Below are the video and transcript to a panel discussion on the new Freedom Center initiative “Change the Game,“ which was featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Sonnie Johnson: About four years ago I met my political soulmate. We were young. We knew nothing. We came straight from the ghetto, and we saw the problems in our community. And we fell under our elders, as youths should do, and we listened to their advice, and we did what they said until we said, you know what? Y’all don’t know what y’all doing. It’s time for us to start doing something on our own.
For four years when I need prayer, when I need counsel, when I’m down, when I’m knocked out, when I have no breath left, when I feel like I can’t fight anymore, I call this man, and he prays with me, he counsels me, he gives me advice, and then in the end he says, it’s your job now and lays everything on my footsteps. And because he did that, I feel strong enough to take it on. Mr. Kevin Daniels.
Kevin Daniels: When I met Sonnie four years ago, she was right, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but it’s something, when you find someone that you believe in so much, that God gives you the foresight to see not what that person is but what that person could become, and I walk with her side by side with what she is trying to do. She has a huge vision, and she’s going to share it, and everyone else is going to share their pieces in it. But being able to walk with her through this journey has been great for me. And she is a jewel. She is a diamond in the rough. And with the vision that she laid out for Change the Game, I’ll just give a brief overview of it, then I’ll step aside.
It’s an ambitious vision. A lot of people said that it can’t be done. A lot of people said that we shouldn’t do it. And when you look at, from the right and from the conservatives and Republican movement, they talk a lot about not engaging this population of people because they’re not going to support us anyway. It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of money. Sonnie disagrees with that, as well as I, because in these communities that we’re going after, that we’re targeting, there’s a lot of people that are like Sonnie and I, that may not have gotten the right start, but the finish, the potential, the possibilities that they all have is something that we’re really going to push with Change the Game.
When we launched this project – we launched in September, September 2, right, Tracy? September 2 we launched the web site. Three months later when you go on the Internet and you look at the organizations that have similar structures that we do, we are ranked No. 2 in the nation in that, and we haven’t even gotten started yet. So far our activities have been web site primarily. We do radio interviews, well, they do radio interviews, and you won’t see me doing any of that stuff. I’m a behind the scenes guy. But when we leave here, we are going to implement a ground game where we are going into these historically black colleges and universities, we’re going into these inner city neighborhoods, and we’re going to push the twin pillars of freedom and liberty everywhere that we go. And we’re going to be very strategic and deliberate in our actions. I’m not a big fan of activity with no goals. So we’re setting goals. We’re going to be very targeted in our efforts. But not only that, the umbrella of the Freedom Center, there’s a lot of projects that are up underneath it, and we want to make sure that we don’t operate independently of them. So we’re going to connect with TruthRevolt, we’re going to work with FrontPage, we’re going to work with everyone that’s up underneath that umbrella to try to undergird them so we can all reach that same goal. David is here now, and he has a great vision with the Freedom Center, and we’re going to connect with all those different organizations so we can move the needle forward.
Now when people say that this thing won’t work, they look at Sonnie, they see how she’s dressed, they look at Kevin, they see how he’s dressed, they look at the suits and the dresses, but someone had to engage us. Someone had to empower us. Someone had to give us the information that we needed in order for that light to be turn on in our lives, in our eyes, so that we can understand what conservative principles are and what they mean, and then how to apply it to our lives and live it. My background is, I was born and raised in Westchester County, New York, lived in Section 8 housing for the first 17 years of my life, parents separated when I was six, my mother died of AIDS when I was 15 years old. I attempted to go to college, didn’t work out that well. I didn’t have a great foundation. How many more people in these inner cities have a similar story? How many people in these inner cities have a similar story to myself and Sonnie, as well as the other panelists that are up here?
So before we launched the web site September 2, a week prior we launched a Liberalville video. We’re not going to call Chicago, Illinois – there’s too many cities out there to name. But what Sonnie did four years ago, and it’s ironic that she mentioned four years ago when we met, because she created this video called Liberalville that we didn’t actually release until August of this year. And so when we look at Liberalville, Sonnie says something very powerful in there. She says I want to show you what I see when you remove the Democratic elite. She goes on to talk about eight individuals, eight characters in the Liberalville video, and she doesn’t look at what they are and what they’re doing. She looks at the possibilities that this individual has, and that’s what we’re looking at doing when we look at people. We have initiatives – taking people to street corners, to corner offices – that’s an initiative that we have where we’re going to push entrepreneurship, we’re going to push small business to these communities because these communities need an economic base. We’re going to push education, school of choice, and I can run down a list of things that we’re going to do, but we’re going to have an aggressive, ambitious agenda. So I encourage you all to go to the web site that Tracy’s going to talk about soon, but look at this video Liberalville. It’s about three minutes long, and it’s a spoken word piece. And look at the foresight that Sonnie had back then, and then look at what’s happening in these inner cities and these communities now. There’s one that just came to mind. She’s talked about the politician, and we all know what’s going on in Ferguson right now. But she said back then, she said the politician has no desire until shots are fired and people need someone to blame. Sonnie was talking about this years ago. The vision that she is laying out for Change the Game, what we’re going to do when we leave this Restoration Weekend is going to be impactful, and we are No. 2 now, but we’re coming for that No. 1 spot. So that organization that is there, they got to move to the side. So thank you for your time. I think you all for your support. Appreciate what you’re doing, and thank you.
