[Editor’s note: Below is the transcript of Andrew Breibart’s speech for the Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club at the Four Seasons on June 21, 2011. To watch the video of the speech, click here.]
David Horowitz: Thank you. Thank you all for coming. All those of you who are new here, welcome.
From the first time that I met Andrew Breitbart, when he was an anonymous figure, I knew that he was a big talent and would make his mark. And this audience today is just one indication of how he’s now making his mark.
I’ve known Andrew for a long time. I knew him before he was Andrew Breitbart.
(Laughter)
I met him during the Clinton administration, when he was the silent right hand of Matt Drudge. And the two of them were bringing down the White House roof over a lubricious intern named Monica Lewinsky.
But I never understood Andrew until I read his book. And so the first thing I want to say is that you should all get this book because this book is in part, or large part, autobiographical.
In this book, Andrew describes his transformation from what he calls an empty-headed, pop culture-infused, liberal rights parrot, liberal talking-points parrot, into a new media warrior. Andrew is a McCluhanite through and through, born with the Internet and the new media.
And so Andrew – in his transformation – when his eyes were opened, blowing apart those talking-points, was not from reading Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” or Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” or Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind,” or even “Atlas Shrugged.” His moment came sitting in front of the television set.
And what he was witnessing, with the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings over Clarence’s nomination to the Supreme Court; and what he was seeing before his eyes, was his liberal talking-points friends setting out to destroy the character and career of an obviously decent black man who had grown up in a dirt-floor shack in segregated rural Georgia and risen to become nominated for the Supreme Court. And Andrew sat there waiting for the smoking gun that would justify the racist lynching by his liberal friends of Clarence Thomas. And of course, it never came.
That changed Andrew. He went on from there to the Rush Limbaugh Advanced Institute for Conservative Thought –
(Laughter)
(Applause)
— and became a diehard conservative.
But, like many conservatives, in fact, he was still in the closet as a conservative. Working for Matt Drudge, but still in the closet. And I would say that most conservatives are in the closet at least part of the time, and many conservatives are in the closet all of the time. And this is the major problem that we have. That’s why we have a radical who was trained in the Marxist movement as the president of the United States.
And I would say, the most courageous part of this book – because Andrew is merciless on himself – and he doesn’t do it in a sentence, just a thrown-away sentence, but it goes on for awhile – as to describe the internal struggle, which I know everyone in this room has experienced in some way, in some context, of actually saying what he believed. And this moment came in the worst possible way for – but, you know, the most necessary way for somebody who is a new media person – on the Bill Maher show, when Maher and one of his air-headed guests, Michael Eric Dyson, set about to attacking Rush Limbaugh as a racist. And since Andrew had gone to school with Rush Limbaugh, this was the test for him.
And you know, moments of sweat and terror. And then, Andrew turned the tables completely on Maher by pointing out – of course, defending Rush, who’s obviously not a racist – by pointing out that Rush, with a lot of other conservatives (yours truly included) had defended Maher when Maher had lost his – his show had been canceled, “Politically Incorrect,” because he said some typically nasty, stupid things about 9⁄11. Rush Limbaugh had gone to bat for him. Because conservatives, in the end, are principled.
And so while Andrew had – the horror for him, and it would be for anybody – is Maher’s knee-jerk audience booing him and jeering him while he said this. But he came out feeling liberated. If you get struck by the lightning, it can temper your steel, if you’re willing to do it and survive.
This book also has lessons about the war that we face. The first is that it is a war. The Left believes – the Left acts on the proposition that politics is war conducted by other means.
And Republicans, well, Andrew talks about the Republican whip-dog syndrome. This is something I’ve been going on about for years, so it really resonated with me. You all know Reagan’s 11th Commandment for conservatives. Well, in my view, the 11th Commandment of Republicans is, “Thou shalt not fight.” Fighting is a sign of ill breeding and is something we just – we don’t do.
And, God help us – yesterday, Huntsman said exactly that in his maiden exit speech.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But you have to read this book to see how, for Andrew Breitbart, this is a passion – the war.
The second thing Andrew says, which is also absolutely correct, is that it’s a culture war. It’s not people just disagreeing about budgets. Andrew talks – he’s got his own construct here, called the Democrat-media complex. The left-wing dominates the culture of our country. And because it’s so ruthless and vindictive, it’s intimidating to normal human beings. Normal human beings, unlike Andrew and myself, are conflict-averse. This is a very prudent thing for people to do.
And so when the Left comes out and is going to scream you’re a racist, sexist homophobe, the conservative response – that’s what they call us: racist, sexist, homophobes, Islamophobes – we call them liberals.
(Laughter)
These people are not liberal.
And the third thing that Andrew points out that’s so important is that we’ve lost this war. They won. And that means you can’t really be a conservative in this culture war. You have to be, as Andrew says, a rebel, and a rebel warrior.
So Andrew – this is the book. And what Andrew is doing is now a model for young – I’ve seen this among younger conservatives than Andrew, and way younger than myself – new generation understanding this. And this is, to me, the brightest hope for the future.
So Andrew and I come – you couldn’t imagine more different people and more different backgrounds. I was a smack in college. I read every book that was assigned. I did the assignments on time. Andrew partied his way through Tulane. And the upside of that was he was either absent or doesn’t remember –
(Laughter)
— all the politically correct indoctrination that he got.
