The panel discussion below recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida (Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer session, click here.
Karen Lugo: –And his discussion–the poll statistics that he was showing on both Sharia law and [Molly Norris] are dramatic and also have proved out in having public discussions as I go before city councils and newspaper editorial boards, county boards of supervisors, speaking in public on these issues, it is very difficult to make a segue into talking about Sharia law unless we can talk about things that matter to people and that demonstrate that the U.S. has already made concessions in these areas. I have just completed a survey of family law in America and the judges that have incorporated Sharia into family law decisions, Frank Gaffney in the back and Center for Security Policy have also done–they have done a fantastic report on the broader areas of law where our American courts have incorporated Sharia into the decisions. So I encourage you to take a look at that very useful information and good to know that people do care and are paying attention.
Okay, this panel, I’m going to challenge the audience now as we begin to be thinking. You actually will have some homework to do – Q&A – and we’re going to save some time for questions. Please work on ideas. You’re out there. You’re the activists. We know that we have an electorate that got us into the situation we’re in today, even though we knew or should have known who Barack Obama was. What do we do at this point? And we’ll be talking about the very difficult predicaments that we are in. But what do we do between now and the next election to alert voters to the situation and the fact that an additional Barack Obama term would be devastating.
So as we have the discussion here today, we have people that are qualified to provide the insight and the fact that these people are skilled and scholarly. They have documented what they’ll be saying, and you can see and write–read their opinion almost on a daily basis. I’m not going to go into where they’re all published because you’ll see them on commentary, Weekly Standard, National Review. So I’ll talk quickly about their professional credentials.
First of all, and I’ll be introducing them from your right. From my left to right, your right to left, and then they’ll come up sequentially and make their remarks. So as I introduce them, hold your applause and then we’ll have remarks and–so we can move quickly. First of all, Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former Adjunct Fellow with Hudson Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard and did his field work in India. He taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He has won many awards and prizes as recognition for his astute analysis and insightful commentary. He is best known for his exhaustive and rigorously investigative expose into the life and ideology of Barack Obama. Radical in Chief, his book, reveals Obama’s Socialist convictions and tactical [restlessness] that has long been swept under the rug. To say that Kurtz has done the job that American journalists refuse to do is an understatement.
Ron Radosh – Ron is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for PJ Media. A former history professor at the City University of New York, he is author or co-author of 15 books, including most recently A Safe Haven – Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. This was co-authored with his wife, Alice. His memoir, Commies – a Journey through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left, chronicles his political life and movement away from Socialism to Conservatism. Most recently, he and his wife wrote the cover story for the October issue of the Weekly Standard, entitled, “Time for Another Harding – How a Much Derided President Succeeded in Cutting the Budget and Fixing the Economy.” They are now writing a book about Warren Harding’s presidency.
And J. Christian Adams, whom I was privileged to give the [Annie Taylor] Award to last year, he is a five-year veteran, an attorney for the DOJ, working in the Civil Rights division. He specialized in election law and he resigned as we know over the New Black Panther voter intimidation scandal. Christian Adams revealed that the DOJ’s Civil Rights division has degenerated into a politicized fiefdom for far left militants where the enforcement of law depends upon the race of the victim. Consider the many lawyers whose main career experience wasn’t subverting laws will be those standing watch over America’s voting system during the 2012 presidential election.
Here’s what Andrew Breitbart had to say about Christian Adams’ book. “Injustice is a whistleblower’s explosive expose into the rancid world of Obama’s Justice Department. Adams shows how the institutional left has turned the power of the Justice Department into a weapon against the rule of law.”
Monica Crowley – Monica holds two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in International Affairs from Columbia University. She worked as a Foreign Policy Assistant to former President Richard Nixon from 1990 until his death. Her experiences with Nixon and her insight into his thinking and his career prompted her to write two bestselling books – Nixon Off the Record and Nixon on People and Politics. Crowley has been a guest on the major TV and cable news channels and we know from last night her extensive experience with radio. I thought it notable that on her website her favorite quote is one that is important for us to remember this weekend. As John Stuart Mill said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed, integrated state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks that nothing is worse than war, is actually far worse.”
So I commend to you all of our panelists this morning, and we’ll start with comments by Stanley Kurtz.
Stanley Kurtz: Okay. I’m going to be speaking today not just about Obama’s past or his leftist ideology, but about what steps we can actually take to bring these points home to the public. How can we persuade an American electorate still reluctant to hear it of the truth about Obama’s transformative and even radical agenda? That’s the point I’m going to be moving toward today.
