Fighting The Left

Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion ”Fighting the Left,” which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2016 Restoration Weekend.

Fighting the Left from DHFC on Vimeo.

Michael Walsh: My experience with the left, speaking of fighting, goes back to 1967 when I was a 17-year-old freshman in college at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. That might not seem like a great battlefield of ideas, but in fact it actually was and it gave me my lifelong distaste for the left, who I have spent a lifetime combating in various arenas, both literarily in Hollywood, in journalism, etc. I just wanted to share a few observations about the left as we go into this distinguished panel, and something that I’ve written many times that has kind of become a slogan is the left never stops, they never sleep, they never quit. If you think you’ve beaten them, you haven’t. Our problem is we go home after we win and they scuttle right back in and start undermining the foundations of society. So just as when Reagan defeated Carter and then Mondale in two great landslides, and the conservative movement said, ”Well, that’s it. We’ve finally beat them, let’s go home,” and then you know what happened after that. You’ve had, what? Sixteen years of Clinton – no even more, Bush, Clinton, Bush; almost another Clinton or a Bush. So the country, as Mr. Farage said at lunch so eloquently, has been like all of the Western democracies, essentially hijacked by a group of people who like to think of themselves as elite, but in fact, they’re not.

One thing that we do have in common with the European elites is that our politicians all go to the same schools. They live in the same neighborhoods in New York City and Washington. They have country houses in the same parts of Connecticut and Long Island. They marry each other. They have affairs with each other on the road. They are just all one big happy family and we are not part of that family, so when you wonder about the origins of media bias it’s almost a tribal thing and that’s kind of what I want to get to here in these brief remarks. Back to 1967, there were two philosophers whom we debated very, very vociferously in the student lounge areas. Remember the Vietnam war was going on and pretty soon we had the awful year of 1968 with two major assassinations and all sorts of things, but the two philosophers that we debated even in music school in upstate New York were Eric Hoffer and Herbert Marcuza. They were sort of the yin and yang of the intellectual struggle for the soul of the baby boomers, and I have a quote from Marcuse from the True Believer, which I think is apposite at this moment. ”When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.“ This is Eric Hoffer, the famous longshore philosopher telling you that when the left is victorious they come to you in the guise of ivied maidens and garlanded youths, but what comes behind them is hell on earth, and I’ve been trying to warn about this most recently in the Devil’s Pleasure Palace and in other books that I’ve written to explain to you the cultural origins of the left, not the political origins of the left.

One of the things that distinguishes the left, and I think you can all agree looking at what’s going on in the streets right now, is rage. They’re always angry. They’re always angry. Nothing makes them happy, except a bomb hitting this room would make them happy, but generally speaking they are filled with rage, and one of the things I said in Devil’s Pleasure Palace is that rage is the characteristic trait of whom? Satan, that’s right. They don’t like when I call them the satanic left. I have no idea why. I mean it so well, but satanic they are, and right now you’re witnessing them like Blake’s great red dragon whipping that tail around, flailing, trying to sting anything that they can get to take you down. They are so wounded, so angry, and so afraid of what we would do to them because you know what it would be? Exactly what they would do to us if they could. That’s what they fear, and as a dramatist, as a novelist, and screenwriter this constant battle between good and evil, God and Satan, yin and yang, call it whatever you will, is the essence of what we do, and so in Devil’s Pleasure Palace I have argued that culture is what we’re defending, and I was very pleased to hear Mr. Farage in his eloquent speech this afternoon say something that I’ve long said too: principles, not programs. When you argue programs with the left you lose because that’s all they’ll argue. Principles not so much, so being conflict averse as the right tends to be is not a good place for us to be fighting them from.

Let me just read you a very brief excerpt from Devil’s Pleasure Palace, which is available conveniently enough out there in the lobby. Conflict is the essence of history, but also of drama. Without conflict there can be no progress. Without progress there can be no history. Without history there can be no culture. Without culture there can be no civilization, and since nothing in this world or any other possible world is or can be static without the cultural artifact of drama there can be no civilization. The least dramatic place on earth was the Garden of Eden. Then Eve met the serpent and the rest is history. When we’re fighting the left, and I’m sure the rest of the panel will give us other examples how to do that, but I wanted to start out with a kind of basic fundamental issue. We’re fighting them on the deepest grounds possible. As Mr. Farage said, we’re fighting for Western civilization, we’re fighting for Western values, we’re fighting for the Western nation state, and these are things worth defending because they have brought with them all of the technological, moral, and civilizational progress, certainly 90 percent of it that the world has ever experienced, and it came out of the exact conditions that the left is now trying to destroy. They want borders abolished. Then there’ll be no countries. They want open borders so that all the world can be one giant melting pot, and remember this, they will always use your best instincts against you, and that is the trick of fighting the left. They never stop, they never sleep, and they never quit. They will, like Satan, use the best of your nature to get you to destroy yourselves, so when you confront them always remember that this is on an existential level. This is not a political thing. Politics is just the expression of it. This is on and in the deepest roots of who we are as a people. You notice they use that “it’s not who we are” constantly. What they mean is it’s not Marxist cultural who we are. They would never actually try to identify who we are.