Sonnie Johnson: Okay. About two years ago or three years ago I was in Providence, Rhode Island, just one of my kind of very first events that I went to, and I really didn’t know anyone so I was kind of always by myself, and I’m walking down this hall, and I hear, “Sonnie freaking Johnson!” And it stopped me in my tracks. I stopped in my tracks. And I turn around, and this girl is standing there, and she said, “We’re going to be best effing friends,” but she used the word. And I, oh my gosh, this big bubble of personality, this big bubble of light, and for the last three years she has helped to sharpen me mentally. We talk about everything. Hardly do we ever agree, but we are friends first and foremost before anything started with us working together. Last year she had the chance to operate her panel, and she said I want you to come and be on my panel. It took me less than two seconds to say of course, if you need it, you got it. Now, we work together with Change the Game, and she is going to show you the awesomeness that is Ms. Tracy Connors.
Tracy Connors: All right. I wanted to give everybody a brief tour of the site. If you haven’t been there, I suggest going. You might not like everything that you see, but that’s not the point. David came to me and said, “Hey, I hear there’s a web site called Buzz Feed. Could we get something like Buzz Feed going on?” I still don’t think he’s ever visited Buzz Feed, but we said okay, we can do something like that. I apologize about the dimensions on this right now, but this is our main page. So you can see, hang on, this is unacceptable. Yeah, it’s cutting off part of the page. All right there we go. Now you can see the page. All right. Now I’ll make it bigger. There we go. Okay. So as you can see, you probably don’t think you’re on a political web site at all, right? Anyway, so we’ve got stories about pop culture mixed in with stories about news and issues that we care about and we think we can reach our readers with and the audience that we’re bringing in. So the people that care that the BET just cancelled one of their favorite shows, they’re going to go and read this story, and then over on the side they’re going to find commentary by Sonnie, which you can’t see over here, where it’s talking about Jimmy Fallon insulting Mia Love, but not in the way that you would think. So it’s a way to get people into our world that would never come and visit to begin with.
When you get to go to the site – which is ctghq.org, or for those who struggle with initials, it’s changingthegame.org as well you can get there – you search around and you’ll see that on the sides, you can catch it kind of a little bit, you’ll be confronted with our issues section and our knowledge section of the site. And this is where we’re really pushing the things that Kevin touched on and Sonnie talked about. So we find stories that we can put an entertaining spin on but to deal with these kind of issues. And then for people that aren’t totally familiar with everything we’re talking about we’ve started to build out a whole section where they can learn some history that they might not have known, understand basic economics, read speeches, read our founding documents, learn more about the progressive movement, and if they don’t understand the language we’re using, I put together an entire dictionary of political words and phrases, and it’s linked back in articles, and we use stuff that we think, hey, the average person might not know what that means. So let’s never talk down to our audience. Let’s make sure they have all the information we can possibly share with them.
And we’ve got a great selection of videos too so if you’re looking for that Liberalville video that Kevin talked about, you’ll find it in the videos section. And now, speaking of videos, I’ve got one to show all of you guys to catch you up on what we’ve been doing.
[Video Recording]
Sonnie Johnson: I have to share a moment of clarity with you real quick.
I’m guessing the moment should have came,
When my brain was lit on fire with facts and names,
I had never known.
I’m guessing you will all question the lesson I learned,
To turn me to the right side or the white side,
Depending on who asks.
I’m guessing that’s why you look surprised,
That instead of pulling out a prerecorded line,
From my talking points bag,
I rhyme instead.
I’m guessing some are saying, “She’s on a college campus.
She should be serious.”
I am.
So serious in fact, to give you my moment of clarity,
First I have to give you all of me.
Poetry.
I stopped one step short of asking for a beat.
Now back to this moment of clarity of which I speak.