Now, in a sense all of the information about Obama’s past that I laid out in Radical in Chief led up to argument about how Obama would conduct his presidency and what his reelection strategy would be. My argument was that Obama had been trying all along to jumpstart a populist anti-business movement of the left. That was the point of things like Obama’s attacks on fat cat bankers, his attacks on the Chamber of Commerce, and even his unprecedented attack in his State of the Union address on the Supreme Court’s campaign funding decision. All along, Obama has been trying to create a leftist movement of anti-business populous. And the reason for this is that Obama has been following a political strategy taught to him by his radical mentors in community organizing.
Many of the community organizers who trained Obama and sponsored his political rise were followers of Michael Harrington, the leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, and really the leading American Socialist thinker of his generation. And Michael Harrington was famous for what he called his party realignment strategy. You see, Harrington’s idea was that instead of presenting themselves as a separate party on the left, Socialists ought to work from within the Democratic Party. Since Americans would almost certainly reject a separate Socialist Party, if it was presented to them openly, Harrington decided that the better tact to take was to push the Democratic Party itself to the left, to make the Democratic Party slowly and by degrees into a kind of de facto Socialist Party.
So how exactly did Harrington and his followers plan to do that? Well, the idea was to jumpstart a populist anti-business movement of the left, thereby driving business interests out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. Now that might sound slightly insane. Why would anyone want to drive someone out of their party, especially people with money? But the idea here was that a populist movement powerful and radical enough to drive business interests into the Republican Party would also bring plenty of newly energized members from the working class, from the poor, and from minorities into the Democratic Party and that would more than make up for the losses.
Not only that, but now the country would be polarized along class lines with all the haves in one party and all the have nots in the other. So Herrington’s idea here was that once America had been effectively polarized along class lines, the party of the have nots, the Democratic Party, would gradually drift toward a kind of de facto Socialism.
So what do we see when we look at the situation today? We see that Obama has finally succeeded in jumpstarting a populist anti-business movement of the left. It’s called Occupy Wall Street. And it was very arguably inspired in significant part by Obama’s attacks on Republicans for refusing to tax the wealthiest Americans in their corporate jets, and all the attacks I mentioned before and plenty more besides. And whether or not you agree that he inspired Occupy Wall Street, we know that Obama, the leadership of the democratic party, and even the mainstream media have all embraced this movement despite its apparent lawlessness and its openly radical desire to utterly transform and even abandon the capitalist system.
The New Republic here serves as the exception that proves the rule. Its editors immediately recognized the anti-capitalist nature of Occupy Wall Street and rightly condemned the movement as illiberal in an editorial. Yet virtually no one else on the left has followed even after the violence at Oakland. And even many of the New Republic’s own contributors have repudiated the magazine’s rejection of the protesters. So something very significant is going on here, something that helps to explain how a man as far to the left as Barack Obama could have gotten the Democratic Party nomination in the first place. Obviously, all of this provides Republicans with a potentially powerful teachable moment, a way of finally convincing the American people that President Obama, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream press have lost their compass and run off the rails.
It gives us a potential way of driving home the point that David Horowitz has been making for years – that large parts of the Democratic Party have stopped being true liberals and are actually leftists instead.
Unfortunately, it’s also quite possible that this opportunity will slip away. So far, Republican politicians have backed off of Occupy Wall Street, even though the issue presents a golden opportunity to define today’s Democratic Party in a way that is both true and highly advantageous to the GOP. Even now, there is something of a preference among conservative critics of Occupy Wall Street for pointing to incidents of violence, lawlessness, disrespect, lack of sanitation, et cetera, but without tying all of these important points to the movement’s ideology.
On the other hand, on the positive side, I’ve noticed lately that some of the conservative pundits most reluctant to point to Obama’s own radical history have been bolder than usual in attacking Occupy Wall Street. So this is a moment of testing for us. If the GOP can’t tell the truth about Occupy Wall Street and its Democratic allies, even in the face of disapproval from media and liberal elites, then they’ll never come close to telling the truth about Barack Obama himself.
Right now, we just don’t know how the GOP is going to handle this, whether they’ll have the guts to pin Occupy Wall Street on Obama and the Democrats, which of course, is exactly what they should do. I think things could go either way. For its part, Occupy Wall Street has intentionally tried to downplay its ideology partly to make piece among its various hard left factions, but even more so to help it attract a mass base of supporters, even as the hard left core retains control of the movement. Yet, Occupy Wall Street’s core activists are so far to the left that their desire to do away with the capitalist system entirely has been impossible to disguise, even if they haven’t advertised their Socialist or anarchist ideologies in detail.
