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December 5 - December 7, 2020
Remember Rush Limbaugh? Or their insistence that Fox News isn’t a real news outlet like CNN or MSNBC?
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.
Young people suckle at the teat of pop culture—but by refusing to fight for their attention, we lose by default.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The key to the conversation was that I didn’t start defending myself against his baseless charge of racism. I dismissed it out of hand as ridiculous because it was ridiculous. He was a punk for leveling that kind of charge without any basis whatsoever.
Feeding the media is like training a dog—you can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over and over again until it learns its lesson.
So, I planted scoops with what business school types would call my “competitors,” and I watched the story explode, my pageviews go through the roof, and my brand flourish. Sometimes the best ideas are counterintuitive.
Building a movement used to take time, but now it can be done in a few hours with the right connections and the right posts on the right websites.
The Tea Parties have used the power of social media to get their message out there in a new and incredible way. There are no leaders to the Tea Party, which is a great thing, and there’s no formal program to the Tea Party—it’s truly a party of the people, and originally, it was based on conservative people partying. If any liberal attended a Tea Party event, they’d be shocked to see that it isn’t a KKK rally; it’s a social gathering of thousands of like-minded people of all races and ages, people looking for others who believe in the same values.
Most of us aren’t experts on the latest budget package or stem-cell line regulation, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless—it means we get to play Socrates, asking pointed questions rather than citing facts we may not be sure of.
My takeaway from the revealing moment about the low standards for TV punditry was that if I valued my career, I would only accept media invites where I could dictate the terms of engagement
Your opponents will pretend to be experts if you don’t, but that’s okay, because you can always puncture their balloon with one word: why
Liberals don’t have a why, other than their own utopianism and their dyspeptic view of the status quo and America. Reason is not their strong suit—emotion is.
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
Joe Biden is still vice president of the United States even though he called the first black president “clean” and “articulate.” Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader even though he said Obama was “light-skinned” and could drop his “Negro dialect” on cue. Until his death in 2010, Senator Robert Byrd was “a lion of the Senate” even though he was a former Kleagle in the KKK.
We start by uncovering the truth and telling everyone about it. I’m not religious, and I’m certainly no theologian, but if there is one thing in religion that speaks to me, it is the idea of absolute truth. In fact, the word truth has meaning only if it is absolute.
Believe in the audacity of hope. It’s too bad President Obama is such a joyless, politically correct automaton, because he’s terrifically agile with his prepared words.
culture. We both also obsess that conservatives are stuck in a nineteenth-century media strategy that will lose elections in perpetuity if they don’t wake up to the fact that those geeky graduate students generating the latest apps and networks won’t “rule the world someday”—they already do
“James, the footage is awesome, and what’s more, important,” I told him—his eyes lit up—“unfortunately, I don’t think it is worth a red cent.” I explained to him that there just wasn’t a market (yet!) for conservative product like this, that if he had done this against the NRA or Blackwater, George Soros would have bought it for $5 million, and it would be made into a movie that would premiere simultaneously in Westwood, Hollywood, and Cannes, and Laurie David would send her private jet to pick him up and he would end up sitting poolside in Saint-Tropez eating oysters with a little fork while
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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.
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.
“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.’
And I knew that for the Obama phenomenon to continue, media control was everything.
Media Matters raises a lot of money, seven to ten million dollars per year, to nitpick a story to death, delegitimizing it, isolating it, and then claiming it has been debunked. The content at Media Matters is then repeated all over the left-wing media, from the networks to MSNBC and CNN to the New York Times, as received wisdom.
Now, I didn’t just do this because I wanted the story to break on Fox News (even though I did). I did it because I believed that Roger Ailes
and Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t launch a story of this magnitude without having the massive legal authority of Fox check to see whether everything was legit. Handing it to Fox News gave me my highest level of confidence. I had a small business running out of a basement—they had a billion-dollar entertainment conglomerate.
We knew that we were drawing blood when ACORN abandoned white spokesperson Scott Levenson in favor of the dashiki-clad African-American Bertha Lewis. Clearly, political correctness, the race card, and Alinsky were going to be their playbook—a tried-and-true defense.
Hannah started going on TV and started to win over the audience. That was an X-factor we hadn’t planned on; that the beautiful young woman playing a prostitute in the videos would come across as so poised, grounded, and mature on television.
It was Clinton who told Kennedy that “a few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Now he was sitting across the table from Obama—supposedly discussing health care.
Perhaps I’m being a bit hubristic, but I’m convinced that this was the meeting in which Obama and Clinton decided to put John Podesta in charge of the ACORN response team.
Stewart’s story was particularly huge, because if you’re ACORN and you’ve lost Jon Stewart, you’ve lost everything.
The Obama team began to respond in earnest the next day with tried-and-true Clintonian tactics. ACORN announced its “independent” investigation panel. The members? Podesta himself,
On Wednesday, we released the San Diego videos, which again showed an ACORN employee helping James and Hannah set up an underage brothel at taxpayer expense.
The irony was both painful and delicious. “That’s what Bush called the ‘soft bigotry of lowered expectations,’ ” I noted. “Those people were smart enough to rig the system to defraud taxpayers.”
The conversation summed up everything that was wrong with the mainstream media. They think it’s their obligation to take down right-of-center organizations; they feel it’s their raison d’être to attack conservative institutions mercilessly. But if I did the same with a liberal institution, I was victimizing an isolated “bunch of dummies.”
I told everyone I could that they had started an uprising, and that the Obama administration and the media wouldn’t stand for it. I said that they’d be labeled racists and hatemongers and violent criminals, that they’d be depicted as the dregs of society, people to be excluded from dinner parties because of their made-up closet KKK status. They were about to be targeted, and I knew it. I had to warn them.
The Tea Party had been shortchanged for over a year already, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow labeling them “tea baggers” and claiming that they were holdover refugees from Birth of a Nation
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went pure Alinsky and told the media that protesters were carrying “swastikas and symbols like that.”
In August 2009, MSNBC took a photo of a man carrying a gun at a rally, but cut off his head and hands in the photo, as Contessa Brewer intoned, “There are questions about whether this has racial overtones… white people showing up with guns.” Dylan Ratigan and Toure agreed with her. There was only one problem: the guy carrying the gun was black. MSNBC had deliberately cropped the picture to try to avoid the inconvenient fact that it contradicted their (false) narrative. They were making it up, using Photoshop to propagate a lie. Where was Media Matters now?
To reiterate: there was no proof that the N word was used, or that anyone was purposefully spit upon. That Tea Party crowd was a sea of New Media equipment. Not only were hundreds of people armed with Handycams, BlackBerrys, and iPods, so were the mainstream media, which had come in expectation of a display of violence and backwardness by the Neanderthal Tea Partiers. They were there, covering every inch of the event. Does anyone really think that somehow they just missed it?
Why didn’t a single mainstream media outlet even suggest that a video should exist to prove these events occurred?
Predictably, we were five full news days into this major controversy and there was still no evidence of such outrageous charges.
course (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referred to the Tea Partiers’ missing “white hoods”).
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.
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.