So let me close with this. I have lots of lefty friends. I work in Hollywood. If I didn’t have any lefty friends, I wouldn’t have any friends at all, actually, except for Mark here, so the two of us drink once in a while and kind of commiserate, and Bill Whittle and a couple other guys, but it’s a very lonely club out there, but we have to work with them and one of the things I’ve noticed about the left, and I’d be curious to hear if any of the other panelists agree, what the dirty little secret of the left is? Deep down they’re really conservatives. They’re really conservatives. If you look at how they live, how most of them raise their children, the values that we all share in terms of things like child rearing and safety and family. Nobody argues about that. They have to deal with something we don’t have to deal with. We believe in what we believe because it’s who we are. It’s where we come from. It’s the essence of our nature. They must constantly fight between what they say they think and what they really think, and at this moment now is the time to drive that stake right through their dark little hearts. Yeah, so I promised I’d start things off with a cheery note and that is it. Don’t give them any quarter. Be nice. As General Mattis says, be kind, be polite, and have a plan to kill everybody you meet, so that’s how we should engage the left. Thanks very much. We’ll have a good talk about this.

Danusha Goska: Love is stronger than death. Psalm songs Chapter 8 Verse 6. Set me as a seal on your heart. Love is stronger than death, relentless as the netherworld is devotion. I am a teacher and I love teaching, and I love my students. I am a Jersey girl. I love my state. I love my city, Patterson, New Jersey, America’s first industrial plant city founded by Alexander Hamilton, now one of the ten most dangerous small cities in the United States. Used to be Silk City, now is the heroin hub for northern New Jersey. Since 2011 three men have been murdered directly in front of my building, close enough to me that I was questioned by police. I am a Catholic and I love my church. I am an American and I love my country. My students don’t know who the founding fathers are. That’s not a figure of speech. That’s a literal fact. They have no idea of the uniqueness of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution or the scientific method or Western civilization’s emphasis on the individual. They take cultural relativism as a dogma. If they have heard of the Crusades or Jihad they think they are identical, except probably the crusades were worse. They believe that Christianity is responsible for misogyny. After the Boston marathon bombing one of my students said to me all these silly Islamophobic Americans thought that the bombers were Muslims. They were Russian.

I am an adjunct. I have no job security. Most classes in American colleges are taught by adjuncts. At one college where I taught I used to stand outside the classroom while the professor who went before me taught. He was teaching a basic grammar class. He would sit on the desk and harangue the students about how stupid Americans are because they don’t have socialized medicine like the Europeans. I never saw him teach basic grammar. Go home and I turn on the radio and I listen to right wing talk radio. The right wing talk radio host is in this solar system over here. My students are in this solar system over here. In between are tens of millions of miles of cold, dark, and empty space. In Election 2016 my Facebook feed was full of hateful and ugly posts. All these keyboard champions of Western civilization are in this solar system over here, and my students are over here, and there is no connection.

I introduced one of my students to Shelby Steele, a black conservative author who insists that African Americans will do best without welfare and through self-reliance. This student said, “My God, Shelby Steele is exactly right.” One of my students approached me spontaneously with no prompting from me and said I wish my professors would encourage us to feel part of America, to feel proud to be American, to feel part of something bigger than ourselves. I wish it were cool to be patriotic. One of my students said to me when immigrants come to this country they should leave their culture at home and assimilate to American culture. The first student I mentioned to you who loved Shelby Steele was an African American male with dreadlocks who had spent time in jail. He considers himself a radical. The second student who wished she could feel proud to be American, not because she doesn’t love America, she does, but because she’s told that patriotism is not cool, she is a Muslim and her family were refugees from Syria decades ago. The third student is Hispanic. She herself is an immigrant and she believes that immigrants must assimilate to American culture. Again, my students know that professors praise them for participating in political correctness and they kind of suspect that it’s a little bit phony, but at the same time I’m going to be very frank with you. I have no other method of speaking. My students feel that Republicans hate them. We need allies, and I need allies who are inspired by love.

Scott Walter: I want to thank David Horowitz for inviting me here. I think this is incredibly important topic, even though it’s been a pretty good week, and I want to say first off that I think one of the top ways to fight the left is for conservatives and conservative groups to collaborate, so I’ve only been the president of the Capital Research Center a few month, but I’m already talking with David and his great crew about ways that we could collaborate with them, as we overlap in a lot of ways very naturally. One thing I want to stress in my brief talk is that we both see the key to the left, I think, in one word and not an exciting one, but “nonprofits.” The Capitol Research Center was founded in 1984 to study left wing nonprofits, and I want to stress that the nonprofit world has two ends. It has the money giving end and it has the money chasing end. We studied both sides. They both matter. They both work powerfully together and have been working powerfully together, and so to save you a 10 or 15-minute talk that I sometimes give about this, I’ll make it simpler and collaborate by just reading just the opening paragraph of David Horowitz’s the New Leviathan, which was his 2012 book on exactly this subject because the opening paragraph is my whole talk.

