Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the Restoration Weekend presentation on TruthRevolt.org, the Right’s newest media watchdog and response organization. Restoration Weekend took place November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Truth Revolt Presentation from DHFC on Vimeo.
David Horowitz: I had this idea. Well, the first thing is that I didn’t want to duplicate what was already being well done on the right. But one of the things – there were a couple of things that I saw missing. One was addressing the culture that the Left had infiltrated and subverted. I picked three areas where the Left had made their major gains. One was public broadcasting, another was education, and the third was Hollywood. That’s how I began thinking – where does the Right need some force?
Now, the second was I saw that conservatives are, as I often say, way too decent for politics. They don’t like politics. Conservatives don’t like politics. Don’t like, you know, getting into the down-and-dirty street fighting that politics is about. Don’t like conflict. Just basic conservative disposition.
As a friend of mine once said, we are the creators, and they are destroyers. And that’s a big difference. Conservatives are builders of businesses. They don’t want to alienate customers or potential partners; want to minimize conflict.
Democrats – and I don’t call them liberals; even progressives is bad – but progressives, leftists – they live to fight. I actually think – I can’t remember the context, but Michael Kinsley once said they live to bother other people. Oh no, no no, of course, it was Terrell – bother they neighbor is their –
(Laughter)
So when I looked at Hollywood, I saw that the Left is very effective at calling people names, attempting to – not attempting, succeeding in embarrassing them; putting them on the defensive. It’s the way they drive our people out of the field and the way they keep our people from being aggressive.
So my first idea – this is actually how I launched what I called in those days the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, which is now Horowitz Freedom Center. The first idea I had was – you know, Hollywood is not that big a community, and there I was living in LA – I’m going to put out a publication to embarrass Hollywood leftists with their idiocies – just try to blow them back, and do investigative reporting on them, expose the hypocrisies of their lives. They’re all flying around in gas-guzzling – you know, it’s obvious what Hollywood does.
And I was going to call it Hollywood Eye. And I wrote to – when I was beginning, I didn’t have all your wonderful people. Now we have, actually, 100,000 individuals who support the Center, which is what makes us strong. If you’re dependent on one donor, if you’re dependent on a foundation or two, you’re vulnerable.
Because particularly among conservatives – well, I’ve had wonderful conservatives, some of them sitting here, who have disagreed with me on some of the big issues, that have stood by the Center. So I’m very grateful for that, Sandy.
But in those days, there were the three foundations. Now, all in, being good conservatives, they sun-setted themselves. Can you imagine one of these leftwing foundations like Ford saying – oh, you know, we’re going to go out of business, because that’s the proper thing to do?
Anyway, so I wrote to the three foundations. And I raised – they sent me collectively $100,000. And I got the $100,000, and I started – I should’ve done this before, but I’m kind of an impulsive person. And when I thought through actually doing this, I realized $100,000 will not do the job. I could not put out the kind of publication, distribute it, hire the reporters, and so forth.
I bring up this story – and then I went on, and I did something like this with public broadcasting, which was much more successful, where was I was going to – what happened there. But we caused quite a bit of commotion and trouble in public broadcasting.
Lo and behold, now, 25 years later, actually this year, Ben Shapiro, who I have known and worked with actually, when he writing his first book when he was, what, 12? No, I think you were –
(Laughter)
He was 18. So we’ve known each other – he looks like he’s 19, I know. But he’s actually 29. So we’ve worked together for a long time.
And he came to me with this idea – or we came to him, and he came to us, for a [request] – when I started the Center, the Internet was – there was no Internet. There was; nobody was on it, except NASA people or something, I don’t know. To (inaudible) cycle, truthrevolt.org, I’m going to actually let him tell you about it.
And one of the things – you know, people read my books, and my later books are kind of memoirs. And I talk about age and everything. And they are saying – when you’re gone, David, what’s going to – how is the Center going to operate? Because I still – we fill a very important niche. I mean, conservatives are actually somewhat changing. The younger generation is very, very different.
Andrew Breitbart, whom I had influence on – is part of the younger conservative generations who went to school and to college and were harassed and abused by leftists – learned from them how to harass and abuse leftists.
(Laughter)
And Andrew was a prime example of that. In your face. I mean, that was one of the things that – that was a phrase we used to have in the Left, and I was always preaching it to conservatives. But again, if you’re too well-bred, and your disposition – you look, and you’re happy that somebody’s doing it on our side, but you’re not going to – you can’t do it yourself. You just can’t do it.
So now we have a younger generation. And Jeremy Boreing is another one. And they actually were influenced by Andrew.