Actually, I think this anti-capitalism gives us quite a lot to work with. It’s not absolutely necessary to prove to the public that Occupy Wall Street is explicitly Socialist. Exposing and highlighting the movement’s anti-capitalism would do nicely. The movement itself is remarkably open about this. After all, the march that led to much of the violence in Oakland was actually called the Anti-Capitalism March.
I think many conservatives who prefer to downplay Obama’s own radicalism have been a bit surprised by his evident turn to the left. Some Republicans put Obama’s left turn down to political desperation, as if he had no alternative. I think this underestimates Obama’s willingness to take calculated risks in the service of creating a new class-based majority of the left.
So if we want to make sure that Obama stays a one-term president, a big part of the answer is drawing out the implications of the Democratic establishment’s support for Occupy Wall Street. That might work even without bringing up Obama’s own radical past. More likely, however, once the public fully grasps the nature of Occupy Wall Street they will spontaneously make the connection to the truth about Obama’s own past, a truth that until now has seemed to some too irrelevant or too impolite to mention, while in reality, of course, the truth of Obama’s radicalism continues to play out before our eyes every day.
Ron Radosh: Thank you very much. I’m very glad to be–honored to be speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Let me preface it with something about my background because it bears on what I’m going to say. I’m probably the one person in this whole conference who knows David Horowitz the longest, because when I was in the ninth grade and a Young Communist, David Horowitz came to my Young Communist meeting–he lived in Queens, I lived in Manhattan–to recruit people to write for the Youth Edition of the Communist publication, The Daily Worker, of which he was the Youth Editor. I was the only one he recruited to write for them. In fact, my first published article, I’m sad to say, was in the The Daily Worker, but I didn’t sign my name to it because they told me it would hurt my future, so I left my name off.
But thank you, David, you gave me my first published writing. I’ve known David since the ninth grade. We go way, way back. And like him, I’ve moved in the same direction for much of the same reasons. And this is related to what I’m going to say about understanding what Barack Obama is, where he comes from, and what we have to do to defeat him. Two weeks ago in the National Review, there was a wonderful issue with formerly Marxist historian, Eugene D. Genovese, one of America’s great historians, in which Genovese commented when they asked him about Obama, he said, Obama is redder than most people believe, even the people in a conservative movement who believe he’s very red. And this gets to Stanley’s book, which I in fact reviewed for National Review and I think may have been the only review the book had anywhere. Very interesting that this important critical book was totally ignored by the mainstream media–in fact, much of the conservative media, too–because they couldn’t deal with it. It was so well researched and so important and definitive that they couldn’t touch it. So they followed the second rule – don’t attack it like they do many conservative books that are just opinion, just–the second thing they do is just ignore it so no one will know about it. They don’t care if conservatives bought it because conservatives were already against Obama. They didn’t want anyone else to know what he had in that book.
And that gets to Obama where he is. And I think, as Stanley said, and I agree with him, that Obama comes from a Communist milieu background, that he combined with cutthroat Chicago politics and support of a black nationalist base, bringing the three elements together as a winning ticket to political power in Chicago. And one thing he followed and managed to keep going all through that period is the rough, cutthroat Chicago political tactics, masterminded by people like David Axelrod, who also came from a very leftwing background.
So here’s the thing about Obama – the question most people ask–and when I try to go through what Obama’s background is–and like Stanley, I believe Obama does have a desire as he said in that critical thing I think we saw in one of the videos yesterday where Obama said, we are minutes away from a fundamental transformation of America. And you’ll remember as well Michelle Obama’s comment about how we have to change our history. They couldn’t help but acknowledge and allude to their very radical beliefs during that campaign, but they try to minimize them.
The question most people ask me, if that’s true, how come so much of Wall Street poured their money into Obama in the years he was President and into his campaign? Why would Wall Street and big money and corporate money go to the Democratic Party and to Obama if he is someone who wanted some kind of Socialist transformation of America along the lines, as Stanley said, spelled out by Michael Harrington?
I wrote a column last week for PJ Media in which I called the Obamas [for] populism. It’s very hard for Obama to hold the OWS populous mantel when you can point out with all the specifics the details of how much corporate money went into the Democratic Party coffers. Well, there are two answers to that – one is Lenin’s old adage that when you give the capitalists rope with which they’ll hang–we’ll sell them the rope with which they’ll hang themselves–or with which we’ll hang them come the time. That’s one thing. The second thing is that why I prefer to call Obama not a Socialist or a Marxist, but a Leninist, Leninist not in terms of Lenin’s politic ideology, but in terms of Lenin’s tactics. Lenin is referring to a strategy employed by the Communists as outlined by Lenin in his early writings.
