Daniel Greenfield at Restoration Weekend: Taking on the Resistance

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Below is the video (and transcript) of remarks given by Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2024 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 21-24 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Naples, Florida.

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Transcript:

Thank you. Michael. You know, we lost a lot of speakers who were going to be here this weekend. And for a while, I was getting worried that the new Trump administration was going to draft Michael [Finch[] as its chief of staff. He would have been great at it. I was worried they were going to draft David Horowitz to be the secretary of education, and then, you know, we’d have to shut the whole organization down.

00:00:24:14 – 00:00:49:08

Unknown

But every time we actually do one of these events right after an election. We don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. Are people going to be happy? Are they going to be smiling faces around the table, sad faces around the table, confused faces around the table? Because California’s still counting its ballots, and we have to wait for them to find out how the election turned out.

00:00:49:11 – 00:01:13:15

Unknown

The good news is we don’t have to wait for California. We should never have to wait for California. And I say that as a Californian. But, you know, not everybody here might be on the same page. I think we have a dedicated hard core of Jill Stein supporters, Jill Stein supporters anywhere. Okay. What about Cornel West? Sorry, Dr. Cornel West.

00:01:13:17 – 00:01:32:10

Unknown

We could have had Harvard, Hamas and hip hop in the house at the same time. Okay, what about Claudia De La Cruz of the party for Socialism and Liberation. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in California, you had her on the ballot and in about six other states. You’re probably not too familiar with the party of socialism liberation.

00:01:32:10 – 00:01:57:00

Unknown

I’m going to talk about it in a little bit, but it’s basically the party you vote for if you think that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Cornel West are too right wing, it’s a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. No. Okay. What about Chase Oliver of the Libertarian Party? The guy who single handedly brought the old Saturday Night Live sketch about the gay Communist gun club to life.

00:01:57:02 – 00:02:17:12

Unknown

Now, personally, I was pulling for the Prohibition Party. You may not realize it. The Prohibition Party is still here. It doesn’t have a donkey or an elephant as a symbol, but a camel. Because a camel doesn’t drink. It’s the third oldest party in the United States. And they’re running on a platform of fighting racism, climate change and alcohol.

00:02:17:15 – 00:02:36:28

Unknown

Finally, a campaign I can drink to. But I have some mixed feelings about the election results. I have to be honest here. We also lost a lot of speakers. We were going to have some guy named JD Vance. I hear he’s hanging around some other part of Florida, maybe Palm Beach.

00:02:36:29 – 00:02:54:05

Unknown

I don’t know what he’s doing there, but okay, the party is right here. And I actually wrote an e-book. I wrote an e-book that is not out there for sale. My book, Domestic Enemies, is for sale. The e-book is not for sale. I worked hard on it. We put it out a few weeks before the election and it was getting traction.

00:02:54:05 – 00:03:18:02

Unknown

People were reading it and sharing it, and then the election night came and the e-book was The Truth About Kamala Harris. And nobody wants to know the truth about Kamala Harris anymore. I would warn people, don’t be too quick, because there was a recent Democrat poll showing that 41% of Democrats actually want Kamala in 2028. So we might still have Kamala to kick around somewhere.

00:03:18:04 – 00:03:41:11

Unknown

Gavin Newsom was only at 9%. So, you know, between them, 50% want a California politician in 2028. Please don’t do that. And you know Kamala could run for governor of California. There’s been conversations about that. She could run California into the ground some more. And if not, my favorite proposal as half prime minister of Jamaica, half prime minister of India.

00:03:41:17 – 00:03:56:17

Unknown

She spends six months in Jamaica, six months in India. She messes up both countries at the same time. And as long as she remembers to switch the accents from the Jamaican to the Indian one, she is absolutely good.

00:03:56:19 – 00:04:18:24

Unknown

But yes, we got it. We got The Truth about Kamala out there. Before I just print out a bunch of copies to burn in the backyard that I don’t have. I want to tell you for a minute about The Truth about Kamala. We got this out there about three weeks before the election. We did a deep dive into every element of her background, her policies, her corruption, her record, her associates, the people around her.