And so I’m very happy. You’ve seen – we’ve had a couple of panels with the younger people that we now have in our orbit. So I’ve actually gotten, as I’ve gotten older, very much relaxed. Because I used to feel – I’ve got to find some conservatives, so that – you know, and get them going in this war. And now, I can sit back and watch these young people do it. And I’m going to – what Ben – I had him in one of our Wednesday morning clubs.
And you know, I felt like I’m watching myself talk up there. He’s got exactly the jujutsu that the Center is about – they’ll fight fire with fire, the in-your-face thing. Call them aggressive conservatives. It’s kind of an oxy – whatever – contradiction in terms. But that’s what they are.
And so I’m going to leave the platform here now to Ben, and he’ll introduce Jeremy.
(Applause)
Ben Shapiro: I’m sure everybody in the room knows who Alec Baldwin is. He’s the star of such classics as that horrible movie with Diane Keaton that came out recently, and that other horrible movie with Meryl Streep that came out recently, and also “The Hunt for Red October,” when he was skinny.
(Laughter)
And he’s also the fellow who’s known for, back in the 1990s, saying this during the Clinton impeachment hearings – if we were in another country, we would stone Henry Hyde to death. We would go to their homes and kill their wives and their children; we would kill their families.
Alec Baldwin is also the actor known for saying that he has Republican friends, although not those “hypocritical evangelicals too lazy to raise their own children properly, and/or anyone who listens to Rush Limbaugh.” By contrast, he thinks that President Obama is “thoughtful, sincere and realistic.”
(Laughter)
He is also a perfect candidate for an MSNBC show, which is why he has an MSNBC show, or rather did until we got rid of him.
Jeremy Boreing: Yeah.
(Applause)
On Thursday, a great gift fell into our lap. And that gift was that Alec Baldwin was confronted by somebody in the paparazzi. Alec Baldwin doesn’t like folks in the paparazzi. And he started chasing this member of the paparazzi, this photographer, around the streets of New York. And the guy was holding the camera; he was filming the entire time. And after chasing this photographer around for awhile, Alec Baldwin proceeded to turn away from him and called him words that rhyme with clock-sucking flag.
(Laughter)
Well, we immediately sprang into action. This is our favorite thing. Our favorite thing is when the Left violates its own standards. So what we did is we immediately went to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
(Laughter)
And we asked them to denounce Alec Baldwin.
(Applause)
They gave us a rather tepid statement, and so we bashed them for not being stronger against the homophobe Alec Baldwin.
(Laughter)
We then went to the parents and families of lesbians and gays and asked them to condemn Alec Baldwin, which they did. We then went to Dan Savage, the supposed anti-bullying expert, the head of the It Gets Better Project and the [boss] (inaudible) bodily orifices. Dan Savage is a sex columnist who has bullied evangelical Christian kids in the past. He’s also famous for licking doorknobs to try and give Gary Bauer the flu in 2000, posing as one of his interns, and is now considered somewhat of a gay spokesperson.
Dan Savage actually came out and said openly that it was fine with him if people use the words clock-sucking flag, so long as they were same-sex marriage advocates. So we got him on record saying that.
(Laughter)
We also opened a petition on the website. Within six hours, we had over a thousand signatures on the petition for MSNBC to dump Alec Baldwin. And within 48 hours, MSNBC had in fact suspended Alec Baldwin from duty. He says that he may never come back.
(Applause)
We only hope that he does so that we can bash him around some more.
(Laughter)
And to talk about how we kind of do this technically, and how we motivate people, how we get people – how we allow people to fight – because that’s really what we’re about. We’re about the fight. I want to turn to Jeremy Boreing, the managing editor of the website. He’s also a Hollywood insider, so he kind of knows the ins and outs that happen there.
So Jeremy, you want to talk about that a little bit?
Jeremy Boreing: Absolutely.
So David says that conservatives are way too decent to get into the fight. And I think that’s why he picked Ben and I. We don’t –
(Laughter)
Ben Shapiro: We’re indecent.
Jeremy Boreing: We’re indecent, at best.
(Laughter)
Ben and I first started speaking to David and Mike over at the Center three or four years ago, because we were so impressed by the fact that they’re the only guys in the space who seem interested in taking scalp. And that’s the business we want to be in – you know, the play-nice, point-out-people’s-problems routine doesn’t work. We have a million websites on the right that report on things that happen on the left. But that’s where it begins, and that’s where it ends. Nothing’s ever done with all that wonderful reporting.
We wanted to do something a little bit more intense. We wanted to sort of be an answer to Media Matters. What they do, obviously on the left, is they target the advertisers and the supporters of people on the right. And they do it incredibly effectively. They’ve probably cut into people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, into their revenue streams by 50 percent, 75 percent. They’ve taken most of the money out of the conservative space by basically saying that it’s indecent and improper for major advertisers to spend their money with racists, warmongers, homophobes, greedy people with women – (inaudible) full of women.
