Robert Spencer Speaks at the Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend

Bestselling author and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer spoke recently at the Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ.

Spencer addressed the fascism of the Biden administration and the Left’s ongoing efforts to foment a civil war.

Don’t miss it out below:

Robert Spencer from DHFC on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Robert Spencer: Thank you very much for still being here. We’ve had quite a weekend, and we’ve heard a great deal about how the election has been in a certain way, rigged, if not with outright fraud, but with the mail-in ballots and so many other ways that can be manipulated to achieve the desired result. Now, we’ve heard a great deal about that.

I wanted to step back in light of all that, and look at some of the larger trends. What is the endgame? Where does the Democrat Party want to be in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years? We saw that very clearly on September 1, 2022, when Joe Biden made his infamous speech with the red and black background, kind of like this one. All I need is a couple of Marines and executive power, and you’d be in big trouble.

He gave a speech that was really without parallel in American history. There is no speech like that speech, from any president before Joe Biden. It was an extraordinary departure from 200 years of American political tradition, and it was extraordinarily important. It reveals what the left is trying ultimately to do. The best analogy for that speech is not in American history at all; it’s actually in German history, in a speech that the Chancellor of Germany named Adolf Hitler gave on March 23, 1933, in the Reichstag.

Now you might say, oh, this is hyperbole, this is exaggeration, this is crazy. You go to — what is it called — the Godwin analogy or something, Godwin’s law, if you invoke Hitler, then you lose. Well, that’s all very well unless you’re talking about real fascists, and Joe Biden is a real fascist. The Democrat Party is at this point a fascist party. Now, before you dismiss this as hysteria or hyperbole, let’s think for a minute about what exactly fascism is. People throw the word around a whole lot. Joe Biden has called conservatives fascists, and Trump. Yet nobody actually stops and says, well, what exactly is a fascist, what do you mean by this?

Now, fascists, the word means bundles — bundles — and it’s like bundles of sticks. If you take out a dollar bill right now and look on the back, there’s a fascist symbol on the United States dollar bill. It is the American eagle clutching a couple of bundles of sticks. Now, why on earth is the American eagle clutching bundles of sticks? Because a single stick is weak and you can snap it, but if you hold 20 sticks together, you can’t snap them. So  the whole idea is out of unity comes strength. And so the statement E Pluribus Unum, which is on the dollar, and is one of the mottoes of the United States, “out of many, one,” that’s a fascist statement, because it is saying that we are all stronger together than we are separately.

Now, I hasten to assure you, I am not saying — I’m not some crazed leftist who snuck in. I am not saying that the Founding Fathers were fascist or that America is fascist. Actually, the Founding Fathers were not. Fascism as an organized political system, an organized political ideology, arose in the beginning of the 20th century in Italy, and of course, spread to Germany and elsewhere, and was thought to be completely discredited at the end of World War II. However, the People’s Republic of China today is more fascist than communist, and Joe Biden’s United States of America.

Now, I’ll explain this. When Adolf Hitler came to power, there were a lot of socialists in his government, because after all, his party was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. And there was a lot of what we would think of as leftist Marxist rhetoric in the Nazi program. There were people who wanted him to nationalize all the industries, but he refused. Instead, he called in the captains of industry, the big industrialists in Germany, and he made it very clear to them that they would do exactly what he said, or they would be killed, and they did. But they maintained ownership of their industries.

So in other words, communism nationalizes, seizes control of the means of production. Fascism does not. Fascism allows for private ownership of the means of production, but coordinates them all, out of many, one, a bundle of sticks, coordinates them all together to work for the same goal. So they’re both totalitarian systems; they’re both very similar. The idea that fascism is extreme right and communism is extreme left, there’s nothing to that. That’s actually leftist propaganda.

The reality is that they are very closely aligned. They’re very similar. They’re both totalitarian systems that extinguish individuality and coordinate everything for the good of the state. There are two primary differences. Fascism tends to be nationalist, and fascism does not seize the means of production, but merely controls the means of production.