So in the end, despite our differences, Andrew and I are really brothers under the skin. And therefore, it’s a great pleasure for me to introduce Andrew Breitbart.
(Applause)
Andrew Breitbart: Before me, there was just Coulter and Horowitz, to me, they were like the true warriors out there. I was like – why aren’t there any people fighting these people? Why is everybody trying to accommodate people who are calling you racist, sexist, homophobe and evil? I didn’t understand it.
And I may not have read much in college, and that is a huge part of my book. And as long as we haven’t taken back the colleges and the humanities departments, give your children an extra $100 per month for beer.
(Laughter)
Because alcohol will 100 percent save them from indoctrination –
(Applause)
— in the cultural Marxist curriculum. So to say I’m not embarrassed about that – it really can save your kids. Because if you don’t give them that $100, do you know what happens that freshman year, when you drive them up to the campus, or you fly across the country – let’s just say, I don’t know, Dartmouth – and you drop them off, and you go to Best Buy in Manchester, New Hampshire, and you pick up one of those little mini-refrigerators, and you – God, I love my kid so much, I’m going to get my child a stereo at Sharper Image. And I just want my child to have the greatest four years in the world. And your child hugs you – I miss you, Mom, I miss you, Dad, I – don’t go. Okay, go.
(Laughter)
And then they come back at Thanksgiving, like – why are we having turkey for Thanksgiving? Why did you put smallpox on the blankets of the Native Americans, Mother?
(Laughter)
I hate you. I’m a lesbian now. But you’re a boy, you’re my son! Are you now oppressing me, applying gender orientation at our Thanksgiving hell?
So that’s what you’re putting second mortgages – that’s what you’re paying for. So, hey, man, I’m even for some of the harder stuff to get you past that four years, especially if they’re in the humanities departments. If they’re in the engineering departments, if they’re in computer, sciences; take away $100.
(Laughter)
Let them study, and whip them. And hire a foreign student to spy on your child and make sure they’re doing, you know, what they’re supposed to do. But if in the humanities departments, if it takes heroin –
(Laughter)
— by all means.
So yeah, I did grow up here, on the west side of Los Angeles, a secular Jew. I call it a “default liberal.” My parents – factory setting, North Bundy. We went to University Synagogue when Rabbi Freehling was there. And I got kicked out of Hebrew School. But Fran was able to tutor me, and I did get bar mitzvahed. Was about as meaningful an experience as college was, quite frankly.
(Laughter)
I remember saying to my parents, I go – what was that? I mean, I was – there was a yearning in me to have this spiritual intake. And it was just chanting Hebrew while these really pissed-off Israeli teachers, who were there just for maybe a year or so, basically babysat us and gave us crayons, and said, you know, draw Moses on the mount.
And my takeaway from University Synagogue – and the reason why I’m dwelling on it, because maybe you can relate to this – my dad pulled us out. He pulled me out by the ear. I remember sitting there when Rabbi Freehling started to go on about the virtues of Reverend Jesse Jackson during the Hymietown era. And I said – what did I do? It’s High Holy Days. We’re out of here.
So my parents were conservative. And my parents had common sense. But I didn’t have the common sense to think that my fuddy-duddy parents – my mother actually watched Lawrence Welk on Saturday nights. And my best friend’s parents were going to Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry concerts. And so, I naturally drifted over to the cool kids, and they were all liberal. And I just went along with that. And that was from about 16 until about 23.
It’s fantastic, because you can get laid, and zero guilt about it in college.
(Laughter)
And another reason why you should hire a foreign student to monitor your children’s behavior, because that’s just what happens when you’re liberal in college, and why I wouldn’t have changed a single thing.
(Laughter)
I’m glad that once I met my wife, I became conservative, and I realized you don’t do those things, and it’s wrong.
Anyway – and so, my education really did happen on the mean streets of Los Angeles. And Matt Duda’s here, and he doesn’t even understand. He was at Showtime when I was delivering scripts for a super-liberal producer.
And my biggest fear – this was during my transformation – I was a liberal when I started this job. And by the time I was done with it, I was a full-fledged conservative. And it was done during a period of a year where I drove 24,000 miles on the freeways from Santa Monica where the production facility was. And I went traveling, giving gifts and scripts to every producer in town, including Matt Duda.
And what was I doing on the streets? I was listening to Rush, and Dennis Prager. And it’s just totally 100 percent true. I wish it wasn’t – I wish I had a better romantic story about how I saw the light. But talk radio was it.
And the professors – I just remember thinking that the head of my American studies department, when I was having a bad semester, and I went to her – she was in charge of the department. She was from Harvard. She was clearly an intellect. And I said – I’m just having a hard time. And the attrition rate at Tulane was insane. Because you go from Brentwood, playing high school baseball and football, and working, and you know, just that grind, to having alcohol seven days a week – the juxtaposition starts hitting you. I used to wake up in the a.m., and now I’m waking up in the p.m.
And I remember she said – you know, Andrew, you need to take a semester off, and do what I did when I was at Harvard, when I took a semester off. I went to New York, and I just dropped acid for an entire semester.
(Laughter)
That was the tutelage that I received at Tulane.
So it’s amazing that in writing this book, Tulane has not invited me to speak.