“This book is about a political force of unprecedented magnitude in American life. The new leviathan is a network of billion dollar tax exempt foundations and advocacy think tanks that work in concert with government unions and grassroots radical groups to make up the organizational core of the political left. The new leviathan is not only a political force in the narrow sense of directly influencing electoral outcomes through the support of candidates and parties. Because its power drives from institutions whose mandates are educational and philanthropic, its influence extends into every aspect of the nation’s life. This influence is exerted through a tax exempt universe of policy think tanks, grassroots campaign organizations, public interest groups, all created and supported by its donations. The components of the new leviathan operate within the framework of a progressive ideology that advocates an ever expanding state along with policies that undermine America’s sovereignty and weaken her defenses. The new leviathan’s ever growing power has already tipped the scales of the national political debate,” and that’s it.

If you want to understand what the enemy is that you’re fighting, it’s Soros’s Open Society Foundation, it’s the Ford Foundation, it’s the reconstituted ACORN groups that my colleague, Matt Vadum here, has written an entire book about. Those are the beating heart of the left. It is not the Democratic National Committee, it is not somebody’s super PAC, and I, in fact, call the left 1.0 and left 2.0. The old 1.0 was industrial unions like the United Auto Workers and the DNC and some political candidates in the rest, and its death, you could say, was the 2004 election. If you remember Kerry was obviously going to beat that idiot Bush and in fact, the morning exit polls even showed that Kerry was going to win, and then the left woke up and discovered the next morning that he lost, and George Soros and Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance had each put tens of millions of dollars into defeating the evil Bush, and failed, and they put it into things like party committees and closely tied to party super packs, and they were furious. They were never going to do that again, and it was just a month after the election that the Democracy Alliance, which is the Soros cabal of millionaires and billionaires for the left, had its first official meeting, and that’s the birth of the left 2.0, and the other side of the left 2.0 is the activist side, the Moveon.orgs and the rest, and there’s a famous line from, again, shortly after that failed election from one of the moveon.orgs leaders, now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back. So those are the two sides, the money givers, the money chasers. They are what power the left and they are networked tightly together. That’s the whole point of the democracy alliance; to channel the billionaire funding into a couple of dozen left wing nonprofit groups, and all of their side is tightly networked together. Actually, more tightly networked than our side, but there’s one big difference. They study our side relentlessly. Any group that ever got one penny from a Koch brother you can find on the Internet like that, and it’s labeled that way.

I know nonprofits in DC that got one grant from a tobacco company 25 years ago and every single news story ever written about that nonprofit to this day says, “The so and so institute, which receives tobacco industry funding,” so my quick summary would be if we’re going to fight their networks, we have to study and expose their networks, which is exactly what David does in the New Leviathan and what we’re try to do and that’s why I love my job.

Matthew Vadum: I just want to say that I think you should all feel good in your schadenfreude right now. That we should all enjoy drinking the tears of leftists and that I don’t really mind the riots that have started around the country. Lefties do that anyway. They’re going to do it no matter what. We might as well enjoy it and it only makes us look better anyway. It only makes people clamor for law and order, and I bet Trump’s approval rating will start to go up pretty quickly. Along those lines, I was wondering if somebody could make a citizen’s arrest out there in the lobby. I’m very good at stalking celebrities and Donna Brazile in the flesh is out there or was at 5 minutes to 2:00 as I was walking to this. It’s definitely her with the purplish hair and she should be investigated, indicted probably, for reasons that I’ll go into. The left, as we know, but we sometimes need to be reminded, doesn’t fight fair. They do not respect the rules of our civilization or of our society. They fight dirty. They are criminals and gangsters and racketeers, and never, at least in my lifetime, has that been clearer than during this past election cycle. James O’Keefe, as we all know, though you might not know all of the details, his Project Veritas Action did undercover videos with top Democrats for a year and discovered stuff that shocked even me, and I thought I was pretty hardened to this kind of thing, so to shock me is quite an accomplishment. They had on undercover video Robert Creamer of Democracy Partners, a top Democratic operative, who is responsible for being one of the key organizers, one of the key leftist organizers, who helped ram Obamacare through. He’s also a felon. He went to prison for a few months for writing a check to cover payroll at a nonprofit that he ran in Illinois, and he is the husband of the communist, small c, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Democratic Illinois, so there was footage of him – you know by now, that James O’Keefe, his videos uncovered the fact that the Democratic National Committee at the highest levels perpetrated something vastly larger than Watergate. That they engaged in tactics, and I hate invoking Hitler, but it’s appropriate, they used tactics of the Sturmabteilung, the SA of Ernst, Rome 1934, 1935. They sent leftist agitators to Trump rallies to foment violence.