And as a result, you go over to MSNBC, and you would be the only person, of course, there if you did.
(Laughter)
But you would notice that giant national advertisers, like Cadillac and the Bayer Corporation and Pepsi – they’re all able to advertize on MSNBC. You go over to Fox News, and you see Gold Bond Medicated Powder.
(Laughter)
It’s been like – you see Pat Boone selling walk-in showers. I mean, it’s a –
(Laughter)
We have more than two times their ratings and none of their advertising base. And it’s because they’ve made it toxic for national advertisers to actually go where the audience is, which is Fox News and conservative talk radio.
And there’s an appetite on the right that finds that very distasteful. You know, people on the right don’t want to target adverse, they don’t want to target supporters. And it’s because fundamentally, we believe in that little document called the Constitution that grants people – or preserves for people the right to freedom of speech.
But there’s a problem. And the problem is that when our free speech can’t find funding, our free speech itself is in peril.
And so, Ben and I sort of constructed a little theory, and we call it mutually assured destruction. And we say that the only thing worse than using distasteful means is allowing your adversaries to use distasteful means without fear of retaliation.
(Applause)
You know, mutually assured destruction gets appeased between the major world powers for over 60 years. We all talk about it as though it’s this really terrible thing. But when’s the last time there was a world war? We have mutually assured destruction to thank for that.
If the Americans had said, in the middle of the ‘50s and ‘60s, you know, it’d be okay if the Soviets nuke a few of our cities and storm a few of our beachheads, because we’re too decent to use this military that we’ve created – well, we’d be in the same place that the Right is today in the media and in the culture.
So it’s our intension to do something about that. And that’s what we’re doing with TruthRevolt. We want to be sort of the insurgent tip of the spear for the Right. We want to punch people in the nose. And we want to do it starting with the media, because that’s the low-hanging fruit. But we don’t want to stop with the media. As David said, one of his initial passions was for Hollywood. And Ben and I both living in Los Angeles – and I’ve worked for a Hollywood conservative organization there – we believe in the sort of axiom of Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream of culture.
And one of the problems is that everyone on the right who has an interest in culture – people like Ben, myself, David, and Andrew Klavan, who was here earlier in the week – we all find ourselves being continually drawn to politics. And that’s because we want to do something immediately, and we feel this urgency to make some sort of difference.
But the real fight is a cultural fight. And you know, as far as the long-term vision for what we’re doing at TruthRevolt, we want to move ultimately beyond just the media. We want to produce content that’s taking these same ideas and this same fight and framing it in entertainment. Because ultimately, two million people watch Fox News, and 20 million people watch “American Idol.” People turn on their TV and their radio to get entertainment.
So you know, there’s websites out there on the left that are doing this, websites like BuzzFeed. Ultimately, we need to move into space like that. But we also understand that we have to score victories, build a strong foundation, before we can sort of take those kinds of chances.
So far, we’ve been able to do that. We had 90,000 unique visitors to the website. Just on Friday alone, the first day of the Restoration Weekend, we’ve gotten 20,000 people to sign up for the mailing list in the last six weeks.
We have an activist team called the TruthRevolt Special Ops, which is a thousand people who volunteered to give us three minutes a day every day to actually contribute to the fight. We like to turn these people loose on the Left. For example, as soon as Alec Baldwin made his remarks, we had a thousand people calling Capital One. You’ll probably remember Alec Baldwin does commercials for Capital One.
(Laughter)
So they got a thousand emails the first day and a thousand phone calls the second day, asking them if they believed that it’s appropriate to refer to homosexuals as clock-sucking flaggots.
You know, really, when you – it could be so many things that rhyme.
(Laughter)
I actually don’t even remember what he actually said.
So that’s kind of what we’re working on. We’re trying to build an actual movement of conservatives who have the David Horowitz battle tank mentality, and help to make them operational. We want to activate the Right in a way, and weaponize this grassroots that we’ve seen growing up around the Tea Party.
So that’s what we’ve been focused on. And so far, had a few good victories.
Ben Shapiro: The real motivating factor in all of this for us is that this is a war. And this is something that I learned from David, from reading David, from knowing David for a really long time. It’s something I learned from Andrew Breitbart, who I knew since I was 17 years old. And that is that this is a war.
And the people who are fighting – and David says it the best that I’ve heard it articulated – in the Go to the Heart pamphlet, which everybody should read – when he says – because Democrats regard politics as war conducted by other means, that he could demonize and destroy their opponents as the enemies of progress, of social justice and minority rights. Republicans can only counter these attacks by turning the Democrats’ guns around, by exposing them as the enforcers of injustice, particularly to minorities and the poor, the exploiters of society’s vulnerable; and the reactionary proponents of policies that have proven bankrupt and destructive all over the world.