What Lenin said–and the new economic policy endorsed by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s is an example of this–is take a few steps backwards in order to move forward later in the future when the time is ripe. Obama–when Lenin instituted this so-called capitalist period, everyone said, see, at the time, if you go back to read what people said in the 1920s, the Bolsheviks are moderating. They’re adopting capitalism. They’re not so bad. They’re moving back from this wartime collectivism. That was just a strategy. It was a strategy so they could move forward full-fledged towards real Communism when they had stabilized their power. That’s what Lenin has to do. And it’s very easy–following that strategy, what Obama did is backtrack, try and appear to be moderate, try and not to–to not appear to publicly say what he really wanted once he’s in office, to appear to be some kind of a moderate and not a threat to corporate money.
And in fact, he did make deals, as he did with the drug companies, and he did get some big firms, particularly to go through his plan for socialized medicine by giving them some of what they want to gather their support causing, as you’ll recall, some of the left to say that he has betrayed us. He came out–from their perspective he didn’t go for the single payer system in real socialized medicine from the start. He adopted a more moderate program. As he himself admitted in some of his early speeches, this was just a starting point. Once we get there we can move forward to the single payer system later, because nothing else will work and we’ll get there by stealth. These are classic Leninist tactics which Obama clearly learned when he was in his youth. And that’s why in his background it’s very important to understand how he operates.
So I think we have to do two things- we have to clearly expose where Obama came from, expose how he operates, and try and educate the public about him and be very firm and very definitive. And one final comment about Occupy Wall Street. This goes back to another point Stanley made. What the movement says as they allude to FDR in 1936 as they [see things], FDR–and I think Dick Morris said that last night–FDR did not move into the so-called Second New Deal till 1936 when you had all his more far reaching reforms based on the power of the unions and the CIO and their organizing campaign. They see OWS as the equivalent of the base that gave Roosevelt his so-called push to the left in 1936. They are consciously following that strategy.
They see Occupy Wall Street as their equivalent of a leftwing people’s movement that will force Obama to the left. And what we have to explain to regular everyday people is that if he gets a second term and he doesn’t face reelection, this is what he’s going to do. He’s going to go to the equivalent of his Bolshevik central committee, which is the Center for the American Progress and the Institute for Policy Studies, both of which has issued papers advising Obama how to rule by edict rather than through Congress. He is going to go to them, use their plans, and try and push America far to the left in his second term when he has nothing to worry about. And that will–and I agree with Pat Caddell, create an America not like anything we have grown up in.
We have to prevent that. And by exposing and informing the public about what Obama was, where he came from, and what his strategy is, we can help prevent him from getting that second term.
J. Christian Adams: Good morning. It’s great to be here, great to back. Last year was a real treat and this one is too. It is also very good to be following Stanley Kurtz. Thankfully, he went ahead of me because in some ways my book, Injustice, is a sequel to his book, Radical in Chief. Stanley told you where Obama and his gang came from and Injustice sort of tells you what they’re up to now that they got there, about the radical policies that are actually being implemented inside your government by these folks. The topic before us is what–is Obamism.
And it’s pretty easy–most people have figured it out by now–that it’s a proxy for a form of radicalism that we’ve heard Stanley and Ron talk about. But I think it’s also something even worse in a way. I’m reminded about when I was researching the book I got a tip that said if you go down to Selma, Alabama, you will find buried in an archive some photographs and video of candidate Obama marching with Malik Zulu Shaba, the President of the New Black Panther Party, who is a radical anti-Semite. He’s a complete nut. He’s also an attorney. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
And they said–I got a tip that said you’ll find video of Obama and Shabaz sharing a podium at this event in March of 2007 in Selma when Obama was trying to get his credibility up as an authentically black candidate. And so, I went down to Selma and sure enough I found the photographs and they’re in the book. But I found something else, and I think in some ways the something else is more powerful than the pictures of Obama and Shabaz together. And these archives were at the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma. It’s the nation’s premier voting rights museum. It is viewed as credible by anybody from the center to the left.
And it has a timeline of the United States–and I actually have this photograph in the book, but I’ll try to describe it to you. And it has the picture of the iconic painting of John Trumbull’s signing of the Declaration of Independence with Jefferson and Franklin all standing around and they’re signing it. And the caption underneath this painting really says everything you need to know about this crowd. It says, “1776, the Declaration of Independence signed by wealthy white men.” These aren’t just radicals. These are destroyers. They are out to destroy things that we hold sacred, for example, the Declaration of Independence, the reviews about that event.