I always get asked the same question.
What made you a conservative?
I hate that damn question.
Apathy, indifference or frustration,
Five years later God speaks, revelation,
Time has been wasted on irrelevant procrastination,
Because my moment didn’t come from man.
My moment didn’t come from the church.
My moment didn’t come from politics.
My moment didn’t come from culture.
My moment started with the people.
How much death could we take?
How much poverty could we embrace,
Where hopes and dreams are at stake?
How many God-given talents would we waste,
And the only place that I can find,
Voices that sound like mine,
That cry the same tears,
Experience the same fears,
With the same goals and aspirations,
The same drives and calculations,
The same observations,
That make hope and change negligible as an actual destination,
Are in hip-hop.
So I rhyme because I’m serious,
I rhyme because I’m furious.
I don’t care who doesn’t like it.
I need young ones to hear this:
We are dying.
Whether we kill our babies in the womb,
Or follow drugs to the tomb,
Or lay unemployed in our mother’s living room,
Whether we pull triggers and kill our own reflection,
Or use the haves and have-nots in our selection,
Or destroy the lives of others due to our own depression.
If you want to talk police brutality,
Then stop pushing gun laws that lessen citizens’ protection,
Because we are dying.
And that’s my moment clarity.
And if I had to say it without rhyme,
There would be tears in my eyes and a frog in my throat,
And I wouldn’t be able to cope,
Because when I say that we’re dying,
I don’t mean it as a political trope,
We are dying,
Leaving our streets blood soaked.
Enough.
And that’s why I do what I do. That’s why I created Change the Game. To me this isn’t about politics. This isn’t about garnering political favor. I am tired of seeing people I love die. I am tired of seeing people I love incarcerated. I am tired of seeing people who look like me don’t feel like they’re a part of the America that I know blood has been split for them to be a part of. That is why this is so important. I don’t care if you like hip-hop. It is not meant for you to like. It is meant for me to take a conservative message into the black community and show them there is a methodology to stopping the death in our communities. And that’s what I will do until I have no more breath in my body.
[End of video recording]
Sonnie Johnson: And so as you can see, I have my right hand and my left hand thoroughly taken care of. Two of my favorite people in the entire world, Kevin Daniels and Tracy Conners. So I’m going to take a few minutes to speak now, and then we’re going to go ahead and introduce the rest of the panel, and we’re going to have some fun. But I want to take a few minutes to speak on some things before we go.
I guess we’re in a celebratory mood. We got to see the Republicans take over the Senate, and we got to see a lot of House seats, state House seats, change over. We got to see Republicans become governors in states we never thought we would never see a republican governor in. Even though I’m sad that Maryland went red, and I live in Virginia and we’re still blue. So I was a little upset and hurt by that. If we are getting close to Maryland I’m scared, and I might be looking for a place to relocate. West Palm Beach is very nice this time of year.
So we have a lot of things to celebrate, but I want to question how we celebrate. So please indulge me for a moment, and I want to talk about Mia Love. Let’s see if you’ll be clapping when I finish. I love Mia Love. I had the opportunity of meeting her and speaking with her and hearing her conservative principles, and last time when she ran she told me the struggle she was having with having conservatives come and back her, getting help for her race. She lost. So instead of giving up, she said I’ll do it, and I’ll do it my way. I’m not going to wait until campaign season. I’m going to keep going from where I finished and never stop. So this year when she ran, we all cheered. Until the next morning. And I got up, and I scrolled through my Facebook page, and I scrolled through Twitter, and there was not a mention of her conservative principles. There was no mention of what she had fought for and how hard she had fought to get where she was. There was no mention of her story. There was no mention of her fight. There was no mention of her tactics. The only mentioned about Mia Love was she was black, she was a woman, she was a Mormon, and she was a Republican. And everybody cheered. And then they say, I’m glad we’re not the party of identity politics.
I don’t believe we are the party of identity politics. What we are is reactive. Whatever progressives do, we react. So they ignore Mia Love, so we take it upon ourselves to make sure that everyone knows her name. And that’s cool because if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? But we don’t talk about her principles. We don’t talk about any of those things. No, we stay on the identity of it because we want them to know that we are not racist. Guess what? They’re still calling you racist. It does not work. It is a fallacy that I have watched for four years, time and time again. And it’s very funny because we have their playbook. We have Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” We know what they’re going to do before they do it. So what have we done to Mia Love? And that’s a serious question. What have we, as conservatives, done to Mia Love. We have painted a bull’s-eye on her back. All they have to do now is destroy her because it’s not about her policies, it’s not about her principles, it’s not about her fight, it’s not about her struggle, it’s not about her tactics, it is about her. What do they do? They target, they ridicule, they separate, they demonize and they destroy, and we give them the targets.