Now, I know there have been a lot of union thugs in America that have caused problems, but this is pretty brazen and pretty shocking, and it’s all there on video. It does not appear to be out of context, and the mainstream media covered it a little bit during this past election cycle, but it was more like, “Oh, here’s a little speedbump on the Democrats’ road to victory to the White House,” and “Will they overcome it?” It’d get like a minute on CBS or whatever primetime. Didn’t get a lot of attention, but it was a vile conspiracy against the American system of governance and it should not be allowed to stand, and of course, the tendency in Washington D.C., where I live, is just to forgive and forget, but this should not be forgiven or forgotten. There should be an investigation under RICO because this is gangsterism. I’m no lawyer, but they did this in several states. They coordinated with a lot of people, and I think they can succeed with a racketeering – again, no lawyer, I don’t know if it’d be better to go after them civilly or criminally, but something should be done about this because it is not okay and it should not be allowed to stand. What was particularly shocking was Robert Creamer’s admission in the video when asked, “What does Hillary Clinton think of this?“ and his answer, I’m not good at exact quotes, but to paraphrase, he said she’s fine with it. She knows about it through the chain of command, so maybe she didn’t actually get her hands dirty, but she’s wink, wink, nudge, nudge, she’s fine with it, don’t worry about, we’re okay. So this is at the highest level, and this is bigger than anything Nixon ever did, and it’s probably bigger than anything Obama ever did because unless I’m missing something I don’t recall him hiring people to beat up and start fights with Mitt Romney supporters. That would have been very difficult probably because they’re not that excitable; one of the reasons Mitt Romney lost, but yeah, it’d be like the movie fight club, like following a priest and throwing water on him to force him to fight back, so gentle people. So gangsterism, racketeering, their bad, I think we all agree on that.

Other things that happened during the election, less consequential, but the thing that I wrote a book about. My book was Subversion, Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. We wanted to go for subtlety with the subtitle there. It was WND Book published it in 2011. Acorn, its offshoots, its successor groups, are still around. You, I think, all remember what happened. Also, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles did the sting operation where they went from office to office and the ACORN intake workers were more than happy to talk about helping them establish a brothel to cater to pedophiles. Remember, they changed the scenario a little bit from office to office, saying we’ve got underage girls from Latin America who are on a boat ready to come up and just the most icky things that you can think of and they never batted an eyelid. You may have recalled in the first video shot, I think, in Washington D.C. Hannah Giles is pretending to be a prostitute and they’re discussing well, what do we put on the tax form as your occupation? You can’t put hooker, so hey, let’s go with entertainer, yeah, because broadly speaking you do entertain and they all agreed on that and that was awesome, but anyway, that happened. That led to the disintegration of ACORN. They filed bankruptcy. Election day 2010 interestingly enough, this is after Congress cut off their federal funding, I forget the number. They got $70 or $80 million over the years from the federal government. That’s just the federal government. I’d need a massive team of researchers to figure out everything from state and local governments, but, so at least that $70 or $80 million, and their offshoot groups I didn’t detect a lot of wrongdoing a lot during this election cycle, but often this stuff only comes out afterwards, but what we do know is that the Maryland Chapter of ACORN resurrected, which is called Communities United, which is active in Maryland and the District of Columbia. That they were reported to be handing out cigarettes as they were registering people to vote, which I’m pretty sure is illegal even in Maryland, even in Baltimore, so that was bad, and then the most infamous chapter so far is MORE, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, which helped cause the riots that were underwritten by George Soros in Ferguson after the killing of the gentle giant, Michael, what was his name? Mike Brown? Mike Brown, the gentle giant who had just roughed up a tiny Indian shopkeeper and stole some Swiffer Sweets. Apparently, they’re really good for putting marijuana in, so just get a nice experience blending the two recreational substances.

Anyway, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment was headed – he just went on to some other group – by a guy named Jeff Ordower, and he was Missouri ACORN’s chief head organizer for years, so, of course, he started off this offshoot, which the National Board of ACORN directed all the states to do, and so look at the damage that they did there, and it was discovered by the Washington Times, unfortunately, they beat me to it, but I’m at least glad that somebody else is interested in this for a change. It was discovered that George Soros was giving to all these groups that were involved in Black Lives Matter, so I’m sure he didn’t tell them go out and cause a riot, but he knows what they’re about and he’s giving the money, so it’s safe to say he’s fine with it, and he has overthrown lots of governments, so we know he’s fine with that, and then the ACORN groups are all over the country. There’s one here in Florida headquartered in Orlando. I think they just opened an office in Tampa. They’re called Organize Now, maybe you’ve heard about them. They’re probably protesting Trump’s election now, but that’s ACORN. The organizer there is a woman named Tamika Pierce, who was Florida ACORN’s president. They all had different titles, chief organizer. They’re everywhere, Louisiana, Texas, Texas Organizing Project. California is very active, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. A woman named Amy Scherr runs that. She’s been with ACORN for a quarter century. They run it out of the same office on South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. They’re not even really trying to hide that they’re ACORN. They don’t care. In New York they’re very active, New York Communities for Change. Boston, they’re New England United for Justice. Minnesota. I know it kind of gets boring. It just goes on and on. There’s about 30 of these active groups.