(Laughter)
Quite frankly, nor has Brentwood High School, nor has University Synagogue. It’s so weird. You’d think that they would like me telling these great stories about the great experiences I had. Trying to become a young adult – didn’t work, Jesse Jackson, Hymietown, Brentwood, go-along-to-get-along liberals, and then Tulane – blah blah blah. Teacher tells me that I should do acid. Really great upbringing I had. And my parents are still paying for it. At 42, they’re still paying for that education.
So I’m not just pissed off at the politicians. I’m really – and I’m not just pissed off at the Hollywood crowd, the Hollywood Left. I’m pissed off at my professors, I really am. They stole my – I don’t care that they stole my early 20s, but that my parents thought that they were sending me to a place where I was going to get an actual liberal education, and then they tried to indoctrinate me.
One thing you need to know about me is I’m petty. I’m petty, I’m the most petty person you’ll ever meet in the world.
(Laughter)
And I will never forgive anyone for any transgression against me, let alone my parents. So that’s my motivation. Why is he doing that? Why is he walking in there? What’s going on? He goes – he’s a super-petty guy.
So, I’m driving around Los Angeles in that car. And I remember – this is what I remember thinking in class during those hangovers, where I actually went to class. What language are they talking in? They were talking in this Noam Chomsky, deconstructive jargon, and nobody on the first day of class said this is a new jargon. They just kept talking like this and expected that you would understand, and you would start mimicking it. And I just remember looking at people cutting and pasting this weird jargon, and trying to make sense of it. And I honestly didn’t understand it.
And it was Dennis Prager – and I think mile 11,230, as I was driving these scripts around town to Matt Duda – where he said that clarity mattered. And I started to trust – he started to convince me to trust my gut instinct and common sense. Because I remember sitting there in class thinking that my professors are full of crap, but I didn’t have the jargon to stand up to them.
And so, it was almost as if Prager was the head of the cult awareness network, you know, deprogramming me, and explaining to me that they – that it was like the movie, you know, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and that all those people at the college campus and all those people in Hollywood, you know, were the pod people, and we were this small sect of people who had common sense. And so I sought out people of common sense since about 1992.
And it was in 1995 that I met Matt Drudge. And I was a slacker back then. I mean, that’s hard to believe, right, with that training and all, and driving scripts around 24,000 miles a year, making about $300 a week. That was fun. And I remember, with my ADD – I won’t get into that, but it’s totally a part of this amazing package up here –
(Laughter)
— I remember driving down Wilshire, thinking – please, God, give me something that I will be passionate about. I have nothing that I’m passionate about. Like, I need something to happen, you know. I don’t want to be in Hollywood, I really don’t. I was like, even if I won an Oscar, I could care less. I mean, unless it were for some teenage, you know, R-rate, you know, boobs-and-stuff type – I like that stuff, and those don’t make – I got to like, turn this off – those don’t get Oscars. And I think it’s a tragedy, because those are some of the great movies, like “Porky’s,” of our time.
(Laughter)
I just don’t understand why the Academy is so snobbish towards these great movies.
And so I’m driving down, thinking – what can I do? It was like going back to Pittsburgh and realizing I don’t like steel. And I’m like – but I don’t want to leave Los Angeles, because I don’t like when my nether region sweats. So as much as I like being in New York, I hated sweating. So, I had to be in Los Angeles because of the sweat factor. And I said – please, God, give me something to want to do.
And I’m telling you, it happened almost immediately. I found the Internet. I had a friend who went to Harvard, an astrophysics major, who grabbed me and said – we need to go on a walk. And he said – I’ve found the Internet, and the Internet is how your brain works. I said – I don’t even know what you’re talking about. But I became dedicated to trying to figure out what this Internet thing was in the early ‘90s. And when I launched – when I got onto it, I was like – oh, my God, he’s completely right.
And then I met Matt Drudge. And here’s the thing. I lived on the west side of LA. And even though I was a slacker (which is shorthand for loser), while all of my friends were like, you know, at law school and medical school, I had nothing better to do at the exact moment that the Internet began, to say – that’s what I’m going to do, I’m staking my claim on the Internet.
Lived out in West Los Angeles. Logged onto the Internet, and I saw this thing that was being posted in these newsgroups. This predates, you know, Netscape or a browser. And Matt Drudge started to post these things. And he was writing these things from a quirky, non-cynical standpoint. At this point, my generation, Generation X, was being defined in Hollywood as cynical, couldn’t care about, you know, politics, couldn’t care about civic behavior. And I’m listening to Dennis Prager, thinking – I need to start caring more about myself, my society and ethics, and crazy things that were never even introduced to me in college.
And I meet this guy named Matt Drudge. I called him up and found out he lived in Hollywood. And he found out I was the first conservative he had met. And I was basically the first conservative – you know, it was a mutual thing. And he came over to my father-in-law, Orson Bean’s, place, like in 1995. And we were on the Venice Canals, which is hippy-dippy, Dennis Kucinich bumper sticker country.
(Laughter)
So it’s like even to the left of Kerry during the Kerry election, to the left of Gore. And we’re sitting there, and he starts telling me the future on the Internet. And he put-putted away, after explaining to me that he was folding T-shirts at the CBS gift shop. All my friends are like Harvard graduates, Stanford graduates, and I’m hanging out with like people with nice pedigrees. And I meet this guy who’s folding T-shirts at CBS. And he sits with me for three hours. And as he put-putted away in his Hyundai, I looked at my then-girlfriend, who’s now my wife. I said – that guy’s going to change the world. That guy’s going to change – and I just glommed onto this movement.