I’ll give you an example of this from something that happened in the last two years with Cliven Bundy. Instead of making it about government against the people, which was the issue, instead of making it about private property, which was the concept, instead of making it about liberty and justice and big government coming in and crushing the individual – no. We didn’t make it about those things. We made it about Cliven Bundy. So as soon as Cliven Bundy opens his mouth and says something stupid, we lose everything. Because it’s no longer about what we’re fighting for. Now they have someone to demonize. Do you remember how many times they put his face everywhere? And they took what we had as a perfectly good message, and they destroyed us with it. And the funny part was yet again we gave them the target by making it about the individual. In this we know what they’re going to do, and we must become the people that no longer play by their rules and their game, hence change the game.
See? I told you all. It’s a question of whether or not you’ll like it at the end. Because it’s an uncomfortable truth. You want to feel good. You have this joy. You want it expressed, but we have to understand how we’re expressing it. We can’t be them and beat them. We can’t do it. So we know what happens next. Everyone knows what happens next. The road will be paved for Hillary, and we will have a war on women, and we will have a war on race, and there will once again be a war on poverty, and we’re going to have more separation. They’re going to say again that you hate the rich. As soon as a Republican dares decide that they want to cut something: “You will hate the rich! you hate them!” I mean the poor. [Laughter.] You hate the poor. But it turns into, “You hate the poor! You hate minorities! You hate women! You hate dogs!” I’m guessing they’re going to tell you you hate whatever it is they want to throw at you at that moment. So we know what’s coming. Do we wait and do we react to this? Or do we say not this time? Because I’m on the not this time bandwagon. I can’t sit by and watch it anymore when I know what happens next. So if no one else is going to say it, then I’ll be the one to say it. If I say it alone, I’ve done it before. It doesn’t bother me one bit.
They’re coming at us, and instead of this time us saying – anyone remember Andrew Breitbart? Andrew – if you have ever seen Hating Breitbart, he has this excellent piece in Hating Breitbart, and he has all these progressives standing around him, and they’re yelling in his face, they’re calling him racist, they’re calling him this, they’re calling him that, and Andrew, cool as a cucumber, said, “And?” One word had never been so powerful to me in my entire life because I knew what he meant. I’m not wasting my time playing these games with you. You still never answered my question about whatever it was he was asking at the time. I’m not going to sit here and play your games. You can call me all the names you want. Still, would you like to answer my question anytime in that response? What that does is it takes away their argument because you don’t care. In order for them to be effective, you have to care. So when they call you names, you have to get offended. When they call you out of character, then you have to say, “But I’m not!” ”All Republicans are racist!” ”We have Mia Love!“ The same point still applies. We aren’t moving the needle. We aren’t changing anything. Didn’t we have Clarence Thomas before? Didn’t we have Condoleezza Rice? Did any of that change anything? What makes you think mere Love is going to change something? Not politically speaking. Good gracious, I love the woman. Go to Congress, do what you do. I’m talking from the progressive point of view. It’s not going to change them. So we know their tactics, we know where they’re coming at. So this is what we’re going to do for next year. Trust this little bit of this vision for you guys. We love capitalism and we’re not running from it. You say we love the rich, yes we do. So those of us who are not rich yet, we’re on our way.
We have some stuff we got to make up, and we’re not there yet, but I tell you one thing, we’re hustling every day of the week to get there. And you’re not going to make us feel bad about it. You’re not going to make me feel sad about it. You’re not going to make me cry about it. People who want to live in the situation of poverty, people who want to live in public housing, people who want food stamps, people who want welfare, you are perfectly fit to be a Democrat. We don’t want you. You can stay all day long, and it’s fine with us. What we want is the get up, get out and get something generation. We want the ones who are not satisfied with what they have. We want the ones who say, you know what? This isn’t going to be my life. One day, I’m going to be in the governor’s office like Kevin Daniels. One day I am going to run The Blaze, and I’m going to do investigative work, and I’m going to shake up Texas. One day I am going to start writing a blog that makes everyone stand up and take notice so when my Karen Davis piece comes out it’s 2,000 hits instantly. Those are the people we want. Those are the people we’re going after. And this is how we’re doing it. Come and eat at our table.