00:04:18:26 – 00:04:35:15

Unknown

And one of the things that are coming out now are a surprise us at all. She was spending $100 million a week, which is enough to buy a bunch of beachfront hotels around here. Much smarter investment, by the way, than that campaign. We actually did a piece that showed that she was doing the same thing.

00:04:35:15 – 00:04:58:13

Unknown

During her Senate campaign she was living large on fundraising and her family was actually running her campaign, which is not surprising because her sister ran the presidential campaign. Now her brother in law ran her campaign. But beyond that, we did a deep dive into every element of that. And why did this actually matter? Well, here’s an interesting thing that came out recently from a Democrat polling firm, Blueprint.

00:04:58:15 – 00:05:20:13

Unknown

They did a survey of swing voters, the swing voters who swung to Trump and actually decided the election. And this was pretty incredible. A quarter of the swing voters who switched to Trump did so in the last week of the election, or even on Election Day itself, which, by the way, means don’t give up phone banking, door knocking, messaging people, persuading your friends, persuading your enemies even until the very last minute.

00:05:20:13 – 00:05:40:29

Unknown

Because a lot of the swing voters, this is probably what decide the election actually happened in the last week of the election and more than a half of swing voters actually swung in the last few weeks of the campaign. Now, this is very important because the Democrats had based their campaign, why did they bring in Kamala in the first place, because she was more popular, more articulate than Joe Biden?

00:05:41:01 – 00:05:48:18

Unknown

It’s a low bar, but she wasn’t even that was what she was was new.

00:05:48:20 – 00:06:11:15

Unknown

What can I say? It’s a very low bar. 2028 Kamala 2028. But she was was unvetted. She was untested. Nobody really knew what she stood for, what she was. And they were betting on bringing her out surrounded with celebrities. Talk about joy all the time and you’re absolutely good. We don’t have to worry about it. Voters will decide in late September, early October and it’s over.

00:06:11:17 – 00:06:26:08

Unknown

Early voting will kick in and we don’t have to worry about it. So we actually put out our e-book, The Truth About Kamala late in the game, and a lot of people were saying it’s pointless. The election has already been decided. It’s over. And that was not the case.

00:06:26:08 – 00:06:44:27

Unknown

The swing voters actually kept on doing it. They decided at the very last minute because they wanted information. And that was the one thing that the Democrat, that the Kamala campaign did not want to give the public. They would do everything they would advertise on the Sphere, they would do a 2.5 million sit down with Oprah. They would bring celebrities who didn’t song but talk about abortion to fake concerts.

00:06:45:00 – 00:07:00:21

Unknown

But answer a straight question? Absolutely not. You know, people think the media was dneecapping Kamala. They were not kneecapping her. They were actually trying to work with her, they were like please, we want you to win. We want you to be elected. Just please work with us. Answer a question and she was like, sorry, no, can’t do. I was raised in middle class family.

00:07:00:22 – 00:07:17:14

Unknown

We don’t answer questions in middle class families. The media was really trying to pull for her. The media was trying to make this happen and it just did not work because she did not want to work. And on the other side, people were actually holding out. They were waiting for answers, waiting for information. And that’s what we did with The Truth about Kamala Harris.

00:07:17:19 – 00:07:39:06

Unknown

We got the information out there to the people who actually needed to hear it, and that’s what we do. That was a Freedom Search Center Investigates project, and we’re moving on. We are moving on because Kamala is probably not going to have a great future in public office, which means the book I was thinking of writing is also not happening, but I’ve never been this happy to put a book away.

00:07:39:09 – 00:08:06:20

Unknown

We are moving on. Freedom Center Investigates is moving on to the resistance. There was a resistance forming, you know. It’s the downtrodden, the oppressed, the wretched of the earth. Governors with their own vineyards. D.C. bureaucrats with six figure salaries, trust fund activists with Molotov cocktails. They are the resistance, they’re gathering. They’re preparing to protest. And riot in D.C.

00:08:06:20 – 00:08:26:26

Unknown

Of course, that is not an insurrection, you know. No, that’s not it’s, it’s dissent and that’s patriotic again, I’m very happy because I was patriotic before dissent was patriotic again, because I was dissenting because they decided dissent was patriotic again. And we are investigating them. We’re investigating who is behind all these resistance figures.