And at the end of the day, it’s a people’s movement. And I think that that was 1995. And we can look back – that in 1988, Rush Limbaugh started. I wouldn’t have known about what it was that I believed in if there wasn’t Rush Limbaugh. And there would’ve been no Dennis Prager, I don’t think, without the revolution spawned by Rush Limbaugh. And it was taking the formally moribund AM dial and granting it this unbelievable power, where we all – it’s like basically our salvation. If we didn’t have it, what would you do? What would you do if they took away your AM radio? What would you do if they took away your Internet?
Unidentified Audience Member: Fold T-shirts.
Andrew Breitbart: What? Fold T-shirts. I wish. I couldn’t even do that back then. That would require waking up before noon.
(Laughter)
So this has been a people’s trajectory that started in 1988, that got a mega-boost in 1995, when Matt Drudge proved that with a modem, you know, a connection to the Internet, with just even 56k, you could change the world. And he did. I mean, I remember he called me up the night before the Lewinsky thing. He said the worst thing that you can tell Andrew Breitbart. And that is – I have something really important to tell you, but you can’t tell anyone.
(Laughter)
Okay? Don’t say that to me, you cruel people.
And it was on the Saturday night – was on a Saturday night, when I was going to Santa Monica for my friend, Mark Robinson’s, birthday. And it was just a table of typical Hollywood liberals. My friend then was an actor. And I was the one conservative at the table, and I liked it to be known. And I just remember, the night before Lewinsky, sitting at the table.
(Laughter)
And, because I’m a class act, this is what I said. I honored my word with Mr. Drudge. But I must say, I said something to the effect of – I know something that you don’t know.
(Laughter)
And it relates to your president. He’s not going to like tomorrow.
(Laughter)
And so I went home that night, at around 12 o’clock, with my wife. And this was – I still had a laptop. I just want to describe to you where we’ve come in terms of technology. Because I’m not a technology person. But boy, am I marveling at what’s happened since 1995. I was on a – I don’t know, like a 14.4 or 28k baud modem. Then I went up to a 56k one. At this point, in 1998, I was living in Santa Monica, and I had a 50-foot Radio Shack extension cord that I would plug in when I would get home, into our kitchen, and take it through our laundry room, through our bedroom, and I’d log onto the Internet with the – noise.
And I pressed my e-mail, and in came the Drudge Report that said that Clinton and Lewinsky – and it was in relationship to that day’s Paula Jones testimony, and that he had been working very diligently to try and get Linda Tripp to lie under oath, and to get Monica Lewinsky to lie under oath, and that they weren’t able to successfully suborn her perjury. And we had a real big deal.
And I hate to say it, because I’d love to be taking the victory lap for the thing that’s bigger than Lewinsky. But to this day, I think Lewinsky is the biggest thing that’s happened in our lifetime for the people to be able to stand up against the mainstream media. Because that was Newsweek trying to kill that story. And Matt Drudge acted as the midwife to it, and it was birthed. And to watch it Sunday morning, to watch the Democrat-media complex, what they did with it, was something to behold.
And I remember Bill Kristol brought it up. But George Stephanopoulos says – no, no, no, that’s the Drudge Report, it’s been discredited. You know that George Stephanopoulos had just talked to the Clintons, and that he knew that this thing was happening, and he needed to shut it up. And Cokie Roberts played the role of my mother, who – when we would ever have a conversation about politics or religion at the table, and things would get controversial, my mother would say – oh, Aunt Ethel makes the most wonderful rhubarb pie.
(Laughter)
And I watched how Kristol brings it up; George Stephanopoulos says it’s not true, the Drudge Report’s been discredited. And Cokie Roberts says – oh, let’s just change the subject.
(Laughter)
And they changed the subject. And they didn’t talk about it on Sunday, they didn’t talk about it on Monday, they didn’t talk about it on Tuesday, they didn’t talk about it on Wednesday. And I’m thinking to myself – wait a second, Drudge is reporting news every single day. On the Internet, they’re fighting back. But ABC, CBS and NBC are pretending that this isn’t happening. This is pure craziness.
And I started to realize that the entire game is rigged. I used to start to – I used to think that there was something called bias. And that’s what Bernie Goldberg’s thesis is, as a liberal. Well, I, as a conservative and a former liberal, can tell you it’s not bias; this is by design. That’s why I called it the Democrat-media complex. I would much rather have control of ABC, CBS or NBC and Hollywood than everything – the rest that we have in this country that the conservatives do.
They just took it. They took academia. They just took it. They just walked in. They didn’t even go through the back door. They just walked in. They had a sit-in, and said – and then the [prova] said – what do you want? They go – everything. He goes – okay. That’s what happened.
(Laughter)
And it happened in Hollywood. It was like – okay, you’re getting old, Jimmy Stewart. You’re getting old, John Wayne. Bye. We’re taking over. And nobody – it happened without a single shot happening. And they just took over our culture. We’re two-to-one ratio in this country, according to Gallup, conservative to liberal. Yet, they just took it over, and nobody fought back.
And so, to me, that’s why Drudge was the beginning of the people’s revolution. Because it wasn’t just – Rush opened it up for somebody in Wichita to be able to go to their local AM station and say – I just want to do the Rush Limbaugh show, and create a series of – local cult of personalities who could fight the fight. And you could at least, in your car, think that you weren’t alone. Okay?