They cared so little about electoral integrity, about the rule of law that there was one module of ACORN, a very big, I guess, subsidiary within it, that may have been independent of ACORN at one point, but then became part of their network and that’s called Project Vote. You may have heard Obama worked for them in ‘92 and in Chicago helped get Carol Mosely Brown elected so she could hang out with African dictators, and they had someone on the payroll there who used to work for ACORN, a woman named Amy Busafink, and I never know if I’m pronouncing that correctly, but spelled Busafink, Busfink, something like that, but she was one of the very few ACORN employees to be convicted of voter fraud, and she was convicted of leading a conspiracy in Nevada for unlawful compensation, they called it. You can’t give financial bonuses to people based on how many people they register. But they thought it was really funny, so Las Vegas ACORN called their program, if the 20 was the quota, you got 21, you got extra money, so of course, they called it Blackjack because everything is funny to them. And their New Mexico chapter, the new chapter, Organizers in the Land of Enchantment or OLE, which is kind of cute, so it’s just all a big joke to these people. Right, the reason I mention her is because she also led the voter drive when ACORN and Project Vote were working together and 400,000 of their registrations nationally were thrown out in 2008, and that was her voter drive, and she was in charge of the voter drive this time too, voter registration and get out the vote, voter mobilization. So that’s what these people think of the rule of law and that’s what they think of you and me. They don’t care. They just keep on going. It makes no difference to them, and the reason I suggested Donna Brazile should be arrested or at least investigated is because there’s just no way that as the interim chair of the DNC that she couldn’t have knowledge of their “let’s go beat up Trump supporters” operation, and it’s inconceivable to me that she didn’t know about it.

Everybody in the Democratic National Committee should be investigated, including the people who are prominent Democrats who are part of Robert Creamer’s organization. He has a consulting group called Democracy Partners, and it’s got names you might be familiar with like Heather Booth, the founder of Midwest Academy, who is one of their consultants, and a prominent political consultant, Mike Lux, and I’m not going to bore you reading all of them, but there’s a whole bunch of them, and these are top Democrats and we need to demand, we need to know, we need to demand to know what they knew and when they knew it and how they were involved because this sort of thing cannot, as I said, be allowed to stand in America or we’re really going to become a Banana Republic. It’s not just rhetoric about how we hate the Obama administration. We really need to do something about this. I’m not sure exactly how to approach it, but we’ve got to do something about it because the left never sleeps, they never give up, and they never surrender, and we have to not go to sleep after every election. We have to do something about it.

Mark Tapson: Before we start taking any questions, I guess I should ask if anybody, anyone of you has anything further to add or to, possibly in response to what’s already been said.

Michael Walsh: Everybody hear me okay? Yeah, some of you may know about 6 years ago I wrote a book under my pen name, character name, David Caine, when I was writing at National Review, and David Caine was a crazy leftwing Hollywood communist screenwriter who was angry at you guys for being such easy pushover moron targets, so I wrote a whole book in his voice telling you how to win, and I’ll just run down the ten rules so we can see how well Trump did, for example, with them. Rule No. 1, this book, there’s a few copies of it out there as well called Rules for Radical Conservatives, obviously based on the Alinsky book. Rule No. 1, know your enemy. Know his intentions and his weapons and his weaknesses and use them against him. This is what we have to do. We have to know the left and fight like the left. Rule No. 2, become what you behold, including how to talk like the liberal, and you must. Rule No. 3, the culture is the message, so seize it. This is obviously something that the late Andrew Breitbart – and my friend, Matt Vadum and I both worked with Andrew in the early days of Breitbart – constantly mentioned. Rule No. 4, one of my favorites, get on offense and stay on offense, and that is so crucial, that you never, never let them turn the tables on you.

Rule No. 5, let the dismantling begin. I was very encouraged to see Trump talk about getting rid of the Energy Department the other day. He’s already said maybe we should tear down the Energy Department, and today, for those of you who are shooters, like me, he wants to make concealed carry, all the licenses, reciprocal across the United States, so that is a great, great thing. When the left always says “Uh, like dude, why can’t we regulate guys like cars, man?“ It’s like, great. Okay, so my license from California is good in all 50 states. Right? They go, “Like no, I didn’t mean that.“ Okay. Right. Rule No. 6, at all times think constitutionally. That Constitution’s there for a reason. Don’t let them tear it down. They’re out and proud. They hate the Constitution. They want to repeal the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and God knows the Ninety-Ninth Amendment, if there were such a thing. You can’t let them do that. Rule No. 7, adapt the time-honored conservative message for a new kind of America and a new kind of Americans. Don’t let them paint you as racist. Don’t. It’s just a term of insult for them. Throw it right back in their face. Rule No. 8, get better officers. We just got a general, didn’t we? No more of these little lieutenants and captains running. We got our new general. Rule No. 9, never stop fighting until the fighting’s done – a line I lifted unabashedly from David Mamet in the Untouchables. It’s what Elliott Ness says to Al Capone right at the end, and Rule No. 10 is the fight is never done. Apropos what Matthew said, another line that Caine wrote that’s actually entered the political lexicon, think of the Democrats as what they really are, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. That’s how you fight them.