00:08:26:28 – 00:08:46:17

Unknown

Remember the Women’s March pink hats, Handmaid’s Tale costumes, signs saying, “You will have to pry my abortion out of my cold, dead body.” Now, the Women’s March, as they were preparing to do the DC protests, they actually held a dance party outside the Heritage Foundation. They brought a deejay. They said, you’re not going to take our joy away.

00:08:46:23 – 00:09:15:10

Unknown

And everybody there was crying. Of course, by then. So the Women’s March claims to be a women-led organization. Fun fact though, it’s actually led by a gay Muslim man. I am not making this up. So it’s a gay Muslim man led organization, which they don’t advertise for obvious reasons. Now, a gay  Muslim man is probably the man who of all the men in the world wants to have the least to do with women, and he’s leading the, Women’s March.

00:09:15:12 – 00:09:35:09

Unknown

But you know why? How did a gay Muslim man come to be leading the Women’s March? The answer is that all these front organizations are fake. They create populist groups like BLM or the Women’s March. Who’s actually behind them? Well, they have professional consultancies, managers, young activists who are funded by groups. In this case, it was the Ford Foundation sets up these consultancies.

00:09:35:09 – 00:10:04:21

Unknown

They parachute them in to take over organizations, and then they get all these backstories for the media about how they were so passionate about this. They built this grassroots organization from the ground up. You did not build the grassroots organization. It’s completely fake. And it’s so fake that you can have a gay  Muslim man leading a women-led organization. Another organization that we worked at, another face of the resistance at is a guy named Neville Roy Singham, currently living in that part of the United States known as Shanghai.

00:10:04:24 – 00:10:26:01

Unknown

Yeah. Singham is the communist equivalent of George Soros. He’s what George Soros would be if George Soros had no self control at all. So, you know, some some billionaire, some radical billionaires actually try to pretend to be something other than they are in other ways. Singham made a lot of money in America. He then moved to China.

00:10:26:05 – 00:10:49:21

Unknown

He’s sitting in a yellow and red office with, communist Chinese slogans on the walls. In case there was any subtlety to this at all. And he runs an international network of Chinese communist propaganda groups. He also runs something called the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which I mentioned at the very beginning. His candidate, he made it onto the ballot in six states from an organization that was controlled by Communist China.

00:10:49:23 – 00:11:24:02

Unknown

We really are rolling over for Communist China. You think Communist China lets American candidates run for office over there? Now, in all fairness, the Party for Socialism Liberation only got a little more votes than the Prohibition Party. But they also formed a united front with Jill Stein and the Green Party and Cornel West. So the top leftist, third party opposition parties all were actually part of a coalition that is controlled out of Communist China, which is a point you think the FBI would be investigating instead of school board parents or grandmothers.

00:11:24:05 – 00:11:45:26

Unknown

Now, beyond that, Singapore controls something called the People’s Forum, which is behind much of the pro Hamas violence in New York. And the People’s Forum is now preparing to do inauguration protests in DC. Originally, you might know them by a former name, which was International ANSWER, and they were actually behind a lot of the anti-war rallies during the Bush administration.

00:11:45:28 – 00:12:04:28

Unknown

So we now actually have the major opposition parties from the left that are not the Democratic Party controlled by China. And we actually have the main force of the resistance controlled by Communist China. And this is just what we turned up on the leaders of the resistance this week. That’s just this week. We have two articles on it.

00:12:05:06 – 00:12:22:29

Unknown

Come back next week, we’ll have more for you because as Michael said, we do not sleep… except on planes. Sometimes. I had to sleep on the plane going here. And we don’t eat except at very nicely catered event banquets. We do research. We actually get this information out there because the real lesson of this election is that information matters.

00:12:22:29 – 00:12:45:08

Unknown

Facts matter. I know there’s this perception, that this election was won on vibes. It was won on cultural stuff. Kamala had a body armor made out of celebrities. Trump went on Joe Rogan and yes, the culture war matters. We’ve all heard the expression, politics is downstream of culture, but information, this was an information war,  andinformation mattered because one side was giving information, the other side was not.