That’s who these people are. They’re evil. They are fighting for something that is evil. That means that it is our job to stick the knife in as deeply as possible between the ribs while smiling.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules here. There are too many people on our side of the aisle who are upset with us. There was an article in Daily Caller that said that what we were doing was really nasty and uncouth. How dare we go after the Left with these tactics. There are Tea Partiers even who have said this. To which I say – I wonder if they remember what the actual Tea Party constituted. As in, when we went on a boat and threw tea overboard.
(Laughter)
Okay, that was more than just calling a sponsor; that was burning the sponsor down.
The fact is this – no quarter is going to be given by the Left in this war. We should not ask for it; it’s not coming. We can live in a fantasy world. We can live in a fantasy world with unicorns and rainbows, where President Obama is not President, where the Left is not vile, where the Left is not interested in destroying everything we stand for, where we can live our lives and they’ll leave us alone.
It’s not true. They’re not going to leave us alone. They’re going to come after everything that we stand for, everything that we own, everything that we believe in. And unless we are willing to do what’s necessary to take them out, then they’re going to win.
(Applause)
And the great barrier in this for the Left has been the media. The media – the reason we’re going after the media first is because the media is the perpetuator of the big lie. It is the media that has been protecting the American people from the facts about the Left for so long. Because it’s not enough for folks just to stand up and shout the truth, which we do routinely at the Center. It’s not just enough for people on the right to say things that are real. Because it’ll never even reach the American people.
The media is not interested in reaching the American people. The media is a motivated force on behalf of the Left. The media is not just innocent and ignorant. That’s not what they are. They routinely lie about the facts. Lie. They cover things up. They do it in order to twist the message.
Everybody down here will remember the Trayvon Martin case as a perfect example of exactly what the media was doing. The media first trotted out the lie that George Zimmerman was a white man who had shot a black guy; George Zimmerman is Hispanic. Then they came up with the term “white Hispanic,” which has never been used –
(Laughter)
— considering that the corollary in the black community would be that President Obama is a white black.
(Laughter)
They then came up with the lie that George Zimmerman, on the 911 call, had actually given the race of Trayvon Martin as the rationale for following him. They sliced and diced the tape. NBC News did that; they’re now in the midst of a lawsuit about that.
ABC News then proceeded to trot out a badly pixilated photo of George Zimmerman, which showed no gash on his head and said that he was not wounded. Then, of course, we got the pixilated photo, and he had a huge gash on his head and a broken nose. We had CNN and Jeffrey Toobin, their legal analyst, who knows less about law than Barack Obama knows about governance.
(Laughter)
Jeffrey Toobin actually went on TV and said that George Zimmerman had, in the 911 call, used the racial slur “coon,” which has not been used in the United States since the 1930s. And beyond that, he said it was cold. He said it was cold outside.
The bottom line is this – the narrative that was created was the narrative that President Obama wanted. The narrative was that if he had a son, it would’ve looked like Trayvon Martin. The narrative was that America is still a deeply racist place in which white men routinely stalk and kill black young men. That was the narrative that the media wanted because they wanted their story.
And it didn’t matter whose life had to get ruined. It didn’t matter that George Zimmerman and his entire family had to go into hiding. It didn’t matter that when Spike Lee was tweeting out the home address of somebody who was not George Zimmerman’s parents, they ended up having to move. None of that mattered to the Left, because they’re liars. And they’re habitual liars.
And they’re liars about everything ranging from social stories like that to Benghazi, which of course was one of the great lies of our time. And the media was not just complicit in it; the media was pushing it forward, up to and including Candy Crowley lying on national television during a televised debate, in saying that President Obama had said that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. He never said that. She later admitted that same night that he never said that. But Candy Crowley, like Scooby Doo eating a Scooby snack out of the hand of President Obama – as soon as he said please say it again, she immediately piped up and settled the lie again. This is what the media does.
You remember when they were trying to pass Obamacare and the media came out and said – look at all these racist Tea Partiers. You had a bunch of Congress people walking out from the Congress. And they said – oh, the Tea Party was using the N-word against us. And Andrew Breitbart promptly put out a notice saying – we’ll throw up $100,000 for anybody who can provide any tape of anybody using the N-word at that rally. And of course, the media never reported that. They immediately said – well, of course the Tea Party’s racist.
The media are the folks who, in order to label the Tea Party racist, took a picture of a Tea Partier carrying a gun and said – this is the racist Tea Partier. And they sliced off the guy’s head and hand. He was a black man carrying a gun. This is what the media does. And this is the battle that we fight.