Now, think about the United States of America today. What we have is a President of the United States and his party with one point of view. And as it happens, that same point of view is shared by all the major corporations, all the social media giants, all of the media. What do you call that? That’s fascism, out of many, one. Bundles, they’re all bundled together, and they’re all working for the same goal.

Now, of course, we know that very recently, there was this big fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works, that Donald Trump became president. And so the whole fascist machinery was stopped in its tracks, because suddenly, the executive branch of the government was not on board with the rest of the program. And so they had to get together and do everything they could to remove and destroy him. Joe Biden just repeated that.

Do you know that after  the election, right on Wednesday, November 9, Joe Biden was asked about Trump? The questioner said, “His movement is still very strong.” And Joe Biden laughed derisively and said, “Oh, yeah,” because he thought that it’s broken. And he said, “I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.” That’s what Joe Biden said.

Now, if you think about that, what does that mean? How can Joe Biden do that? I actually checked the Constitution this morning just to make sure. And there is nothing in there about eligibility for the Presidency of the United States, except that you’re a natural born citizen and you’re 35 years old; and you can be removed from office, impeached, and convicted; if convicted, removed from office, if you are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Now, that might be what he’s saying, that they’re going to indict him for treason for something related to these allegedly classified documents that he allegedly had and so on. And that will be considered high crime and misdemeanors and bar him from the presidency. But what he’s really trying to do, he made clear on September 1. That was to criminalize opposition, to make only one political point of view acceptable in the United States. And you can see that that is exactly where everything is tending in the fascist system in which we are living today.

The social media giants have already made it normalized that people who speak things that are unacceptable, get banned. And some people protest for a while and everybody forgets about it and we go on. And there’s this big debate because Elon Musk bought Twitter over whether he should allow the freedom of speech and how much he should allow it. Joe Biden actually said that they’re going to investigate him for daring to try to reinstitute the freedom of speech. So how much does this administration value dissent?

This is an administration that put together the Disinformation Governance Board last year that was going to work out of the Department of Homeland Security, quite ominously, in order to combat alleged disinformation, judged, of course, by the Board itself, and prosecuted presumably under the auspices of being a national security threat.

And so back to that red and black speech on September 1, 2022 — incidentally, the 83rd anniversary of the beginning of World War II. Joe Biden said that Trump and his supporters represented a grave threat to the republic itself. Now, that was what was so unprecedented in American life, and that’s why his speech was more like Hitler’s Reichstag speech than any speech of an American president, because Joe Biden was saying that essentially, half of the electorate, and everybody in this room, is somebody who is a threat to the republic, is somebody who is outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

So if you think that they are going to peacefully allow everyone who believes the way that we do to recapture the White House or the House or the Senate, and do nothing about it, then I’m afraid that you’ve been naive. This is an effort to rule out Trump supporters, that is America First patriots, to rule them out of bounds, to criminalize that perspective.

What Hitler did was in response to the Reichstag fire. You’ve all heard of the fire in the Reichstag on February 27, 1933. Hitler blamed the communists for the fire, and he banned the Communist Party. Now, as it happened, the Communist Party had enough  deputies in the Reichstag to prevent him from being able to pass the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers. And so lo and behold, the communists weren’t there, because he blamed them for the Reichstag, he outlawed the party. Then he had a majority in the Reichstag. On March 23, 1933, he said, “These people are a grave threat to the republic and so we have  removed them.” The rest of the deputies vote in favor of the Enabling Act, and the Nazi dictatorship is established.

Now in the United States of America, it’s happening more slowly. We have a long democratic tradition. Theirs was 14 years old at the time that Hitler made his speech, that’s not very long. But ours goes back to the 18th century, so it’s going to take a while longer. We had the Reichstag fire, that was January 6, the event that is cast as high treason that they blamed on the opposition group. And we had the speech that was consciously — somebody made a decision to put the red and the black. Did you see all the red and the black pictures? Somebody decided, hey, let’s get the Nazi colors and put them behind Joe Biden. Who decided that, and why?