So I want to kind of dial something back though because most people assume this radicalism I think is centered high up in the administration, the David Axelrods, Barack Obama, the political folks. But what I’m here to tell you and what I write about in the book is the enormous synergy between these radicals that would have household names and the radicals that I used to work with at the Justice Department that you’ve never heard of. Okay? These are the folks that do the dirty work, the heavy lifting, that implement the ideological marching orders. And without this synergy between the folks you all heard about and my former co-workers, the radicalism will not work. But there is an enormous synergy between these two.
And the radicals have been waiting–there’s really two types of government workers. The first type are the radicals who have been waiting a long time for this very moment. It’s finally happened. We have a crackpot at the top. Okay? Bill Clinton–I like to say, give me back Bill Clinton. This is not Bill Clinton. But there’s a second type and this is the more dangerous type. These are not the radical government employees, but they’re the ones who have tendencies in the direction of big government. So these two factions in the Justice Department in particular join together and there is nobody standing in the [bridge]. The political people, the radical civil servants, and the pro-government tendency folks are all in lockstep and there is hardly anybody left. Now, why do I talk about justice all the time, about the DOJ?
People need to understand the DOJ is like the auger in the petri dish. It is the most important federal agency to spread radical ideology. If you infect the DOJ, it spreads throughout the federal government because the DOJ sets policy throughout the federal government. Miranda warnings for battlefield detainees, DOJ. Termination of enhanced interrogation, DOJ. But endangered species enforcement – what do you do with grizzly bears who attack farmers and the farmer shoots them? DOJ. Prosecuting someone in Idaho for this. But I saw firsthand also how it deals with election and race. And race is something that I’m not–it’s not the topic of my talk but it can’t be overlooked. Shelby Steele has written about this extensively. But it’s the topic of my book. It’s not just class that is the focus of these destroyers, it’s also race, because they use that like gasoline on a fire. And I write about this in the book and I won’t get into it.
But let me share some of the–one of the radical things that’s happening under the radar that most people don’t realize. The DOJ is implementing this radical policy. For example, I talk about the transvestites in schools. In Mohawk United School District in New York, a 15-year-old boy decided to come to school dressed like a transvestite – stiletto heels, he wore a miniskirt, he wore a pink wig. Now, in the old days, like five years ago, this wouldn’t last very long. And in fact, the school district said you can’t come to school dressed like this. But to the radicals of the Justice Department this was a federal cause of action. And the radicals of the civil rights division where I used to work sued the school district. This is true. It’s in the book. It’s Mohawk United School District because they would not let this student dress like a transvestite, a 15-year-old boy. And the theory of the case was that he was just exploring his gender identity. He had gender identity issues and the Federal Civil Rights laws against discrimination against women in the workplace should also extend to 15-year-old boys who think they’re girls.
And this is a real case and the school district settled. He’s allowed to dress like a transvestite and they have to spend $75,000 a year on gender identity counseling. Okay? Look, this is just one case. I have example after example after example of this radicalism through the Justice Department as it stands right now. But the place where it’s really going to show up is in the election next year. You heard Catherin Engelbrecht last night. Obamism is converting the most powerful federal agency in the government, the DOJ, into a weapon to impose intellectual radicalism that 20 years ago was only on college campuses. And they’re doing it in election law also and that’s my particular interest and specialty.
But let me give you an example of this – Catherine at [True to Vote] last year, I worked with her on this project. We found in the Houston, Texas voter registration forms many people who said–when it said on the form, are you a U.S. citizen, they actually marked no and they were registered to vote. Okay, they were registered to vote after saying they’re not a United States citizen, which is illegal. So we put together a referral to my old colleagues, the voting section of Justice, and said, look, here’s the registration forms. We had duplicate registrations, we had people who didn’t live there, and so forth – all the good stuff. They did absolutely nothing about it, nothing. And so, this is replicating all across the country where you have voter roll problems and nothing is being done about it. Contrast that with this – Georgia passed a law in 2009 to require proof of citizenship for voting. The Justice Department objected to this. They blocked the law under the Voting Rights Act.
So in closing, my point is that they have brought the outside radicals into the bowels of the civil service. But the Freedom Center webpage, I go to it weekly when I do write–I always link to it– when I do George Soros-funded it always ends up to discover the networks. And it’s getting a lot easier to discover the networks because more and more they’re on the GS federal pay scale inside the federal government.