You say we’re the party of the rich. Think about how good the food tastes over here. And we’re not asking you to bring anything, just yourself. We don’t care about your past. We don’t care about your situation. We don’t care about any of that. We got a place open at our table for you to sit down and eat. The only condition that we put on to you coming and eating at our table is that next time we’re coming to your house to eat at your table because that’s what we do. You come eat with us, you become part of a family. You get a network. You get a backdrop. You get not just politics, you get prayer. You get acceptance. You get people who care about what’s going on in your family life, not just what’s going on in the polls. You get something that a lot of us in the black community definitely don’t get from Democrats, that’s why they didn’t show up in this last election. We have the table, and we’re opening that table for you to come and eat with us. Our table starts with Change the Game at the web site. Come and eat from our politics. Come and eat from our culture. Come and eat from our history. Come and eat from our economics. Come and eat from our spoken word. Come and eat until you are so full you have no choice but to say get up and let somebody else come and have a seat. That’s how we want you to eat because then we know you walk away feeling inspired, feeling empowered. So what do you do? You go make your own table. And then you start feeding the people around you.
Do you know the best way to cut welfare? Make people not want to be in poverty. That way there’s no congressional vote, there’s no demonization, it’s none of that because you have people who willingly leaving the system because they want something more. They see the American dream, and now they know that they can be a part of it. Where they saw no route before, they saw no way before, impossibility like they told me a thousand times it can’t be done – ha-ha. We got our table. It can be done. Those doubts should not exist. Come and eat with us. The simplicity of it. And that’s what we’re going to do next year as far as our overall mission and our overall focus. We know they’re going to demonize us, we know they’re going to hate us, we know that some people like where they are and they’re going to want to stay where they are. But we know that a lot of black people like money, a lot, especially when you didn’t have it growing up. So that’s our message, an economic message, a platter full of food to eat, a family that you become a part of, an American dream realized. And to me that encompasses what Change the Game is.
So that’s what we plan on doing going forward, and that’s my vision of how we’re going to do this, not distracted when they want to call us names. We’re going to stand in their face and say, and you still haven’t answered my question about school choice, you’re just a show for the conservatives. You still didn’t answer my question. We’re not going there. If that’s the conversation you want to have then you can go to your table and have that conversation. Don’t come over here with that. So that’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to stop because you all know how I get if I don’t.
So what I want to do now is in addition to my right and my left hand, I started to build a tent. And I love the idea of – Tracy created this wonderful graphic for me, and I absolutely adore it, so I wanted to make sure everyone got to see it. That’s our Change the Game tent. That’s our table. It signifies to me, I loved it the moment I saw it, but I said I have to start filling this tent. So I had to pick some of my favorite people, and I wanted people who were already active, I wanted people who had already been beaten down, I wanted people who had already took their strikes and were still fighting. Those that didn’t give up, those that refuse to give up, come to eat at my table. Those are the kind of people that I love.
So I’m going to introduce to you all them one by one. I’m going to let each one of them talk, and then we’re going to have some fun. First up, I want to, from Washington D.C., he is PopGlitz, he is DC Pundit, and he’s one of my favorite people because his favorite place to go is Democrat headquarters, Javonni Brustow.
Javonni Brustow: Hello, everyone. I wanted to go over the reason why I’m a Republican because I felt that I am the elephant in the room, and that needed to be addressed. As we know, Sonnie Johnson’s project, Change the Game, is about minority outreach, and I felt who else would be better than the super minority in the room to go over there. So I live in liberal Washington as we know. I’m a writer and a conservative that is pretty visible in both conservative circles and in Democrat headquarters. Why I put myself through that, sometimes I have no idea. I get beat up on a daily basis, but such is life. That’s what I chose. For starters, I am a Republican based on my hard work. It’s not something that’s taught by the left. If I were to listen to Democrats, I feel that they would let me know that by myself being in DC and where I am, I wouldn’t be able to hang around there for long.
I was able to spend the last couple days with Ann Coulter, and for me to be around her as I took pictures and sent it back through social media over the last few days, the responses that I got were absolutely unbelievable. If I were to listen to my liberal followers, they would let me know that Ann would have flown up here on the dais on her broom with her witch hat, and I probably would have been shot and wouldn’t make it out of Florida. I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. I work out every day, I think I could take her, a couple pounds give or take, I don’t know.
I have beaten every Democrat stereotype. I have to deal with the question of how did you end up in the Republican Party? What went wrong? I know so many liberal politicians, and it’s the same thing, and they’re like, okay, when that’s done, you can come over here. It hasn’t happened yet.