It seems to me that it was very clear that he was saying: we have the military behind us, and we are going to come after you. We are going to make what you were saying and doing a criminal act, and we are going to rule you out of the political life of the United States of America. And so Joe Biden in doing that, you see, is doing a quintessentially fascist act. He’s got all the corporations and all the media, all the industries, behind him. They all work for the same point of view, and now he is moving to eliminate the opposition.

So when we look at the election of 2022, it’s very clear what happened. There was a very decisive majority for the Republicans in the popular vote, and yet it didn’t translate to seats in the House or the Senate. Why not? Because they’ve already rigged the maps, as we’ve discussed here several times during this weekend. The  gerrymandering has been quite successful, so that Republicans won big in their Republican districts, but it didn’t translate to statewide victories.

Now that is the same effort, you see; that is all one step toward eliminating the Republicans altogether, or if not the Republicans, eliminating the MAGA Republicans. Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, they’ll be the acceptable opposition. But you see, the acceptable opposition is a controlled opposition, is an opposition that doesn’t really oppose, that just goes along. And this morning, I saw that at Arizona State University, which must be around here somewhere, they voted 90% — 90%! — for Katie Hobbs.

Now, it reminded me — what was really disconcerting about it actually was that this was on a Twitter post, a tweet, and all the responses said, hey, bravo, Gen Z; hey, this is great. We love the young people, they’re saving us. But what I thought was, gee, that reminds me of the Soviet Union. And when they would have elections, they had free and fair elections, and 99% of the people voted for the Communist Party. And so the same thing has been set up organically here. Those people are going to grow up and they’re going to be the only ones voting, and they’re going to vote 90%, 95%, 99% for the establishment Democrats.

So this is — unfortunately, I understand, a very bleak picture, and I’m sorry to come to the morning breakfast and give you a load of bleak. But the fact is that even amidst all this, the light of freedom is never extinguished, and they’re making all these plans. We need to be aware of these plans. One of the most disconcerting and disappointing things, I think, out of the 2022 election was that I didn’t see any Republicans talking about any of this.

I saw Republicans talking about inflation, which is important, and the border, which is important; not taking away from any of that. But where were the Republicans talking about, hey, this is a fascist administration that’s against our freedoms. This is an administration that is trying to foreclose on legitimate political discourse. This is an administration that is consciously aping the institution of authoritarian totalitarian regimes in recent historical memory. Did you hear anybody say that? I didn’t see anybody say that.

But it’s very clear, you know they sic the FBI on parents protesting at school board meetings. They keep saying white supremacists are the biggest terror threat that the nation faces. Have you seen white supremacists flying planes into buildings? Have you seen white supremacists blowing stuff up? I  don’t see it, but they keep saying it because, of course, what they mean is the MAGA Republicans are white supremacists, and we are going to take away the franchise from those white supremacists and destroy them utterly.

Anyway, I was saying it’s not so bad. So I will end with that. Remember that one of the reasons why we have had mass migration into the United States was because the Democrats assumed that particularly the Hispanics would be completely on board with them, and would give them a reliable voting majority for the foreseeable future, and that’s all fallen apart. And the more — yes — and the more that it goes on, the more it will continue to fall apart.

There are a lot of people in the United States who believe that there ought to be the freedom of speech. And so even though there’s an alarming number of people who are against it, and it is under grave threat today, at the same time, there are a great many people who are not willing to see it go, and it will not go lightly. But it’s going to be tough times ahead.

And so Mike said he’ll tell you the title of his new book, and I’m sorry for the ad, but the book will be out in January. It’s called The Sumter Gambit. The Sumter Gambit, referring to Fort Sumter. And the subtitle is How The Left Is Trying To Foment a Civil War, because you notice also how crazy everything’s gotten lately? That there’s drag queens in primary schools, and you see one story over here and you think, gee, that’s terrible. And you see another one over there, and then you see another one every day, and it’s happening in schools all over the country.

