protecting its own, the group suddenly became even nastier, and rather—animated.
Luckily, the cameras were still rolling, protecting me against false charges (and against violent activity, because who wants to be videoed pounding on an unarmed Tea Partier?), so I wasn’t fearful. Then the Reid supporters tried to block the cameras by holding up their signs.
Now, I don’t like backing down from a confrontation, but there were some intensely threatening people there. People were calling me every name you can think of (and some you probably can’t). One kept screaming, “Get out of here, rich guy!” (This at a time I still owed my dad that $25K.) And naturally, the race card came right out, with a black guy calling me (how original!) a racist. As gently as I could and still be heard amid that crowd, I told him, “Name one thing I’ve ever said that’s racist.” His face simply contorted in rage. That’s when I heard another guy scream close to my ear, “I’m going to have to go to jail today if we don’t get this guy out of here.” The cameras were blocked; I was surrounded. Now I was getting scared.
So I got out of there. As I backed toward my car, a group of police officers drove up. Saved! Then one of the cops leaned out the window of his SUV and called out to me. “You need to come over here.”
“Yes, Officer,” I answered.
“Why were you over there?”
I told him what had happened. He then told me that the Reid supporters had called the police on me. “That group of people said you threw eggs and instigated what just happened,” he said.
I said, “Excuse me?! I have a camera guy with me, and you can see what happened on the video.”
The cops saw their local union pals had picked the wrong target—end of police encounter. But still, the officers didn’t go after their local union pals.
Now, the Democratic Party has accused every Tea Party of being astroturfed—of “flying in” agitators to pose as grassroots locals. They accuse the Tea Parties of being propagated by the Republican Party, by white supremacist groups, by a secret cabal of neocon industrialists. But what I had just experienced was astroturfing at its worst—outside agitators from God knows where dropped in to intimidate and harass a peaceful, legal gathering. It was reminiscent of 1930s-style labor coercion.
I had written about these types of tactics and I knew they had happened, but to experience it—to look into the eyes of these people and try to reason with them and realize the uselessness of it—was a revelation. These people were simply looking for trouble and would not take no for an answer. They were there to be a problem. Period.
After reviewing the tape, we were able to identify one of the main culprits in the crowd: Brian DiMarzio, who in fact can be seen clearly on the tape blaming me to the cops (though the video clearly shows otherwise). Who is Brian, you ask? The field director for the Nevada Democratic Party.
Naturally, the usual Podesta/Media Matters apologists leaped to diminish the encounter (which was fairly widely reported). Media Matters “Senior Fellow” Eric Boehlert called my oral and written reports about the event “the Phantom Egg,” calling into question my truthfulness.
But of course—thank you, James!—I had the video. It showed clearly that Harry Reid’s little foot soldiers were not only there to misdirect traffic, they had also thrown the eggs and called the police. What childishness—what low-rent, schoolyard nonsense. And it might have worked—I might easily have been arrested, and you can imagine how that would have played in the press. But in this age of New Media, the tape (or, as with the N-word accusations, the lack thereof) usually tells the tale. I once again released the video to the media, and even Jon Stewart, who regularly mocks the Tea Partiers, was appalled. After he rolled the video we shot (which clearly depicted one of Reid’s supporters holding an egg) on his show, Stewart shouted to the camera: “You’re not helping!”
It is they who are violent, not we. They called us racists and couldn’t deliver the goods. They called us violent and couldn’t deliver the goods. Now they’re even trying to infiltrate the Tea Parties and plant violent, psychopathic liberals and union thugs who want to make the Tea Partiers look bad—and they still won’t be able to deliver the goods.
They need to marginalize and demonize those that would stand up to their hardball, toxic, antidemocratic tactics. That’s why they had Bill Clinton out front and center, saying that the Tea Party rhetoric is the same kind of rhetoric that drove Timothy McVeigh to commit his evil acts. That’s why Obama is outright dismissive of the Tea Parties—he thinks the usual tactics will work. He literally laughs them off, the epitome of smug arrogance.