My thing is that I have – when I was a teenager I worked three jobs in order to move into my first place, which was a luxury apartment building. Again, that was not easy. Hard work is just one of my things. For anyone who’s ever questioned what type of work ethic that I have, I feel like that is the basis or the crux of the Republican Party. It’s about hard work. I had a very hard-ass family. They were very tough, and if anyone were to question if I actually work, those are like fighting words for me. Aside from Change the Game, I do have an entertainment site, a political site. I just joined Hip-Hop Republican, I’m with the Examiner.
I’m working 24 hours a day, and as for any of the arguments about racism and discrimination, they’ve never played any part in life for me. I’ve never accepted excuses. They don’t make any sense because I’m always too busy working. I don’t have time to go over statistics. Thank you. When I turn on MSNBC and I see Al Sharpton speaking and I’m hearing about how awful things are – number one, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed if I listened to him. It’s too depressing. But with that being said, I don’t have the time to look at it. I have things to do. I work with staff, I have staff, and again, 24 hours a day. I don’t drink coffee until 1:00 in the morning for nothing every night.
So that’s that, hard work, and the other thing, I wanted to mention: gay marriage. Now, I don’t want to be shot up here. I know that’s a form of profanity, and be nice because I can hear gag reflexes. What I wanted to mention is that, in case no one’s noticed, I don’t think that I have to go over that, but I think that I would like to have a long-term relationship, and one of the arguments that I tend to have is, they say, well, you’re in a party that doesn’t like you. And I said well, what are we, 12? I think that I last stopped caring about anyone’s opinion in high school. And I just explained to someone earlier, I said I went to four schools. One closed for money laundering. I moved around a couple times. And I have never seen any of these people since then, which means that I am pretty sure that I have come out successful. I think that’s really all that matters, and I don’t think that the government has any type of say in the end result of my life or anyone else’s life, period. So a sheet of paper for anything really does not make that much of a difference. If you decide to do something, I can have an attorney and say at the end of the day this is my shit, this is yours, when it is over you don’t touch my shit over here, and I will not touch yours over there. End of discussion. No one’s opinion mattered, and, again, the government, it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. In fact, I was engaged before, and I don’t think I even ever looked up to find out if it were legal. I didn’t care. I said I guess whenever it happens, hey, I have an attorney on speed dial. That will be it. But I just wanted to explain myself and how I’ve become a Republican, and that there is a myriad of people in demographics that are within the party. So wanted to thank you.
Sonnie Johnson: The very first time I met with Javonni I didn’t know what to expect. He had me laughing for three hours. He is one of the funniest people that I have ever met in my entire life, and I am so proud to have him part of our team.
Now, our cowboy, because I told him, I said you kind of fit the stereotype, Billy. Your name is Billy, dude, come on. But if you don’t know this man, you might remember that some Obamacare people down in Texas got their money revoked. Obamacare – what are they called? – the navigators. They got all of their financing snatched. That’s my cowboy. And now you can see him as a regular on Dana Loesch’s TV show on The Blaze, and he’s one of my favorite people in this entire world, Lawrence Billy Jones III.
Lawrence Jones: Thank you for having me, and I want to thank my big sis for just inviting me to break bread with you guys and just talk about some issues. I’m going to be very brief because we want to have some fun. Years ago Frederick Douglass had given a speech, and he was really rallying the people in Washington DC to make a difference, and there were a lot of young people there. And one of them, after the speech was over, Frederick Douglass, he was tired, and he was just ready to get back home, and that one child came up to him. He said, Mr. Douglass, “Mr. Douglass, what can I do? How can I get involved? How can I make a difference?” And Frederick Douglass gave him three words – agitate, agitate, agitate.
And when I joined my big sis’ organization I was pretty skeptical about joining any organization, but I knew that she knew what the real mission was, and she said, Lawrence, your name is going to be the community agitator. And that’s exactly what I do. I come from a background, my mom was 16 when she had me. We had never had anything the easy way. Everything was about working hard. Ninth grade I was recruited by the Democratic Party to work for Obama. They flew me out to DC. We laid the groundwork to get him elected, working with Organizing for America, and they told me, sir, I don’t care what you believe, but you can never be a conservative because you are black. Even though I agreed with the ideology, you could never be a conservative.
Well, we never had anything easy. I had my first job when I was 15. I was working at a leasing agency, and my godmother was white, and I said look, you’re different. Well she said, I’m a Republican, and you see things just like me. It was at that moment that I opened myself to what Republicans in the conservative movement were doing, and I figured out that I was lied to. Oh, I was pissed. I was mad as hell. Y’all don’t understand, when I worked for the Democrats I did research. I’m a private investigator by trade, and I dug up dirt. I went after conservatives because I thought they were on the other side. But when I got mad at liberals, they had something coming.