00:12:45:14 – 00:13:05:02

Unknown

Remember that Blueprint survey, of the Trump’s voters, the swing voters, the switch to Trump? Why did they switch the Trump? Well, because they knew certain facts about Kamala. And when I say this, I want to remind you, this is not coming from me. It’s not coming from Fox News,  America’s Voice or Newsmax. It’s coming from a Democrat polling firm that surveyed them.

00:13:05:07 – 00:13:29:06

Unknown

And what made their decision was that they knew that Kamala wanted to ban fracking, ban cars, ban private health insurance, open the border, defund the police, and, yes, provide taxpayer funded sex change operations to illegal aliens in prison. Who doesn’t want that? And again, I have to repeat this. These are questions that are coming out of a Democrat polling firm.

00:13:29:09 – 00:13:53:09

Unknown

This is why swing voters switched over to Trump. Because facts actually matter. The truth matters. Getting this information out to people matters. And that is what we do at the Freedom Center. That is what we’re doing with Freedom Center Onvestigates. We’re delving into all these various elements. We’re looking at burrowers in the administration. Burrowers are not some weird species of Florida insect that gets into your house.

00:13:53:11 – 00:14:16:12

Unknown

They might be forgiven for thinking that. It’s actually people who are political appointees who come in. They become career employees. We actually profiled a lady named Stacy Young who works at the Justice Department. She’s in the Cvil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which is the one division of the Justice Department you should destroy first, if the Department of Government Efficiency ever gets around it.

00:14:16:15 – 00:14:37:20

Unknown

The job of the Civil Rights Division is basically to interfere in elections, stage race riots. You can thank the Civil Rights Division for the enjoyable years of BLM race riots. Anyway, Stacy Young was the former counsel to Vice President Kamala Harris. She’s the head of the Gender Equity Network at the Justice Department, which lobbies for abortion.

00:14:37:22 – 00:14:57:24

Unknown

And she came out and went to the media and said she’s very worried that Trump will fire merit-based employees like her and appoint partisan picks .The former counsel for Kamala is claiming that she’s a merit based employee. Should Trump fire her? Yeah, yeah yeah. Well, now let’s be fair. It is currently still very hard to fire government employees. Yet.

00:14:57:24 – 00:15:22:18

Unknown

But one thing you can do is reassign them. I hear Nome, Alaska has a lot of civil rights violations or the Arctic? It’s systemically white. Everything is white. There are polar bears, snow hares. The owls are white. The foxes are white. Why are there no black polar bears? Someone should be assigned to investigate that. And this is something that the Trump administration sort of did in its first term.

00:15:22:21 – 00:15:41:04

Unknown

It actually took BLM. The other BLM, Bureau of Land Management, which is also run by a terrorist, by the way, a former spokeswoman for Earth First, which is a terrorist organization. He told them and he said, we’re going to move you guys to Colorado. And a whole bunch of these D.C. sites said, no, we’re quitting. I mean, I think Denver is perfectly nice.

00:15:41:04 – 00:16:03:04

Unknown

It’s pretty sad these people want to leave rather than move to Denver. But there are even nicer places they could go to, like Juneau, Alaska, the part of Hawaii that is on fire. Puerto Rico. There’s a lot of places you can move them. Newark. Newark gets the most laughs. Chicago.

00:16:03:06 – 00:16:29:16

Unknown

You can actually we you can actually create conditions under which these people will want to leave. So what we’re doing is we’re looking into every element of the government. You know, before there was a Department of Government Efficiency we were the ones doing that. We were investigating DEI across the federal government, including in the Secret Service and FEMA, even before it made the headlines, we’re investigating elected and unelected government officials, not because we want one side or another to win.

00:16:29:16 – 00:16:52:08

Unknown

Obviously, personally, I was pulling for the Prohibition Party. I had $50 up on Polymarket for the Prohibition Party at 2 million to 1 odds. If they’d won that, I would be owning this hotel. Of course, we could not serve any wine or beer in there, but sadly, the Prohibition Party continues its century long track record of never, ever winning an election.