Suddenly, everybody’s decided what we really need to do is sexualize five-year-olds and have pornographic displays in front of them. Well, I don’t know who’s paying for that. Somebody is, but that is just one example of how — what the immediate next step is, and that is to push us and goad us until we strike back violently. And then if we strike back violently, then they can arrest us and put us in prison wholesale. And so the idea is with all this to drive us crazy and to say, I can’t believe this is happening, and we have no recourse at the ballot box. What can we do? The only thing we can do is go shoot up some government office or something like that. And that’s just exactly what they want to happen.

And so a lot of this, the reason why the imagery of Joe’s speech was so flamboyant and so in-your-face was because they want us to notice it and strike back. And then they can use the strike back to justify further authoritarian measures. And so above all, we have to not take the bait and proceed peacefully, but all the more energetically to tap the sentiments of those who did give us this big majority, and do everything that we can to restore the electoral viability of that majority, and to roll back, with the heroic efforts of people like J. Christian Adams and others, to roll back the gains that they have made to rig the system so that even when we win, we lose.

So I will close by noting that I am from the great State of South Carolina, and I know you probably wouldn’t believe that, but anyway, it’s true. And  the state motto is Dum Spiro Spero — while I breathe, I hope. And so we must never, ever give up above all, and if we do not, and insofar as we do not, we will prevail. Thank you. [Applause].

Male Speaker: We have time for questions.

Robert Spencer: Great.

Male Speaker: (Inaudible).

Audience Member: Okay, yes, sir?

Audience Member: Secession comes to mind.

Robert Spencer: Yes.

Audience Member: And you didn’t mention the Night of the Long Knives, June 30.

Robert Spencer: Well, that’s another thing, yes. Secession, the gentleman said, “Secession comes to mind” and I didn’t mention the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934. In the first place, secession I think might be a great idea, if they would allow us to go peacefully, but probably they wouldn’t. But at this point, the gap between the two groups in the United States is so large, it’s hard to see how it can be bridged. And so maybe it is true that it would be good to go our own way, but I don’t think that is a viable option in terms of being possible in a peaceful manner. We’ll see, maybe as things develop.

As far as the Night of the Long Knives goes, yes, I think that kind of thing is coming. It’s just the logical next step. Once you say the Trump supporter — the Night of the Long Knives, by the way, was after Hitler became a dictator. Then at one point, at one night, he had thugs go around and kill all his political opponents, all his major political opponents, the former Chancellor of Germany and various others. And that’s coming because this is what totalitarians do, this is what fascists do, and these people are fascists.

And, oh, yes, I didn’t explain — excuse me — as an aside, the People’s Republic of China is more fascist than communist today because they have private ownership. They don’t have nationalization of the means of production. They have entrepreneurs, but they all do what the state wants them to do and so it’s a fascist state. And that’s what we’re working toward here. Anyway, you rule out one group from acceptable discourse, you say they’re a threat to the republic, then killing them all is really a no-brainer. It’s the next step.

Hello.

Audience Member: Hello. Sometimes I feel that when I’ve been listening to all these speeches, that we’re giving Joe Biden too much credit. I think that  this really  started with Obama, and I think that Obama is still behind a lot of what is going on, and that Joe Biden is just the puppet.

Robert Spencer: Oh, you’re quite right, yes. I have to say, I  had limited time this morning, and so I did not say that Joe Biden is not really the President of the United States, but I think we all know that. Joe Biden is just a stand-in for probably for Obama, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett, other people who are running the show. He himself has made that abundantly clear on numerous occasions, saying, “I’m going to get in trouble if I depart from this  script. And I’m told I have to call upon these people” at his ridiculous press conferences. It’s very clear he  openly — because he’s got dementia, he just says whatever’s in his head. And so he said several times, he’s not the man in charge, he’s just taking orders. A lot of the machinery of this did begin with Obama. The totalitarian tendencies that we’re seeing come to fruition now, he did plant the seeds for them to a tremendous degree.

Audience Member: Steve Emerson (inaudible).

Robert Spencer: Hi, Steve.

Audience Member: Hi, Robert. To what extent was January 6 a planned Democrat plot?