I spent two years traveling with organizations like Freedom Works trying to get the conservative message out there, and I was speaking from my investigative skills that we have to expose the left for what they really are. We know what they’re about. It’s about power, money and greed and whatever they need to do to deceive you to believe that Republicans and conservatives are against you, they will do it.
And I’m speaking this speech, and the crowd is like, what is he talking about? And this man comes up to me, and he says, I need to really introduce you to somebody, and he introduces me to James O’Keefe. I spent the next year undercover in the Democratic Party in Battleground Texas, and because of that we shut down the whole Navigator program in the state of Texas. You can have Obamacare, but you can’t sign up in Texas.
And so back to my mission. And been on cable news. And that’s all fine and dandy. Giving speeches is all fine and dandy, but if we cannot attract a different generation of leaders, if we cannot go to all communities across America, then we have done nothing. And so what I do, I don’t come with my suit and tie on to those communities. I come with my Jordans, my Nikes, I come with sweats sometimes on, my cowboy boots and my hat, and I agitate the community because what is the problem today? And we see this in Ferguson. People are angry, but they’re mad at the wrong people. And so it’s time for a new generation of leaders that aren’t afraid to go into different types of communities. You know, I didn’t accept the RNC job because, like I told them, y’all trying to have a one night stand with black voters, and game recognize game. You will never get them to vote for you if you just come during election time. And so I go into these communities, and I agitate them. You see what your congressman is doing? Yeah, he’s black, too. Do you realize he’s voting against your community? What? I got it on tape, you want to see it? Do you see that when they sign you up for Obamacare they are storing your personal information then selling it out for political purposes?
What we have to realize is that we have a group of people that once they get sick and tired of being sick and tired, they will change the way they vote. Once they get tired of being on food stamps, on housing, when they get tired of the government taking their money, when they get tired of staying in failing schools, they will change the way they vote.
It was when I realized that my parents worked for every single thing that we had and that my 16-year-old mother married my father and they built the family together, and nobody was going to rob me from that, that I changed the way I believed. We got to get it, conservative, because we’re hooraying about this conservative victory that’s just taken place, but like I said on The Blaze the other day, we didn’t do anything. We did absolutely nothing. Candidates went around the country campaigning against Obama. We didn’t really present our proposal. That’s what we have to do conservatives. The battle is not over yet. We have to go into these communities, agitate, let them know who’s really against them, and once we expose the Democratic Party, the liberals and progressives for the frauds they are, it’s game over. Time to change the game.
Sonnie Johnson: And they keep trying to tell me I’m the only one. All right, Ms. Kira. I bonded with her in a cornfield. It’s true. Look, everybody would laugh when they hear that. No, we bonded in a cornfield, literally out in the middle of nowhere, and I found that just like me and Tracy, me and Kira don’t agree on everything. But she is my favorite person on this earth to disagree with. Five minutes after our disagreement, we have a scotch in hand. That’s my Kira Davis.
Kira Davis: Yeah, you can clap for that. Okay, thank you, Sonnie. Yes, we did. That’s a true story. We did meet in the middle of a cornfield, and maybe I’ll tell that to you to you later if you want to hear it. But one of the reasons that we don’t always agree on everything, my background’s a little different. I’m actually an immigrant. I immigrated from Canada at the age of 17. I was born to a black American father and a white Canadian mother, and I was raised in eastern Canada for most of my life. I didn’t meet my own father until I was ten years old. He had left before my mother even knew she was pregnant.
But when I was ten, I had the opportunity to travel to the United States for the first time, a place I had only ever seen on TV. I knew there were other black people, I just didn’t know where they were. So I was really excited. I flew by myself, and my dad’s family picked me up in Boston. I got off the plane at Boston Logan Airport. First time I ever set foot on American soil. And I will never forgot how it smelled and felt and looked. It was so different than where I had come from, a rural kind of fishing community, and it was vibrant. There were so many different types of people I had never seen, black and brown and orange and yellow, and yeah, people with – and I was so amazed at how you could go anywhere and buy anything. I know a lot of people are surprised to hear a Canadian say that, but Canadians don’t have the same kind of freedom that Americans have. This brand of freedom we have in this country is very unique. It’s unique to us. It really does need to be protected. I don’t think you realize that until you travel outside, but I remember that moment of all of those sights and sounds and smells coming down on me and thinking to myself, I’m going to be an American someday.