So thank you very much for your time.
Monica Crowley: Hi. Good morning. I’m so happy to be part of this weekend this year. It’s really a thrill–and to be on this panel with so many courageous voices who are willing to speak the truth about Barack Obama. It’s a very gutsy move in this new era in the United States. And I want to give my colleagues here kudos for doing it and for standing up for the truth.
I want to start with a quote from the writer Maya Angelou, who is a close friend of Oprah Winfrey’s. And when I give you this quote, you’ll understand why I’m starting with it. Maya Angelou once wrote, “When somebody tells you who they are, believe them the first time.” Barack Obama has been telling us who he is for years. The mainstream media in this country ideologically attuned to where he was coming from buried his past. [Sallie] has written about this, Ron, we’ve all talked about this endlessly over the last couple of years and certainly during 2008 those of us who were very worried about this man, what he represented, what his background was, we were raising the alarm bell over and over again. It wasn’t a mystery. Barack Obama never made a mystery of himself. Did he try to cover it up once and a while, did he try to pose as a moderate here and there, sure, but his background was out there, his policies as a state senator and as a U.S. senator were out there. Barack Obama was named the most left U.S. senator in 2007, 2008, more left than Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed Socialist – more left than Ted Kennedy. Not a big mystery here, guys. Not a big mystery. He has been telling us who he is for years.
And yet in 2008, whether it was a case of wishful thinking, whether it was a case of willful blindness in the phrase of the great Andy McCarthy, whether it was just full on denial, the majority of the American people decided to give the keys to the kingdom to a complete stranger. I came across a quote from Bill Ayers the other day and there’s been some talk this morning about Occupy Wall Street and its connection to Barack Obama and what he represents. This quote from Bill Ayers stunned me because here’s what he said in 1972. Bill Ayers, of course, blew up the Pentagon with the Weather Underground, blew up the New York City Police Department. When you look at Occupy Wall Street, it all fits together, right?
In 1972, Bill Ayers said, “Kill all the rich people. Break their cars, break their apartments, break their homes. Kill your parents. That’s where it’s at.” This is a man who was so close to Barack Obama, despite his denials, that he actually hosted Obama in 1995 in his living room and launched Obama’s political career. And I thought when I saw this quote from ‘72 and now I’m looking at Occupy Wall Street, it dawned on me, this is the same revolution. Occupy Wall Street is not some spontaneous leftist movement that all the kids are in the streets with their sleeping bags and isn’t it quaint with their drugs and their free love and everything, and it will go away. No, this is the same revolution. And we’ve seen it since the turn of the 20th century where a group in the early 1920s tried to blow up Wall Street – anti-capitalists, anarchists – carried forward by Bill Ayers in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and now carried forward by Barack Obama and his soldiers of fortune.
Barack Obama five days before the election, and we’ve heard it here already this morning, “We’re just days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He also used terminology like, “We are going to remake this nation.” He used the word remake over and over again. I’m working on a book. It will come out next year. I expect each one of you to buy about 10 copies. It’s stunning how many times, how often he used the word remake, fundamentally transform, and again, willful blindness, wishful thinking, the Obama hypnosis, everybody sort of getting sucked into the Bermuda Triangle of hope and change. Nobody paid attention to what he really meant when he said that.
So now we’ve got these leftist radicals in the White House in this administration whose sole purpose is to destroy the existing order. This is Saul Alinsky. This is Barack Obama’s mentor–philosophical mentor. Destroy the existing order. And this is what the leftists are brilliant at. This is basically the only thing they know how to do is destroy. Occupy Wall Street – destroy the existing order. But let’s not stop there when we think of the leftist radicals. It’s not just about destroying the existing order. Once they destroy it, which is what they’re really good at, then what do they seek to replace it with? What they seek to replace it with is a more socialist ideal. That’s what you’ve seen from this president and this administration. In a couple of short years we have had socialized medicine that is remaking the healthcare sector, we have had an attempt at cap and trade and then when that failed, massive regulations done through the EPA, through the White House to remake the energy sector. We have had a partial nationalization of the banks and then with Dodd Frank a remaking of the financial sector. And then, of course, the auto takeover.
So the entire or at least a big chunk of the industrial base taken over by the government. Wealth free distribution class warfare – it’s all part of a piece. Because remember, what the leftists need, what Barack Obama needs, okay, and this is–people don’t want to say this, the American mind doesn’t want to process this. He needs the chaos. He needs the chaos. He needs an enemy. That’s what Occupy Wall Street is all about. That’s what the evil millionaires and billionaires are all about. That’s what evil corporate (inaudible) are all about. The left operates at its maximum speed with an enemy. He needs the chaos. He needs the upheaval. He loves Occupy Wall Street. For goodness sakes, he is Occupy Wall Street.