So the bottom line is that we have to do to them what they’ve been doing to us for a very long time. We have to destroy their profit margin. We have to destroy their profitability.
(Applause)
We have to destroy their sponsors, and we have to destroy their security in the knowledge that they can say whatever the hell they want to say without any sort of consequence. And so that’s what we’ve been visibly doing, whether it’s Alec Baldwin or whether – there was a case in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal in which there was a cartoon that was run with a picture of a Tea Partier as a jihadist, wearing the full-out jihad regalia, suicide vest on, during the government shutdown.
We immediately sent out an email to our team. Over a thousand emails were received by this particular editor. He started getting calls from local advertisers upset at him for running it, because all of our people were inundating the advertisers with calls. He retracted it, and then he wrote a nice piece about us because he was scared of us.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
CNBC’s Steve Liesman, who’s a lefty commentator on CNBC – he dislikes Ted Cruz, and he dislikes the government shutdown. So he showed a picture of Ted Cruz on the television. And then he said – let’s get some Mexican music for Ted Cruz. We immediately clipped that, and we put it up, and Matt Drudge linked it. And within 24 hours, he had apologized, the network had apologized for it. That’s the kind of stuff that we do.
Politico ran a piece in which they called for the death of John Boehner and they called for the death of Ted Cruz. We immediately went to Carbonite, which was the online sponsor of that piece, and we got Carbonite to back off of Politico. We did all of this in the first five weeks.
(Applause)
If you’ve seen the young guys on laptops who are hanging out while these panels are going around, that’s us. That’s the work that we’re doing while everything is going on. Because the battle never stops.
Again, there are some people who don’t want to fight this battle. There are some people who would rather write whitepapers for Heritage; that’s fine. We need all of that. We do need all of that. But there are people who have to do the dirty work. There’s somebody who has to take the damn hill.
And if we’re going to be the people who take the hill, fine. Let the movement take credit for it, let the movement live off the back of our successes. We don’t care. All we care about is victory. All that matters is winning. And the only thing that matters in winning is taking some scalps –
(Applause)
— and throwing a scare into them, and making them afraid to tell the lies that they have been telling for so long. They are bullies. Everything that David says in his pamphlet is true. Everything David has been saying for the last three years is true. These folks are bullies. Their entire intent in life is to have a feeling of unearned moral superiority because they’re better than everybody in this room.
(Applause)
And for too long, we’ve been trying to talk with the bully. He’s been telling us that if we don’t give him the lunch money, he’s going to punch us in the face. And we’ve been saying – you know what? Let’s have a conversation about that. You seem like a nice fellow.
(Laughter)
And as we’ve learned from our President himself, to quote President Obama – there is only one way to fight a bully. And that is you punch back twice as hard.
Thanks so much.
(Applause)
David Horowitz: This looks to me like an audience of hockey fans.
(Laughter)
No, hockey is the model.
(Laughter)
They’re the players who have the great shots, who have the skill sets, who are wonderful skaters. And then there are the bruisers. They have designated hitters on every hockey team.
(Laughter)
And if you touch – if the other team abuses one of the skilled players, the elite players, these bruisers come out and beat the crap out of them.
(Laughter)
And the fans cheer.
(Applause)
So it’s very important, if you remember the Clinton Administration – I mean, Clinton was never the angry attacker. And to this extent, Republican consultants are right. I mean, a presidential candidate should be presidential. Cannot get down and, you know, give shot-for-shot.
But he had Carville and Begala. And then he had – can’t remember, but he would’ve had in the congressional ranks what I call designated hitters. And that’s hugely important. The intimidation that goes on – I mean, it’s very, very real. People do not – I mean, people do not want to be called names.
And one of the things that the Left has done is liberated a generation of young conservatives by calling them names. Once you’re called names enough times, you know, it can’t hurt you anymore.
So I have so many scars on my [back] and all over that it’s really difficult for them to get at me. And certainly, it’s impossible for them to get me not to say what I’m going to say. And this is what’s happened to a lot of our young people in college, people who were, at 18 and – I mean, it’s really terrible what goes on in many classrooms and on the campus with these leftist groups.
Nobody wants to be called a racist or a homophobe, or whatever. But when you’re called that enough times for very innocent reasons – you disagree with them on the weather – racist –
(Laughter)
— you become immune to that. And I’ve never asked anybody to do what they don’t feel comfortable doing. Because they won’t be able to do it well, and I wouldn’t want to put anybody – and I understand that a lot of my support has come from people who do not want to do this themselves, and they’re actually quite wise.
See, I was brought up in a household where we had arguments, political arguments, at the breakfast table, lunch, dinner, from the time I was very, very young. So I was born to it. It never occurred to me that there’s a better way, which is avoiding such conflicts.