Robert Spencer: Oh, I’d say about 100%.

Audience Member: And we know, of course, that they refused the National Guard in advance. Last night, he mentioned the huge bronze doors were already open, and etc.

Robert Spencer: Yes, it’s abundantly clear, January 6 was a setup. The National Guard was refused, as Steve pointed out. The doors were opened by the police, that’s on video. And then of course there’s the famous Ray Epps. You probably have all heard of Ray Epps, but just in case, you can find abundant videos of this fellow with a MAGA hat. And he’s saying, we’re going to have to go into the Capitol, we’re going into the Capitol. And he has not been arrested.

If anybody was a ringleader of any kind of insurrection, it’s Ray Epps, and yet he’s one guy who’s completely escaped prosecution. Now that of course is abundantly clear. The guy was a plant, he was probably FBI. He was trying to goad people to go in, so they could create this incident that they could use. The whole thing — maybe a few people went into the Capitol thinking they were going to do some damage, but mostly they opened the doors, people went in. Hey, I’m going to take some pictures of the rotunda or whatever. They had no idea they were participating in an insurrection, and what’s being done to them is criminal. But that’s what fascist regimes do; they have to find a scapegoat and a political enemy that they direct hatred toward, and use as a springboard to criminalize and silence all their opponents.

Audience Member: One thing I’d like to mention and hasn’t been said out loud here, is we are living, as you say, in a new world. At this moment, someone is surveilling us, that goes without saying. When the people on the dais call you heroes, you are because at some point, you’ll be challenged. I worked in the surveillance industry my entire career. Someone here doesn’t belong here; they are working for someone else. And you’re smiling, you know —

Robert Spencer: No, I think you’re absolutely right. I just think it’s kind of amusing —

Audience Member: It’s a game.

Robert Spencer: — because maybe — I always wonder when they have plants like that, if they ever learn anything.

Audience Member: And you know —

Robert Spencer: And whoever’s got me under surveillance, I know you must be very bored and I’m sorry.

Audience Member: Like and you listen to him as he makes the disclaimers. I put my cell phone in a wire-mesh wallet, so they don’t listen to my conversations because if I’m put on a list and I open my mouth, a machine somewhere in the bowels of the government records what I say, if the words that I say trigger it.

Robert Spencer: There’s no doubt about it, yes.

Audience Member: It’s not a joke. They spent a trillion dollars-plus on setting this machinery up. China has spent $3 trillion  in their money on a machine that’s even more insidious. Beware. Be ready, speak softly.

Robert Spencer: I want to assure you, I was not making light of your statements. I  totally agree. This is just a fact of life, really. We all carry around these surveillance devices with us all the time. And I could tell you a lot of stories about when I’ve been chatting with people about a certain subject and never looked it up online or anything; and then I go online, and I see all this information about it. So some automated thing probably was listening, but this is just a fact of life in America today. And we have to reckon with the fact that they are looking for ways to get at us and to destroy any opposition that they face. And so we may come up against that, that’s just the way it is, and we need to have the courage that the founding fathers had. [Applause].

Male Speaker: We have time for one last question if anyone has a question. It’s [Phyllis], nobody else has their hands up.

Robert Spencer: You are being watched. (Laughter).

Audience Member: I love it. Do you think that  our military, even though it’s now becoming infiltrated as well, that if there was an order given to go after the citizenry, that the military would actually obey that order?

Robert Spencer: Yes, I think they would. I’m sorry to say that, but I’ve seen so much of the police. I used to think, well, the police, if you’re going to be a policeman, you’re generally a good law and order guy. And so you’re a patriot and you love this country and you want to see it be safe and free. But then I see police just doing the bidding of these totalitarians and they don’t seem to bat an eye. We have to reckon with the fact that some people are just going to say, I’m just getting a paycheck and I’m going to follow orders. It’s unfortunately a  phenomenon that has abundant historical precedent, most notoriously, of course, during World War II with the German army.

Male Speaker: Thank you, Robert.

Robert Spencer: Thank you. Thank you.

[Applause]