Rahm Emanuel, never let a crisis go to waste. And I would add to that a little addendum–even if you have to manufacture one. And that’s Saul Alinsky as well.
Briefly, foreign policy, just a quick note. We’re so focused on domestic issues here, but Barack Obama and the rest of the left loathes the United States, loathes this country, loathes everything we stand for in the world – our freedoms, our power, our economic prowess. So his whole mission has been to take the United States down a notch or two or ten. You know, just another nation on the U.N. roster, nothing special, and he has largely accomplished that.
Just finally here, the economic situation in this country is abysmal, we all know that, a direct result of his policies, direct result of his policies. And people will say, again in the wishful thinking or the willful blindness or the denial they’ll say, well, he’s incompetent. I’m sure you hear this a lot now. Oh, Barack Obama, he’s incompetent, or he’s naïve, or he’s in over his head, he didn’t have any executive experience so he just doesn’t know what he’s doing. All wrong. Barack Obama is a brilliant man and he knows exactly what he is doing.
Our political survival here hangs in the balance, our survival as a nation hangs in the balance. This man is not Bill Clinton, as we talked about before. Bill Clinton was a pragmatist. Bill Clinton wanted to survive as president, and so he did what he needed to do in order to moderate his policies to win reelection. This guy is willing to sacrifice his own political survival for the leftist agenda, for the agenda of fundamentally remaking America to the point where it’s irreversible. That’s why he was willing to lose the Democrat majority in the House. That’s why he was willing to lose so many seats in the Senate. And frankly, that’s probably why he’s going to risk losing the Presidency of the United States because for him it’s not really about him, it’s about fundamentally transforming this country.
One quick example before I go. Blanche Lincoln represents–represented Blue Dog Democrats in the Senate, a moderate Democrat from Arkansas. When the Obamacare debate came up, she went to the White House and begged Obama, begged him, to back off from the radicalism of socialized medicine. Let’s do this piecemeal. Let’s try to get some Republicans onboard. This is a major social issue in this country that we need bipartisan support for, we need public support for. We don’t have that. He turned to her ice cold and basically said, stick it, Blanche, stick it. She lost her seat for reelection. This man is willing to sacrifice his party and even himself for this mission. You are dealing not with a pragmatist, but with a pure ideologue.
Last night, Dick Morris was talking about 2012, and I hope he’s right. I hope he’s right. I will say that based on what we’ve heard today that Barack Obama has a formidable machine behind him. He’s got the unions. We’ve seen what they can do in Ohio and elsewhere. We have seen the corruption in this administration that Christian Adams pointed out. We have seen him mobilizing the kids. If you watch carefully now, I would say maybe every other campaign speech Obama gives will be on a college campus for a reason–and of course, minorities. So when you put those groups together and then you put together the formidable lying machine of David Axelrod, Valerie Jarred, David Plouffe, and of course, Obama at the top, we’re dealing with a very formidable challenge ahead of us. And that’s why we need to do our own community organizing. We need to community organize ourselves, people who love this country. It started with the Tea Party. We need to continue that momentum, okay? We need to work the ground forces from the bottom up because they’re doing it, they’re three steps ahead of us. And you know what? They’re playing chess, we’re playing checkers, and it’s about time we ramped up our game.
Thank you.
Karen Lugo: Our time is going to be cut a little short because of the security and process required for getting into lunch with Glenn Beck. I had offered the panelists time to do a responsive remark at close. So we’re not going to do that. I’ll ask them to include their final thoughts into answers to your questions.
I would like to very briefly, just because this is so topical, share a little bit with you from the Federalist Society Convention I attended just days ago where I was struck with so much conversation about how much of this is happening, as Christian mentioned, extra-Constitutionally or outside of the accountable political process. School districts are receiving dear colleague letters. Catholic charities are receiving letters saying, if you want USA I.D., we advise you to behave and instruct this way according to gay and lesbian policy. The dear colleague letters were encouraging administrators to look at [voting] policies in a more liberal way than the law requires.
We know–we heard about the Hajj situation this morning and we now have a DOJ that has openly declared that a case like the Hajj teacher who wanted to go on–that they will partner–they are now partnering in an unprecedented way with the EEOC. So, yes, you say, all these memoranda and letters are aspirational, these are guidance. Now with a DOJ like this, they become a matter of you should conform to this or else you have the team of these two organizations, which when they went after that school district, it for three years these combined agencies battled a school district in a town of several thousand people. Finally, the district settled.