So, you know, people often say – oh, you’re very brave, David. No, I’m not. I mean, that’s the way I was brought up, and it’s the way I am. And I didn’t think about the consequences of it till it was way too late to do anything about it.
I’ve said this before, but there was a moment in – it took me about seven or eight years to leave the Left. Because it is a religion. It gives you all the consolation that a religion does. Gives meaning to your life; purpose. So it was very, very hard to leave. And it was harder still to become a conservative, of all things. I mean, the devil devils themselves.
(Laughter)
And I also had a real fear. Because I had four kids [who] lived in Berkeley. And the Panthers – you know, I – the Panthers had murdered my friend. And if I said something, I was going to put my family in danger.
But there came a moment, in 1985, the spring. Peter Collier and I had written a bestseller. It was actually the number-one bestseller on the Kennedys. And I got called by the editor of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine to pick my brain. And he wanted to do a story about Joe Kennedy, Jr., who was a congressman. And he said – what are you guys up to? And I said – you’re not going to believe this, but Peter and I just voted for Ronald Reagan. And we actually hadn’t consulted each other. Oh, he said. And that’s a good story. Why don’t you write it for us?
So we wrote a piece that we called “Better Ron than Red.”
(Laughter)
And they changed it to “Lefties for Reagan.” But it was the front cover of the Washington Post Magazine.
And when that appeared, Peter said – our literary careers are over.
(Laughter)
Said, what are you talking about? Peter was the realist in our partnership.
And he was exactly right. That was the last time we ever had a front-page decent treatment in the – in fact, I’m a visible person; I’ve written 15 books since then, and they don’t get – well, anyway. So they take no prisoners. But just to show you – I mean, it didn’t even occur to me until the horse was out of the barn door – was closed, horse was gone.
So, you know, I’ve lived with that and made a relatively happy life out of it. But normal people will hesitate wisely before making the kind of enemies that you have to make. So we need a strike force. And this is our strike force. That’s what we’re about.
(Applause)
Ben Shapiro: David, you mentioned the colleges. And we’re starting to work with [Jeff Biner] to go after the colleges – not just to reach out to them but to train strike forces at these different colleges. Because we need – we’re relatively –
(Applause)
We’re a relatively lean operation. When I say “relatively,” I mean massively lean operation. And so –
David Horowitz: What he means is that when the Left set out to create a vicious smear site, Media Matters, they had a fundraiser in Washington, with Hillary and Bill Clinton, and George Soros. And they raised an $8.5 million-a-year budget. Now, I’ve been doing this for 25 years; our budget is about $6.5 million. That’s how difficult it is to do that. An $8.5 million budget and 27 writers on staff to go after conservatives.
And you know, you’ve seen O’Reilly talk about it – they’ve picked on every conservative, or even not so conservative, figure whom they feel is effective, and therefore, a threat. We have one staffroom, which is [a den]. And everybody else is either – it’s just the budget that we have – is either part-time or volunteer.
So you can see – I mean, I’ve learned – I had to learn every – I was never cut out to – I never ran a company. I mean, I ran Ramparts, leftwing.
(Laughter)
But I’ve learned that you invest in personnel. It’s the individual that does it. It’s the only way to do it. And that’s what you invest in.
So Ben – I mean, I’ve known Ben for all these years. And so I had very great confidence when he came to me with an idea. I can’t, you know, navigate the social media and do all these things that these young people can do. But I have the confidence I’m going to give him his [head]. And so it’s working out very well. And we’re going to just try to –
(Applause)
— put a bigger floor under him.
Yeah. If you’d like to ask Jeremy and Ben some questions?
Unidentified Speaker: Thanks for all you do. I’d like to ask you to comment on Republicans who, like Senator McCain and others, have criticized their more conservative counterparts who are also duly elected. And then there are Republicans – and not just the known establishment, but good, solid Republicans that are – to put it your way, are a little bit scared of engaging in the bare-knuckled fight. How do you – I mean, what’s your advice on engaging with them? Because there are Republicans that fear that an internal [Internet-themed] warfare will destroy the party and deliver us Hillary, which is a real fear. But at the same time, I’m with you – you either come to the fight, or you go home. So I’d like you to comment.
David Horowitz: I wish that Republicans would fight the Democrats the way they fight other Republicans.
(Applause)
I think – to me, it’s the strength and also the weakness of the conservative movement. To me, it was liberating to come out of the Left, where you always have to look over your shoulder at other leftists to make sure that you haven’t crossed the politically correct line. Because if you do, you pay a huge price. Whereas conservatives disagree about everything. And that’s a strength. But it’s also a weakness, when it comes to these kind of fights.