But the Internet clearly, in my mind, is in the same realm as the Tea Party. And it’s saying if the political class isn’t going to fight the fight, if the conservative movement is not going to attempt to rein in the bias, or whatever this is, then we the people are going to start fighting back.
And you are now starting to see, I think, that just as the Left thought that they were ascendant, and that it was the end of the conservative movement in 2008, that we the people finally said – no, no, no. There are more of us than there are of you. And even though the Republican establishment basically sucks – and by “sucks,” I mean they totally suck.
(Laughter)
And they take our money. They take our money and say – we’re going to fight the fight. And then we watch them on C-SPAN say “nay” when they should say “yea.” And you say – why aren’t you fighting? They’re like – well, we don’t – I mean, for instance, an aside – the biggest scam I’ve ever seen in my entire journalistic life, or whatever it is that I do – I reported on the Pigford scandal. Anybody know about that? The black farmers?
Okay. Let me give it to you in shorthand. And I’ll do a lie detector test against Barack Obama on this one. This is the reparations movement. Period. Period, period. It’s payback. It’s payback, it’s payback. And they’re not just doing it within the African-American community. They’re doing it now with the Native Americans, they’re doing it with Hispanic farmers, and they’re doing it with female farmers. There’s – yeah, yeah, the female farmers.
And it’s not even farmers, because there aren’t enough people who farm to give these checks out to. So the class action attorneys who are making hundreds of millions of dollars said – why don’t we work with the Justice Department and create a new class: the attempted farmer? Anyone here could go in and say – I went into the USDA office, and I said I wanted a farm. And then they didn’t give me an application. Okay, here’s a $50,000 check.
And that’s what Barack Obama wielded. This Pigford thing was supposed to have ended in the year 2000. There were 18,000 black farmers in the country. And there were supposed to be anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 potential claimants, even though there were only 157 black farmers who brought on the lawsuit. But they said – well, given that there are 3,000 black farmers in the country who have loans or paperwork, you know, at least there could be a potential that 66 to 100 percent of them have been discriminated against. At the end of Pigford, there were 22,500 claimants, 4,500 more than there were black farmers in the entire country, getting $50,000 checks.
Now, here’s where it gets really interesting, and why I have absolutely no faith in the Republican Party, except for a few brave people. Pigford was supposed to be over. And Barack Obama gets confronted by the scam artist that runs the black farmers – the National Black Farmers Association. And he says that there are 72,500 late filers that we need to be brought in. And they say – look, there are only 18,000 black farmers in the country. This thing was supposed to be over.
Have you ever been in a lawsuit, and you’ve paid $100,000, and you said – okay, bye, and the judge says it’s over? What Barack Obama did was opened the case up again. He was the sole sponsor. He was the sole sponsor when the corrupt guy that runs the Black Farmers Association – who fakes that he’s a doctor, and who’s getting paid under the table by the class action attorneys who are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of this. The people who got screwed originally – you know how I said there were 157 black farmers? They lost their farms. Their case got hijacked by the Congressional Black Caucus and the class action attorneys.
And I started calling up the original people. And they said – we’ve been trying to tell the Republicans this for years – we’ve been trying to tell CNN and Fox News and everyone else for years – that our legitimate case was hijacked. We lost our properties. The farmers that I know, like Jimmy Dismuke and Abraham Carpenter, and Eddie Slaughter and Lucious Abrams, lost their farms, and now have money being taken out of their Social Security checks. But they look around them, and their neighbors, who work at Best Buy and who are mechanics or police officers, or even work for the USDA, who were the discriminators in this case – they got $50,000 checks. Okay?
It’s probably 99 percent fraud. And we even went into the churches where they were teaching people how to defraud the government, and caught them on tape teaching people how they could get their $50,000 check. We caught them dead to rights. Okay?
And you go to Washington, D.C., and you say – we caught them. We have affidavits from an FBI investigation that was diverted from the Justice Department because – oh, we don’t want to touch on race in this country. Wait a sec, this is 99 percent fraud, and the actual black farmers want to go testify about how they got screwed over. You’d be helping the salt of the earth, black farmers who wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and go to bed at 9 o’clock. But instead, it’s been hijacked by trial lawyers that fuel the Democratic Party. The Congressional Black Caucus knows about this. And it was all done so that the Congressional Black Caucus and Democrats could win the black vote in the rural South.
And we have the letter. Why Barack Obama, who had no history of sponsoring anything, was the sole sponsor of Pigford, was because according to a letter that we have, he was told – if you sign onto Pigford, we can win the rural black South for you. And that’s exactly what happened.
You remember when Bill Clinton lost it, when Hillary lost in South Carolina? It was because Barack Obama had jujitsued the Clintons, who’d invested so much time trying to be the first African-American presidency. And he absolutely undermined it. And they’ve wielded the United States Treasury in order to pay billions upon billions of dollars – $2.7 billion so far.
And right now, because we exposed it, and nobody would do anything about it except for Congressman King and Michele Bachmann – they’re the only ones –
(Applause)
— that will go out there and stick their necks out there. And Congressman King just put up a resolution this week, or last week, in which he said – let’s stop the funding of this, and let’s investigate it. And Darrell Issa voted against it. Okay?