Mark Tapson: Beginning of January, we may have the political power, but we don’t have the cultural power, and that’s where it all begins. We barely have a foothold in mainstream news media and in the entertainment and educational arenas, and that’s the culture, and that’s where they create new generations of leftists, and that’s where we have to wage an insurgency, because it’s too late to wage a culture war. We already lost the culture war. We’re now in a period in which we are the counter-culture. We are the insurgents now and we have to win that cultural battle or we will lose further political battles, so that’s it. That’s it for me, but questions.

Audience member: I’m a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, and this is directed to Ms. Goska. I hope I’m pronouncing your name correctly, but you might encourage your students to consider joining the military because it really does serve as a surrogate family and it brings Americans from all walks of life together, contrary to John Kerry’s dismissive comments that we’re a bunch of losers.

Scott Walter: I think that’s a great idea. Yeah, always. I have a lot of Marine Corps friends, and no Marine needs a safe space. In fact, there is no safe space if a Marine is around, but the other thing I would say in speaking about culture, one of the hardest things we have, of course, is academia, as you were just explaining in your excellent talk there, but, two things, you want to understand the left and the donors. The women’s studies department on your local campus was invented by the Ford Foundation. Literally one program officer at the Ford Foundation said these black study things are going good for us. Why don’t we try women’s studies, and they funded it, and now it’s everywhere, so we don’t have anything the equal of that, but the closest thing we do have, and the liberal president of the Hewlett Foundation has even in a book devoted a chapter to this because he was a former Stanford Law dean and he knows that it’s impressive – that is conservative foundations, mostly the John M. Olin Foundation, which made its money off ammo, if you recall, they have created law and economic centers at law schools all over the country, and they started, by the way, not at some small conservative place. They started at Stanford and Harvard and Yale and the rest, and those have had a huge effect on the legal profession because, of course, economics forces at least some degree of reality into the utopian ideosphere of academia, so that’s been very successful at the graduate school level. I personally, if there’s a billionaire lying around in the audience who’d like to start something like Ford’s women’s studies, my recommendation is military history. The more undergraduates who study military history, the more utopian nonsense would be dispelled as they had to face the brutal realities of what our great veterans celebrating this day have dealt with.

Michael Walsh: Yeah, I want to emphasize that. Last night, my buddy, Bill Whittle, touched on this. Yesterday was the Marine Corps birthday. Hooyah to the Marines. I personally was born on Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, so I’ve been raised a jarhead my entire life, but a very touching anecdote. First day of the Battle of Shiloh when Grant was a new rising commander in the Union Army, the Union got whipped pretty good. The Confederates attacked them and pushed them back over around their lines. Drove all the way back to the Tennessee River, and we think of our precious snowflakes today panicking and throwing down their, I guess, their binkies. They wouldn’t be carrying rifles, and there was a moment when William Tecumseh Sherman, who became, of course, Grant’s best friend and adjutant during the whole war later, came up to Grant, and he said, “Well, Grant, we really had the devil’s own time of it out there today,” and Grant, sitting there in the rain smoking a cigar all by himself, said, “Yep. We’ll lick ‘em tomorrow.“ And that’s the spirit that this lady in the back there who just, that’s what you learn in the military, and that’s what our side needs to always remember – we’ll lick ‘em tomorrow. Never give up.

Audience member: First I’d like to say I’m amazed by the brilliance on this panel. You folks are wonderful. I have a question, and I couldn’t pick who to ask, so I will ask any or all of you. If Tuesday had gone the other way, what would we be talking about today?

Scott Walter: I’ll urge you to look up Matthew Vadum at LifeZette.com because the day before the election, he gave an entire run through of all of those fine recreated ACORN groups in 30 states, if I remember correctly, that have been registering voters and busing voters to the polls, because you can be a 501©(3) public charity and not only register people, but bus them to the polls or even, of course, bus them to perhaps more than one polling place, or that’s why we have early voting now, so you can practice and get better at it, and I think that would be a lot of it. I will tell you that Matthew’s also in the Soros WikiLeaks. If you look up Matthew Vadum at the Soros WikiLeaks, you’ll find my favorite thing of all the leaks that came out, and it’s a long memo in 2011, so they’re getting ready for the 2012 presidential election, where we had our hopes up, only to be dashed. The memo’s about 14 pages, but it’s short and simple about what it’s message is. It’s from Andy Stern, the head of the SEIU and the most frequent visitor to the White House in the first term of Obama, and by Deepak Bhargava, who is the head of one of the groups Matthew has mentioned, and they’re writing to George Soros himself and his board of directors for his main foundation, and they’re saying look. It’s real simple for this election cycle. Number 1, we have to win. Nothing else matters. That’s the left. Nothing in the world matters but power. Number 2, in order to get No. 1, we have to spend millions and millions of dollars registering and getting out the vote with our ©(3) non-profit groups. And the third and last point is we know that you get so tired every cycle, having to spend millions of dollars to register and bus people to the polls so that we can keep our hold on power, so the long-term strategy is that we have to have electoral reform, and, of course, what that means is we have to use our legal groups to crush the voter I.D. laws.