So I’m hoping – I actually think that the country is in such dire straits, and that everyone who’s a conservative understands that – that this is not going to blow it for us. I firmly believe that.
Jeremy Boreing: Well, our philosophy at TruthRevolt is to enforce a rigid ideological purity. The problem is that Ben’s an orthodox Jew, I’m an evangelical pastor; we don’t agree on anything.
(Laughter)
So in the meantime, we’re just going to focus on punching the Left in the mouth.
Ben Shapiro: Well, my view has always also been that when it comes to – there’s unfortunately, I think an innervating idea – as opposed to energizing idea – an innervating idea in the conservative movement that once we vote, that’s basically the end of what we’re supposed to do. And so once John McCain is in there, there’s nothing we can do about it. Except we can try to primary him next time. Or if Lindsay Graham does something bad, we can try to primary him next time.
I don’t believe that. I believe the Milton Friedman admonition that it’s not about electing the right people; it’s about getting the wrong people to do the right things.
And so what we should be focused on is – it’s okay to pressure people on our own side. I mean, we killed amnesty because we called people up, and we killed amnesty.
(Applause)
If we get a House select committee on Benghazi, it’s going to be because the American people rise up and tell the House that we need a select committee on Benghazi. The pressure that we bring to the – the power is in this room. The power isn’t in the rooms in Washington, DC. They’re subject to us. And that subjection does not end when we leave the ballot box in November. There’s a lot of time in between.
This is not a situation, unfortunately – I wish it could be like this – where we could just delegate our powers, go home, they’d leave us alone for the next couple years, and everything would go okay. But we need to hold them accountable. And that’s one of the things that we’re in the business of doing – holding them accountable and removing the media middleman who lies to prevent us from holding them accountable.
(Applause)
Unidentified Speaker: I just loved the way you went after Al Sharpton, and enjoyed writing a letter to the sponsors telling them how I would sadly forgo having Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Triscuits.
(Laughter)
But this was totally necessary because I live in New York and have been watching the charlatan of Sharpton for years.
Ben Shapiro: Yeah.
Unidentified Speaker: Was there any response?
Ben Shapiro: Well, the corporations keep silent. Last I checked, I haven’t seen any Ritz Crackers commercials on Sharpton in awhile. We went after Ritz Crackers (multiple speakers) for a couple of reasons – one, they are supposedly a family-friendly company; and second, because we desperately wanted to use the headline “Sharpton’s Crackers” when we first launched the website.
(Laughter)
And so, for those who don’t know, the first campaign that we launched at TruthRevolt was a campaign against the advertisers on Al Sharpton. Because even the Left should be ashamed of having somebody like Al Sharpton in a position of power, although not ashamed enough to keep him out of the White House repeatedly from visiting President Obama.
So I mean, not only is he a charlatan; I mean, he’s responsible for deaths. I mean, this is somebody who was intimately connected with what happened at Freddy’s Fashion Mart, when – what was it – seven or eight people were killed. This is somebody – we had articles on the site, where we went to the brother of Yankel Rosenbaum, the guy who was murdered in the 1991 Crown Heights riots. We had him write a piece for us.
We went to Steven Pagones, the DA who was slandered by Al Sharpton in the Tawana Brawley case; had him write a piece for us. All of these got linked to Drudge, so it was great for traffic. But beyond that, it also reminds people that the kinds of people who are employed on MSNBC are people who call Laura Ingraham a talk slut, like Ed Schultz; people who say things like clock-sucking flag, like Alec Baldwin.
Our current campaign is going against Martin Bashir. We’re going to start this tomorrow. Martin Bashir, for those who missed it –
(Applause)
On Friday night, Martin Bashir went after Sarah Palin, because Sarah Palin had compared slavery to Obamacare. Because she had said that Obamacare was essentially a form of slavery, because it was enslavement to the federal government. And Martin Bashir promptly went out and read from the diary of a slave owner in Jamaica in which the slave owner had forced one slave to urinate and defecate in the mouth of another slave. And Martin Bashir then said – if somebody were deserving of that treatment, it would be Sarah Palin. Except he didn’t use the words “urinate” and “defecate;” he used the words “piss” and S-H-I-T. Right?
So our next campaign is going to be to get Martin Bashir knocked off the air. Because that is not –
(Applause)
There have to be consequences for this. There must be consequences for this.
Media Matters has been built up – what we’re watching right now in the Benghazi debate – it’s all about Media Matters. On October 16th, Media Matters released an e-book titled “The Benghazi Hoax.” It was by the heads of Media Matters. Media Matters was a Hillary Clinton project. It is a Hillary Clinton attack machine. She said it herself, that she was building the attack machine. And they were doing it for 2016. These are the folks that we have to take out.