I’ve lost my faith in the Republican Party. And what we were told by Congressman King is – they know it’s fraud, but they’re all afraid of being called racist. That’s what they were told – they’re afraid of being racist.
And even – this broke my heart – Allen West voted against it as well. And so he was confronted on the David Webb show on Sirius, and he said there were 40 resolutions being passed. And I’ve said I’d vote for Allen West for president right now. I’m like – you’re kidding me. Because I’ve told Allen about this to his face, and he said he’d look into it. He said he made a mistake. Okay?
I don’t know what Issa’s explanation is, but I know Congressman King is a man of his word. And when he tells me that the Republican Party’s not willing to stand up for what’s right, and the pilfering of the Treasury – when I’ve granted them the story. It’s there with a bow on it, with black farmers who will testify to say these crooks took your money. My neighbor – all you have to do is look at the people who got the $50,000 checks. They’d never farmed a day in their lives. And the farmers who brought the suit – their lives lay in ruin with this.
And because the press won’t look into it, because the Republican Party won’t look into it, they said – wow, even with Breitbart on our tail, with exposing it with undercover tape, with affidavits that show that the top lawyer, who’s made $15 million, paid a person within the USDA to write hundreds of fake claims to the tune of millions of dollars – we have FBI affidavits from African-American USDA [coworkers] saying that the head of the lawsuit worked with a lady to file hundreds of false claims.
This thing’s 98 – we have on video one of the top lawyers saying – my own clients got away with murder, they never farmed a day in their lives. This thing could take down Barack Obama in a nanosecond. We have him going after a whistleblower.
You remember in 2003, 2002, Crowley – Colleen Crowley, the year of the whistleblower? Yeah. The mainstream media, the Democrat-media complex, loves whistleblowers in government when Republicans are in charge. But when a woman by the name of [Kimberly] DePasquale comes forward and tries to talk about fraud within Pigford, one senator comes forward, goes to the head of the USDA and says – investigate that woman. She’s in violation of the Hatch Act by acting political within her job, and they punished her. Okay? And so this thing has Barack Obama’s fingerprints all over it.
And so, let’s even get more into the weeds. And you’re going to realize what happened a year ago to me. Do you remember the Shirley Sherrod incident? Why do I even know about the black farmers of Pigford? All I was trying to do was point out that the NAACP – which was waging a campaign the week before against the Tea Party, claiming it was racist, and I had proved through videos that the N-word wasn’t hurled at them, yet they were still given a platform – the NAACP and Ben Jealous was given a platform for seven days to say that the Tea Party was racist and to condemn the Tea Party.
And so I went on the radio, and I said – Ben Jealous, how dare you try to divide this country on race, when everybody in this country is suffering because of the economy? How dare you? Especially when the basis of your argument isn’t even true? So I was angry and pissed off, and said that I had video that showed your group behaving in a more racist way than any video you’ve ever found of the Tea Party.
And when I put that video out there, with [two] out there – and the group was clapping when she talked about how she stuck it to the white farmer, eventually she said – then I realized it’s not about black versus white, it’s about rich versus poor. That was included in the video; the media ignored it. And my article said, “Eventually, her basic humanity informs her to help the white farmer.” The media ignored that as well. Instead, they made it about me, as opposed to the president, who fired her.
Why did the president fire her, if my piece said, “Eventually, her basic humanity informs her to help the white farmer”? The day that the video came out, the NAACP apologized for the audience’s applause. I had hit the target perfectly. Shirley Sherrod went to the president and the head of the USDA and said – but I helped the white farmer. My article said that she helped the white farmer.
Why did the president still choose to fire her? Because she and her husband made $13.3 million in Pigford. Okay? And when this story came out there, my inbox was inundated with – I can’t believe that you’re doing to Pigford what you did to Acorn – laying this thing out one thing at a time. And there were articles that came out that week, saying – wow, Andrew Breitbart’s a genius. He set up Pigford for, you know, exposure. Because people knew that Pigford was the biggest scam. It’s the reparations movement gone pro. It’s sold as reparations at Reparations Conference by the people who architected it. Okay?
The thing is, I had never heard of Pigford. I happened upon Pigford. And my e-mail’s being hit from people who are against Pigford. And I turn on MSNBC, and Lawrence O’Donnell and the Rachel Maddow show are saying Andrew Breitbart’s to blame for – get this – they pulled out the $1.15 billion from a supplementary war funding bill the exact week that they fired Shirley Sherrod. They were so convinced that I was setting them up for exposure that Barack Obama bought the presidency with billions of dollars of your money in order to pay $50,000 checks into the rural South.
This is all provable. I will take a lie detector test. It’s totally, totally, 100 percent provable. We’ve gone out there, we’ve told the truth. All we’re asking for are for hearings. And who’s in charge of the Congress? The Republicans.
And so excuse me while I’m cynical about the Republican Party, and that they’re basically worthless. And why is it that it’s Ann Coulter and David Horowitz and me that go out there and say we’ve got to fight these bastards? There are more of us than there are of them.
Yet, this week, we find out on Pigford – which is so easy to prove, and you have a cast of the greatest black men, they’re like the greatest generation – they’re 60 to 80 years old, they’ve done everything right, they were discriminated against, the USDA – all you have to do is put them in front of Congress. And they will tell you how everyone in this room got screwed over by the Democratic Party. And the Republican Party’s not willing to go in for the kill.