By the way, that’s another Ford creation. All of the public interest quote-unquote law firms out there were created in the seventies by Ford Foundation money. They thought of it. They got it approved by the IRS. They funded it. Enjoy. So they want to do the no voter I.D. laws. They want to do early voting for months at a time. They want to have same-day registration. They want to have universal registration. It isn’t possible not to be registered to vote. They want to have no cleaning voter rolls, et cetera. That’s on the memo. That’s how they hoped. That’s how they did win in 2012, and how they could’ve won this time.

Matthew Vadum: Again, there was so much going on in this election, so much craziness. Obama basically said in an interview with some young woman a few days before the election that the polling place is sacred and that if you were to vote – it was in response to a question. He didn’t say it, but it was implied in the answer, that if you’re an illegal alien and you can get away with voting and you can actually vote, you’ll get away with it because the ballot box is a sacred place. The polling place is a sacred place, so wink, wink. Go ahead, illegals. Vote. Vote your hearts out. You’re awesome. On the thing that was in the memo that’s in WikiLeaks, my first essay a few years ago for American Thinker, and again, another subtle headline, it was _Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American. _Oversold it a little bit.

Audience member: My question is this. I would suppose if you would poll most people here, they probably would find their political views driven by certain ethical, moral, spiritual and historical considerations, so that’s what’s in our hearts. What is in the heart of the left? What is it that when they’re alone with themselves or their families or they’re not pontificating out there somewhere, spending their money on whatever cause, what is in their heart that really drives them to believe what they believe and do all these nefarious things that they do?

Danusha Goska: If I may, I’d like to address both of the two previous questions together. The first question is if Trump had not won, what I be talking about today? I’d give the exact same talk. I wanted to talk about Patterson, the city where I live, again, America’s first planned industrial city founded by Alexander Hamilton where today, healthy, young African-American men spend their every spare minute standing on street corners, smoking marijuana. Garbage in the streets. They could pick up that garbage. They don’t. They could apply for jobs. They don’t. I have lived in Patterson under Republic presidents and under Democratic presidents. It’s the same city. The local high school, East Side, not a single white student. High murder rate. It doesn’t change. When people give me a ride home, as soon as we cross the border into Patterson, I hear the click. The car door locks. I receive mail from the city in English, Spanish and Arabic. The mail tells me your water contains fecal matter, cryptosporidium and lead. They can’t get the water right, but they can translate the letter into Spanish and Arabic. When I was a leftist, I wanted to save the world. I am no longer a leftist and I want to save the world. Patterson and David Horowitz helped me to not be a leftist because what saves the world changed in my mind. Being generous, giving things to people – it’s not saving Patterson. But I’m not convinced that the other side has the answer either. If anyone wants to convince me after the talk, here I am. That’s my answer.

Michael Walsh: There’s a great line – I tend to think of everything in terms of movie dialogue – there’s a great line in answer to your question. In the Cohen Brothers movie, Miller’s Crossing, in which the John Turturro character, who plays Bernie Bernbaum, at the end of the movie is whining and pulling this act, saying, “Oh, Tom, look in ya heart, Tom. Tom, look in ya heart.“ And Tom Regan says, “What heart?“ That’s what’s in the left’s heart. Nothing. When it comes to their families, as I say, the lefties, and I know them all in Hollywood are very good people. We get along fine. We never, ever, ever discuss politics, but when it comes to you, they hate you on some level that I just don’t quite understand, and frankly, I saw from people who really make me angry, as long as we’re on the subject, the Never Trump crew this time, who attack Donald Trump every single day in the most vicious personal terms that they never use against the left. They save them all for our team, and I think that’s something that we’re going to have to discuss down the line as well, but essentially, they don’t think of it in terms of heart. They think of it in terms of winning and in some glorious, good America that is to come, and we think of it as hey, we like our real America just fine. Thanks.

Scott Walter: I just want to chime in for a second and say two quick things. One, the questioner said when they’re with their families, what do they think about this? First of all, a huge aid to the left’s growth and strength is precisely the breakdown of the family. There’s nobody better on this than Stella Morabito, who has written very powerfully about how if you’re a kid who maybe your parents aren’t around much or maybe your parents have split up or maybe your parents were never married, you have a lot of weaknesses and wounds and a lack of connection that somebody in a happy, healthy family does, and the left grabs that incredibly powerfully. They are your new family. They have the answer for why you’re hurting and how to make it stop hurt, and how to channel your anger. The left feasts on that, so family breakdown, working on that, is a huge aspect of this problem. And then second, on the Patterson, that was a very powerful point she made about who’s coming to help Patterson. If our side were smarter and tougher and willing to leave our safe spaces, we would be much more in the Pattersons of America, because of course we have something to tell them. We can say your schools are horrible and you deserve a lot better and we have education reforms that will do that, and your welfare programs are wildly counterproductive, and real charities from actual human beings and churches and civic groups are the answer to that, and I would add I’m on for that because I’m a Catholic and I think it’s the right thing to do to other human beings, but I do live in and around DC, so I can’t help thinking politically. You want to know why Pat Toomey is the next senator for Pennsylvania? Why he didn’t lose this time? Because in Philadelphia County, which last presidential cycle had 85 percent blacks voting for Obama, this time it had 81.7 percent blacks voting for Hillary. That was the difference for Pat Toomey and for Trump in the election. A fraction of the vote, Hispanics and blacks and people who tend to be in poor Patterson places, if we got the tiniest fraction of them, it would be devastating. This Tuesday would be nothing. In fact, I’m going to have one of my number crunchers run the numbers. If the black vote were 5 or 10 percent lower, because I just gave you one that was about 3 percent lower – 4 or 5 percent lower, it’d be existential crisis for the Democratic Party, so we need to leave our safe spaces and go into the Pattersons, and I will say in Trump’s defense, he did that more than some of his more recent Republican nominees have, and we need to keep doing it. One of the Podesta leaks – Podesta was a Catholic theoretically. They happily try to correct Catholics. Soros gives money to left-wing evangelical groups and to left-wing Catholic groups because they don’t expect to have the 81 percent of evangelicals that vote Republican turn 81 percent Democrat. They’d be quite happy if it were 65 percent.