So I mean, what’s wonderful about what we do is that we get up every morning, and we don’t have to search for targets very hard.
(Laughter)
I mean, there’s Media Matters, and there’s Jay Street. We’d love to go after Jay Street. When we talk about our college programs –
(Applause)
When we talk about our college programs, we’re not just talking about activating students so that they know what to say in the classroom and out. We’re talking about – we want students in their classes, taping their professors and getting us the tapes of those professors, so that we can have a Ward Churchill every week.
(Applause)
Because, by the way, that would be a dramatic – if there were a Ward Churchill every week, that would basically only take out the poly-sci department at UCLA.
(Laughter)
So for us, it’s all about the war, it’s all about the battle. Al Sharpton is one target in that battle. But the American people also have to know who these villains are. And unfortunately, so many on the right are afraid to call out the members of the media.
You know, when I did Piers Morgan, and I told him that he was standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook to push his gun control routine – when I did that to Piers, that was something that was new. People hadn’t done that before. David knows how to do that. But they won’t have David on, because they knew David knew how to do that. So they had me on, because they didn’t know who I was yet. And then I did that, and they won’t have me on anymore.
(Laughter)
But this is – the folks on the right who go on George Stephanopoulos and don’t say to George Stephanopoulos right off the bat – look, George, you were in the Clinton war room, you are a White House hack, and for you to pretend objectivity is nonsense, and say that publicly – the fact that they don’t do that means that we have to do it. It means that we have to do it. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s okay. As David was saying, not everybody’s cut out for this.
But there’s enough anger in the country right now, and justified anger – not wild rage; justified anger – justified righteous indignation at what is going on in this country – that I don’t think that we’re going to have any trouble recruiting folks to help us with the fight.
(Applause)
Unidentified Speaker: What’s the best way to feed you intelligence? We’re all out in the field, we hear things.
Ben Shapiro: Yeah, absolutely.
Unidentified Speaker: Yeah. For insurance, I had a friend who was an NBC investigative reporter. And ownership changed hands. And they came in, and they eliminated 200-and-some investigative reporters, cutting them down to 85. She doesn’t know she ended up in the thing. But her name was Cohen, and I think they thought she was a liberal. But she said they were told they don’t need that many investigative reporters anymore; they were going to be told what was the news.
Ben Shapiro: Oh, interesting. I mean, there’s no question that there’s a tremendously high level of coordination between this particular White House and its favored members of the mainstream media. Media Matters was having weekly calls at one point with the White House to help message out to the MSNBCs and the CNNs. There’s a high level of coordination.
In terms of how you can give us information – Andrew Breitbart was fond of saying that anybody with a cell phone is now a reporter. You know, if you have a camera on your phone – so get rid of the flip phones, gang – if you have a camera on the phone, you’re now a reporter. And you have all the means necessary in order to report on the news. We can’t watch everything. And David mentioned, Media Matters had 27 employees. Remember, Media Matters had 27 employees to basically watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh. We have me and seven part-time employees to do NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and what is left of liberal talk radio, the two people who listen to Mike Malloy.
So that means that we do need all your help. If you see something, don’t assume that we saw it. You know, we have a [box] at TruthRevolt – it’s in the upper right-hand corner. You can click there, you can email us direct with any tips that you have on the media. We’ve gotten some of our best material that way. The Steve Liesman thing was a tip that we got. It was somebody who actually tweeted at me and saw it on CNBC. And we immediately went and grabbed the tape and found out it was true, and cut it and put it up.
So everybody is now an activist. Everybody now has the ability to be an activist and make a difference in this fight. And not only are we doing this at TruthRevolt; we have a great relationship with Breitbart, because I’m still editor at large over there. So we can post our material here there, and play it up. And we can get attention for virtually anything that the Left media does wrong.
So we now have the bullhorn. It’s just a matter of what voice we want to go into the bullhorns. That can be your voice. Just let us know, and give us the information.
Unidentified Speaker: Thank you.
(Applause)
David Horowitz: The site is truthrevolt.org. That’s the way you find it.
We have another site called discoverthenetworks.org, which is an encyclopedia on the Left, which goes hand-in-hand with this.
As Ben was talking, I think one of the things that has always – again, it’s the strength of the Right that the Right is about individualism. But it’s also a weakness. The Left is about solidarity. And you don’t find a lot of cooperation among conservative groups.
But now, this network – we have Breitbart, Drudge – this is going to be very, very powerful. And you have to understand, what he’s talking about is six weeks old. So we are at the beginning.
Ben Shapiro: We’re going to win. We will. We’ll get there. We just have to be willing to punch back, and we now have the means to do it. So thank you.
David Horowitz: Right. Thank you all.
(Applause)
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Leave a Reply