So, gosh. I want to leave on a better note.
(Laughter)
Any Weiner jokes?
(Laughter)
So my entire attitude is to hell with them, and that when I was invited to go to the Tea Party, the first Tea Party in Santa Ana – and then I did one with Pat Boone in Beverly Hills – those people are willing to fight. Those people are willing to stick their necks out. And so, the first few times that I went to the Tea Parties, I was just there simply [defending] them against the Democrat-media complex, which was there to predictably call them racists, sexists and homophobes, which is what they do, which is their way of trying to throw off anybody from leaving their house and joining the Tea Party. It hasn’t worked. Because we decided to fight back.
So my trajectory from being a Salma Hayek liberal –
(Laughter)
— to being for about three brave weeks a libertarian, just because I was so afraid of saying I was a Republican – to becoming a Republican, to becoming a conservative, and now a Tea Party conservative – is because I trust this audience more than I trust those who exist in political power. And you saw, with Anthony Weiner, what people will do to hold onto political power.
I want you to understand that this is a fight, that this is a war. And it’s not just a war against the cultural Left; it’s those on our side who falsely claim that they’re fighting on your behalf but are simply saying to you what you want to hear and aren’t willing to fight for what you believe in.
And so I want you to join this damned Tea Party. Because if you don’t join the Tea Party, or if you don’t join the new media revolution, you’re not in the battle, you’re not in the war. And if you’re not in the war, then when we lose this country, I’m going to come back here, and I’m going to blame you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Question)
Well, I’m really happy that the Weiner thing happened. Because now, the next thing that we do people are going to be paying attention to. And we have yet to show the letter from Barack Obama to show his involvement in it, and how this guy who tries to pretend like he has nothing to do with it – that he was the sole sponsor of it, that he was willing to intimidate a witness. So that’s one thing that we’d like to do is expose that.
I’m also thinking of, and perhaps – I’ve never asked for money, but I’d like to send the black farmers – Jimmy Dismuke, Abraham Carpenter, Lucious Abrams – I can probably get about 25 of them to go do what they did in 2000 or 1999. And that was to protest in front of the White House. And so I’d like to get them to go up there and protest in front of the White House, protest in front of CNN, where Anderson Cooper has been at the forefront of trying to pretend that this false front – that the black farmers got justice.
I want to go up there and draw attention to – the real victims of Pigford weren’t just the American taxpayer, but the actual black farmers who the politicians run around, saying – we helped the black farmer, we helped the black farmer. You cannot find a black farmer, other than Shirley Sherrod and her husband, who were very much involved in – how do I state this while I’m in the middle of a lawsuit with her – she was very much – and this is why I believe that she filed the lawsuit, was because I kept going after Pigford. And I found out that she was the fox guarding the henhouse.
If you were a black farmer – and they told this to me – when I called up the first set of black farmers, I thought – okay, hi, yeah, you’ve heard my name before. I don’t know. Yeah. The Shirley Sherrod, yes. When I told them that, they’re like – oh, she didn’t help me. She got the money. And she’s the person that the black farmers were supposed to go to and say – we got screwed out of Pigford. Well, since she’s getting $13.3 million between she, her husband – who’s a black radical, you know, who says we need to get rid of the white men in office and the black Uncle Toms that, you know, enable them – they got $13.3 million between that and their defunct communal socialist/communist-based farm that they managed. That’s by far the most, by far the most – they got it.
And so, it’s a screwy situation, and it’s complicated, as you can see. But it is a much more illustrative story as to what is wrong with our political class, what is wrong with the Democratic Party, what’s wrong with the Congressional Black Caucus, which has kept the black – which have told the black farmers – shut up, shut up. You should be happy that everybody’s getting their $50,000 checks.
And it’s also illustrative of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Because Steve King said this week, on the David Webb show, that when he asked people – and there were lots of them – why won’t you vote against this obvious fraud, they said – we don’t want to be called racist. You’re not willing to stand next to the black farmers and, you know, brave those arrows while you’re defending black farmers, who were the ones who were supposed to be helped in the first place, and who ended up being hurt? I don’t know, they’re just such cowards. The Republicans are such cowards. Darrell Issa’s so [disappointing]. What has he investigated? No, really, what has he investigated?
(Question)
Why did I create the Huffington Post is a better question. Because – and I’ll get back to you, because it will answer your question. I was Arianna Huffington’s researcher from ’97 to ’99. And the first thing that we did together – or she did, and I was her researcher – was dig up Larry Lawrence from Arlington National Cemetery, because he claimed to have been a war hero. But Arianna proved that he wasn’t. I went – that’s what I want to do. Arianna, for a brief period of time, I thought, was in the Coulter-Horowitz category of people who wanted scalps, or, in this case, dead bodies.
And I remember watching him being disinterred while the mainstream media the week before said – this is the lowest I’ve ever seen a Republican go, on CNN, in hushed, somber tones. When Arianna had the goods and was telling the truth – like Drudge was telling the truth on Lewinsky, like I was telling the truth on Weiner – the same group of objective and neutral journalists were trying to stop the truth from coming out and were ridiculing and mocking those who were reporting those truths. And that’s the Democratic-media complex. And then, when they’re caught having lied, there’s no apologies.