00:16:52:11 – 00:17:13:26

Unknown

They should actually look into what Kamala is doing and just avoid competitive elections. But you know what the bottom line is? We’re looking into all this. We’re providing that information because information matters. Information is actually what changes everything. And that does not take an army to actually find out the truth. That does not. It does take an army to get the truth out.

00:17:13:26 – 00:17:36:12

Unknown

And this is the part where I want to thank you not just for generously supporting the David Horowitz Freedom Center over the years and now, but for actually spreading the word every time you email something out, every time you retweet or tweet or Facebook share or whatever it is you do, or just pass along our books or pamphlets, you’re part of our army of truth, and you’re also changing the country.

00:17:36:12 – 00:17:54:27

Unknown

And the lesson out of that, Blueprint survey was you never know who you’re going to reach and never, ever give up, not even at the last moment, because the people going into the voting booth, they might actually be ready to have their minds changed. Information is ultimately what matters because the other side tried to run on culture.

00:17:54:27 – 00:18:20:09

Unknown

They tried to run on celebrities. It did not work. And right now, because of that, we are very, very privileged to have a situation where we’ve lost a lot of good speakers. We’re very lucky to have lost a lot of good speakers. This is the one time I will say that, and the fact that we’ve lost so many good speakers is a tribute to David Horowitz and the political machine that he built.

00:18:20:11 – 00:18:50:03

Unknown

I can only hope that in 2028, we lose even more speakers. David always says that we are not a think tank. We are a battle tank. We are out there fighting and that’s a lesson we’ve absorbed. We do a whole lot with very little. We always push. We always strive to expose the left and describe it in the plainest, in the starkest terms possible and I’m glad we actually have a lot more smiling faces around the room, because in the past there was this there was this negative energy.

00:18:50:03 – 00:19:05:27

Unknown

There was the sense of, it’s all rigged, we cannot win. It’s all hopeless. And I’m glad to see there’s so many smiling faces. And even after downturns, I hope you take that energy with you. Because happy warriors have to be happy. Not only when we win. We also have to be able to persevere, continue and persist even when we lose.

00:19:05:29 – 00:19:23:29

Unknown

You know, after the last election, we redoubled our efforts. We fought twice as hard. We were under an IRS investigation for six years. We kept on fighting. We had to listen to four years of words salads and lies from the white House. We kept on fighting. We did not give up. Thank you for standing with us. Thank you for not giving up.

00:19:24:07 – 00:19:40:13

Unknown

Thank you for being part of our fight. Thank you for being here and I welcome any of your questions.

00:19:40:16 – 00:19:53:20

Unknown

I welcome any of your incoming questions. If you don’t have a microphone, just shout loudly when you have a microphone. If anyone has a question, we have a microphone.

00:19:53:22 – 00:20:24:15

Unknown

There was a lady up front, so just ask it. Sure will we have microphones? We found a way. Thank you. Can you give us three, facts from the book that is not being published about Kamala? Well, I should clarify. First of all, the book is published. It was out there for three weeks. Okay. It was an e-book, but, let’s start with, Kamala’s grandfather was actually involved in terrorism in Zambia and Africa.

00:20:24:17 – 00:20:51:02

Unknown

Her parents met at the organization that was a predecessor of the Black Panthers. Her mother was the only non-black member of that organization, which should tell you something about that. Kamala’s Senate aides during her campaign quit because they believed that she was really ripping off donors and stealing all the money. Yes. And we profiled assorted associates, including her best friend from Gaza, who had over 100 members of her family die in the war.

00:20:51:02 – 00:21:09:14

Unknown

For some unexplained reason. Who happens to share a last name with a whole bunch of Hamas commanders who was one of her oldest friends and whom Kamala described as when condemning Israel, saying, you know, her very good friend lost a lot of people in Gaza. She neglected to mention they all had green headbands and suicide vests. I could keep going.

00:21:09:17 – 00:21:18:14

Unknown

But I think we’ve turning the page on Kamala. Joy cometh in the morning or in the afternoon.