And from that moment on, it was my goal in life to become an American. And I left home as soon as I could. I came to school here in the U.S. and went to school in Iowa. I met my husband there. We married. It still took ten years and thousands of dollars to get my citizenship, but I did it the right way. It’s a privilege to be an American. I can’t emphasize enough how honored I am to be American, and when I began serving in the black community, my husband and I had an after-school program, we would invite children to come and use computers, and we would tutor them and mentor them for free. And I was, even though I was very passionate about America, I still was a socialist liberal because you’re in Canada you’re just by default hockey and socialism, they just go together.
And I realized, I’m serving this community, I’m realizing, all these policies that I have supported my whole life, I’m watching how they work, and they don’t. And I just thought one day, I can’t do this anymore. I’m not helping these kids, I’m distancing them from success with the politics of victimization and by telling them that white people don’t want you in their places. I wasn’t incentivizing them, they were just becoming cogs in the machine. And so it was during that time that I realized, no, I really am a conservative. This is what I believe. I started studying American history, and when I read the constitution for the first time, mind blown, like this is one of the most inspired documents on the face of the planet, the Bible, the Constitution of the United States of America. Which is not an accident, which is not an accident. They go hand in hand.
But I want to wrap up because we want to do some Q&A. We want you guys to know how we view things as black Americans so that you might not be able to do what we do, but that you know what we want to do so you can at least support us, and that’s who we’re going to win this battle, that’s how we’re going to win back this country, by understanding we can’t all be on all fronts. This is a war, but you have to know which battle you’re in. Pick that battle, and do it. So we’re in this battle, and so we want you to know a little bit about what we want to do. But before I go, this is what I want to say. When I came here, even though as a teenager I was still pretty liberal, I still had the innate sense that there was something very special about the brand of freedom that is America, and now I tell my kids, look, just by being born in this country you are already five steps ahead of the game. You’re already five steps ahead simply by accident of birth. You need to nothing more than be born here to have more than almost everybody on this planet. I don’t care if you live in the hood or the suburbs, it’s the same thing. I say this all the time. America doesn’t owe you an opportunity, America is the opportunity.
Audience Member: One think I would ask is that you have a menu because in the beginning you said when you started this that we really need to know how to address the attacks, and you have given us some good examples today, and I appreciate that immensely. So I would say at that table you need a menu for us, something that perhaps the Horowitz group can continue to share with us on how to handle some of these situations and issues.
Sonnie Johnson: I will gather all my blog posts because basically that’s what I write about. Continuously, personally, me, I have no choice but the two-pronged approach because while I’m talking to the black community, I also have a conservative base, and my base doesn’t understand when I’m talking to the community, and my community doesn’t understand when I’m talking to the base. So I always do a two-pronged approach. I always will make sure that I have an argument that’s framed that fits the black community, and I have an argument that’s framed that conservatives can understand. The problem is when people hear this they call it pandering. No. It’s knowing who your audience is. It is the first step of owning any business or running any venture or anything else you do. If you don’t know who your audience is, you will fail. So I always take into account who it is I’m talking to. It doesn’t matter, you’re going to get Sonnie Johnson either way. That part of it isn’t going to change. But I am aware and alert enough to understand that, and I will do that. I will make that something that I do and make sure that, I guess I’ll work with David to see how we can make it available for everyone to be able to grab hold of it.
Kira Davis: In the next few years it’s going to be really important, there’s going to be a lot of these young groups, these kids coming up, groups like us that will need your support. So yeah, you might not be able to go into the hood and walk in and talk to people, and that’s fine, that’s okay. But to find the people who are doing that and support them, that support is as valuable as a dynamic personality like a Sonnie Johnson. So just keep that in mind as we move forward. Find someone you like and can support and throw everything behind them. It’s going to be more important than ever. The field is ripe for the picking, and we’re on our way to a big win in 2016 if we can hold that.
Lawrence Jones: Kira has been nice, but some conservatives just need to shut up when it comes to – seriously, and this is where Sonnie’s little bro comes into effect. There are a lot of conservatives, some of them are black conservative, that are screwing it when it comes to race relations and going into these different communities because they do not know what to say. If you don’t know what to say, shut up, it’s okay. Get behind organizations that know exactly what they’re doing. The RNC is not one. They fail. Okay. So what we need is for people all across that are in Freedom Center to continue to support this movement. It is proven, there’s a track record there where people are beginning to change their minds. They’re listening in whether it’s a podcast, radio show or TV show because they want to know what these type of conservatives are talking about. Thank you.
Sonnie Johnson: As you can see, I am a lucky girl. I am a happy girl, and David wasn’t here to hear this, but I am a sharp girl. We look forward to 2015, and we’re going to show America how restoration starts with Change the Game. Thank you all for coming.
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