I remember on CNN – I remember Maureen Dowd saying – this is the lowest I’ve ever seen. No apologies. No apologies to me from Salon saying that I was the hacker. No apologies to Drudge, when he was told that he was lying about the blue dress. Okay? So this is how these people behave.
What the left-wing blogosphere is is a protection. It’s like a protection against the mainstream media. My goal, when Arianna came to me as a lefty – five years after she, on a dime, switched from being on the Right to the Left – you go figure why – she lives in Los Angeles. Now she’s friends with the people that hated her. And there’s more money, as David will tell you, on the Left [than there] is on the right. And nobody comes to me with money. I created the thing – it’s worth $350 million. Don’t you think if you gave me $5 million I could create value? But there’s nothing on the Right. And the Left only wants to protect its place.
But why would I create something for the other side? Because the only way to expose the Left is to expose the Left. And that is to give Arianna and her crazy friends – like Gore Vidal, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin; all those nutcases – a place to expose to you how insane they are.
And the first week, the first day that it launched, I remember driving up Lincoln Boulevard, and I was at the altar, listening to AM talk radio, listening to Michael Medved. And he was reading aloud from day one’s articles. And one was Rob Reiner, and an article called – “Where Are the Woodwards and Bernsteins of Today,” saying that there’s nobody being critical of George Bush. And as he was reading it, he was laughing. And I could almost sense that mucus was coming out of his nostrils, he was laughing so hard. And I said – that’s why I created this thing.
And there was one moment, during Katrina, well after I left, when Arianna put up on her site that two days into Katrina, that black people were cannibalizing each other, on the front page.
And I just remember – I mean, again, I was a C student at Tulane. Two days? I mean, I remember Yom Kippur and going – I need to go get a sandwich. Okay? But I don’t remember thinking – I need to go eat my neighbor’s arm.
(Laughter)
And it just seemed so outlandish. Yet, what the Left has that the Right doesn’t is they have gatekeepers. And the fact that the gatekeepers put that up on the front page, and then Drudge put it up on his page – Huffington Post: Cannibalism Hits New Orleans.
And Arianna called me up, and she knew that I probably had a little hand in that placement. And I remember this phone call vividly. Hello, sweetheart.
(Laughter)
I said – Arianna, how are you? She said – you win. I said – what do you mean? She goes – we retracted the cannibalism story. I’m like – oh, so it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true, okay.
So I created it to expose them. And I think I should get a Nobel Peace Prize for that, quite frankly.
(Applause)
(Question)
Well, there may be a germ of truth to what he’s talking about. The reason why he’s doing it is because he realizes that his side is losing, and they’re losing control of the narrative. And so, he can no longer look to Barack Obama as the saintly, larger-than-life, perfected, you know, human being. He’s now looking for excuses why he’s on Al Gore’s – I’m not even sure that channel even exists. I’ve gone through every single – he’s trying to rationalize why he’s on current TV. That’s why he’s doing it.
But I mean, I think I just spoke to a problem with the political class. But it’s not because Republicans and Democrats, you know, are the same on the value system; it’s because those in political power, as Anthony Weiner has shown, will do anything, anything, anything to keep their political power.
And the amount of people who I can count on my hands that have walked the walk – it’s getting – it’s diminishing. And the people that I trust in this election cycle – this election cycle would not be possible – 2010 and 2009 – Chris Christie’s election would not be possible without the rise of the Tea Party and new media.
So to indulge the class of Republican who were accepting of the premise of the permanent ascendancy of the Democratic Party, and did nothing but create that environment, and did nothing to create a resurgence – I’m not going to indulge many that I respect, including Gingrich, who – the first thing, when he saw this permanent ascendancy, where the articles of the Huffington Post were – “Is This the Death of Conservatism?” – no, they weren’t even asking. They were saying this is the death of conservatism.
And the first thing that Gingrich did – who I’ve admired for a long time – was sit down with Nancy Pelosi and say – Cap and Trade, baby. Let’s do it. Let’s figure out a way to triangulate, so I can be relevant in this political system. And the American people said to hell with this crap, and created the Tea Party.
So I’m in the Michele Bachmann – I’m in the pilloried camp.
(Applause)
I’m in the – if you’re marching towards the fire, and they’re calling you the devil, then I’m going to stand by you. And that includes Palin, and that includes Bachmann.
(Applause)
That includes Herman Cain, and anyone that has the courage to fight for this country, and not fight for their own political existence.
(Applause)
(Question)
Thank you. I’m a performance artist. I’m from LA. Salma Hayek. I’m not kidding you – is that there is a – like, all I liked growing up was comedy. And I was at the Bill Maher show, and John Waters was there. And I said to him, I said – you’ve influenced me more than George Will. I mean, how weird is that?
(Laughter)
And he was in Provincetown, which is the really outrageous, you know, gay vacationland. And he reached out to me through somebody to congratulate me for Weinergate, for getting my scalp. Well, wasn’t a scalp, technically.
(Laughter)
So I’ve realized you can’t just report the truth. You have to – I’m a midwife. I’m trying to figure out how to take these stories, and how to catapult them over not just the mainstream media, but over Media Matters and the George Soros, you know, Left. And you have to figure out how to do it. And they say – are you a provocateur? Are you an activist? I’m like, I’ll wear whatever hat possible in order to win.
So, I’m having fun. And I’m not going to apologize for it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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