Audience member: Hi. You can all hear me? I’m from Cambridge, Massachusetts, lovingly and locally called the People’s Republic of Cambridge. Need I say more? Many of my friends are professors and affiliated with Harvard and MIT. 95 percent of them are Democrats. They’re not evil. As Danusha said, they want to save the world. They’re good people. They want to give. They care. They get together and they drink the Kool-Aid. They believe the media, the public media. They listen to NPR. They read the New York Times, the New Yorker, and they use sound bites to denigrate the Republicans. They say a lot of the same things we say on the other side. They talk about Trump as being racist, a pedophile, a Hitler character. They’re not evil. They just are uninformed, and I think now that the media has been exposed, maybe that’s where we should put our direction, to publicize the truth, and then maybe they can see the good things that Trump does and they will begin to alter their viewpoint.

Matthew Vadum: I think you’re referring to my aunt, who is a psychology professor at Assumption College in Worcester, and I love my aunt, but she graduated from Berkeley with a Ph.D. in 1969, so it’s made for some interesting Thanksgivings.

Danusha Goska: To take this away from politics for a minute, I wrote my dissertation about Polish-Jewish relations, and when I was talking to the Jewish people, they liked me. I liked them. We got along great. Everything was fine. When I was talking to the Polish people, they liked me. I liked them. Everything was great. Put the two of them together – I worked on Polish-Jewish relations for 25 years. I attended many conferences. I published many articles. I never saw any progress at all. It has nothing to do with left and right. It has to do with religion and ethnicity. People occupy camps and they insist that the other side is evil, and I don’t share that view. I think people are people. I just do. I mean my mother was a communist and my father loved Nixon, and they were my parents, and I loved them both and they loved each other and they fought like cats and dogs. It’s life. If you want, like I want to make my students’ lives better, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen, and if it takes a right-wing approach, if I’m going to be tough on them and make demands and that if that works, I’m fine with it. If it takes me being more giving and loving and all that kind of stuff, I’ll do that. I’m just going to do whatever works to make people’s lives better, which I guess means I disagree with you.

Audience member: I enjoy telling David Horowitz that I have something in common with him. I, too, was a Berkeley graduate going way back, and that’s a good place to learn all about the far left radicalism, and when I got out into the real world, I discovered they were not all Marxists, far left Marxists. There’s a whole variety of what we are calling leftists, and I’m just wondering if it would be useful in devising strategy to fight the left, which is important, to make some distinction? Or is it a case of one definition fits all? Or do we have to distinguish between, let’s say, a leftist like Joe Biden and Angela Davis on the other hand? And what kind of a leftist is Hillary Clinton? If there is in fact a spectrum, where do we put her? So that’s a question I think I haven’t heard much discussion about. I don’t think it’s a case of one definition fits all leftists. There’s a great variety between those who are dedicated, organized leftists on the one hand and the family member or our colleague at work who tells you he’s going to the polls to vote for the Democrats. There’s a big difference between those, so how do we handle that?

Michael Walsh: Let me just say about that, you’ll notice that the left, whatever they may be in private life, they stick together and they vote together, and they never, ever break rank. Ever. Right? The Bernie bros vanished 2 seconds after she bought them off. You never heard another peep out of them, and at the same time, the Never Trump movement in the right-wing conservative intellectual circles never stopped shooting us in the back, so that’s the difference there. Whatever they think, they stay on message, and if David were here, he’d agree with me. They never stop. They never sleep. They never quit. You have to be careful of them because they won’t give up.

Mark Tapson: I think we have come to the end of our time. Did you want to make one more point?

Audience member: I don’t know if you understood or if I understood you. The person who didn’t happen to like Trump, is he equivalent to a far leftist?

Michael Walsh: I don’t think so. What I’m saying is that the Democrats and the left in general stick together and don’t break ranks, whereas the Republicans and the conservatives do break their ranks, so whatever they may think privately, they vote. That’s why you have Obamacare. Right? That’s why you have Obamacare.

Mark Tapson: I think we’ve reached the end of our time, I’ve been informed, so that’s going to wrap it up. Thanks to the panelists. Thanks to you all.