But it won’t work. Given a fair hearing, given just the slightest bit of exposure—and the American people will rise to the occasion. They see these tactics for what they are.
Will the media keep falling into the trap of blind support of this agenda? Of condescending to and misleading the American people? After all, the current media business model takes another hit each and every time they get suckered into this stuff. Unless they care more about politics than moneymaking—and if they do, that puts the lie to their argument that they’re just profit-seeking enterprises rather than branches of the Democratic Party—it makes no sense. Are they more deeply wedded to their Complex mind-sets than their own solvency? It looks like the answer is yes, as Keith Olbermann’s liberal-leaning audience buys into everything he says, Rachel Maddow alienates everyone but the converted, CNN implodes, and the New York Times is angling to be sold for parts.
But that said: will the GOP stop playing Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy? If the Republican Party doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to fight back, it will be the growing numbers of disenchanted and disenfranchised Tea Party participants who will have to step up. And I want to foment their righteous anger. These people are my people. They recognize the civilizational battle under way here; they understand that the United States is it, the last outpost for freedom. Ask any immigrant who strove to come here. They’ll tell you.
I embraced the Tea Party movement because of its evocative use of a founding revolutionary rebellion and its Constitution-mindedness. That was brought home even more deeply less than a year into the movement, when former Polish president and communist fighter Lech Walesa came to Illinois to support a Tea Party candidate. Why? “The United States was always the last resort and hope for all other nations,” he said. “There was the hope that whenever there was something going wrong in the world, you could count on the United States. Today we’ve lost that hope.” Walesa and others like him—people who have felt the oppression and the totalitarianism of the state at a fundamental level—understand that America is the beacon of freedom and liberty. That understanding is my lifeblood, the thing that motivates me and that motivates the Tea Party. I don’t have a hard time saying that these notions of social justice and economic equality that sound so lovely to the left are the enemies of freedom and liberty. The Tea Party says it, too—and that’s why the Complex wants to destroy it.
We have now entered the first full-fledged Alinsky presidency. And the only way to beat Alinsky is with strength. We don’t fight fair; we fight righteous. The Democrats and President Obama will not give up their tack or their tactics. Do you think the GOP will win if its strategy is to apologize for every media-manufactured “right wing” outrage? It will not. We will win the day by using all the tools in our arsenal to fight the tyranny of these totalitarian ideologies that have been visited upon us from overseas, where those same ideologies caused only chronic human misery. We will win by using the New
Media to expose the bankruptcy of their beliefs and tactics. And ultimately we’ll win, because their ideas simply don’t work. No amount of media spin can change that.
CHAPTER 10
The Big Plan: Join Us
Now you know the Complex, and you know that we can fight it if we just use the right tactics, understand our opponents, and walk toward the fire. Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about being called a racist, a homophobe, a sociopath, a violent heteronormative xenophobe with fascistic impulses. They say all those things about you because they’re keeping you inside the Complex, forcing you to respond to their playbook. They want to stop you in your tracks. But if you keep going, if you tell them you can stop their verbal bullets and keep walking, you’ll send messages to people who are rooting for you, who agree with you. That’s how you build an invincible movement willing to play by its own rules.
Here’s how I’m going to get you in that game.
Here’s my plan.
I spent years working as a team player. But at a certain point, after watching other people take the risks and have successes and have failures, it became a personal imperative that I start sticking my neck out and emerging on my own. So after I left the Huffington Post and returned to Earth, I was determined to use my knowledge of the news cycle to create a brand—a media entity that could operate on a par with other news outlets, but that would use the New Media to even greater advantage. Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv did that. People inside and outside the news business know the Breitbart sites: they’ve heard of them; they use and return to them. They learned fast that we had the newswires, and that we had the unique audio and video content.
Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! Page 19