And the one thing we did not hear this morning that is very significant about that settlement was that not only did the teacher get back pay reinstated and all of this, there’s a new policy now in that district which requires that instead of the contract governing her request for 21 days off, when the most that the courts had ever allowed–and this was a Supreme Court decision–was 10 days for a religious accommodation. So now we have 21 days off in the first year of teaching. I could go into a lot of the legal aspects of this kind of a decision. But now there’s a new policy where these cases are to be negotiated on a one-on-one basis. So all school districts in the country now know that if they don’t operate this way that they will be facing the combined force of DOJ, EEOC.
Just got an email yesterday from CARE announcing that the DOJ is going to intervene in a California land use case where a mosque was denied the ability to expand its facility. And so, again, the DOJ–I do land use law on behalf of Christian churches and religious organizations under RLUIPA–the DOJ–we don’t say, okay, we’re going to go to the DOJ with our case if we lose or if we have an issue with the city. It is something that goes through the court processes.
So for the DOJ to intervene again on the behalf of a minority group is a very disturbing thing when we live under a rule of law that is equal for all. So, with that, questions? Manny?
Unidentified Audience Member: (Inaudible) from Los Angeles. This is an extraordinary panel, very focused, a lot of really good information. I thought there was a slight tension between two of the comments–two of the speakers. One is between Monica and the other is Ron Radosh. And that is, is Obama a pure ideologue who is willing to sacrifice himself, or is he a shrewd ideologue, and a Leninist who figures he’s going to pull it out, and be there again, and they’re pulling out all the stops to do that? He’s not quickly willing to sacrifice himself. The economy didn’t turn around fast enough for the fundamentals to work out for him. But he wants this second term. And he’s not sacrificing self, it seems to me, on any altar. He is totally an ideologue, but he’s a Leninist who wants to be there (inaudible) and achieve all of his goals.
Monica Crowley: Yes. No, I don’t disagree that he wants the second term. I think he’s desperate for a second term for the sake of what more damage he can inflict on this country. What I’m saying is, he realized he had a short window of opportunity when he had these huge majorities in the Democrat Congress to push through Obamacare and all of the big social welfare programs, new entitlements, all of the massive spending that he did. When he lost the House in 2010, the window started to shut real quick. And I think in his mind, yes, of course he would love a second term, because without the worry of having to run for re-election, he could go to town and do it mostly through fiat and executive order. He would absolutely love that. But in the bigger picture, if he’s prioritizing, the main mission of remaking the country–or getting as many of the tentacles of these leftist socialist policies wrapped around the country as possible, even if he only has one term to do it before the American people got onto him, and now we’re onto him. To get those tentacles wrapped so tightly that even if he loses, it will be nearly impossible, or at least very difficult to remove those tentacles.
Karen Lugo: If Ron wants to respond real quickly–.
Ron Radosh: –Yes, I agree, the only other thing I left out today, to add to–to get that second term, he depends on one institution–that is, the AFL-CIO. And this is not your father’s union from the 1940s and even the 1950s, when the Communists were expelled from the CIO in the (inaudible) years of Harry Truman. The AFL-CIO is now largely a union of public sector employees. And the reason Christ Christie is so successful in New Jersey, he worked with the private unions and conservatives in the Democratic party to succeed in getting a conservative agenda for his state. But the AFL-CIO is an organized left-wing institution at present. And that’s where they’re going to pull out all the stops to get him elected. That’s his base. And that’s why they’re marching for Occupy Wall Street. They’re the shock troops of this socialist movement. We have to remember that too. And there’s some serious opposition we have to do.
Karen Lugo: It’s so difficult to have to move on, but we’re trying to squeeze in two more questions right here.
Unidentified Audience Member: we need to get the word out, and this is very obvious. And then you tell us that nobody knows Mr. Kurtz wrote this book because the mainstream media would not review it. How can you get the word out when the mainstream media will not tell the people who need to hear it what the word is? Thank you.
Monica Crowley: –I am the media, I guess, right? I’m doing my part on Fox and on radio and my blog and wherever else I can do it. It is a real challenge, because the media in this country now, for the most part, doesn’t do their job. They’re not an independent function. They are an arm of the Democrat Party, and they’re certainly an arm of this administration. So it is a challenge. And that’s what I meant by community organizing, because we’re going to have to around the media. And look, most of the American people are with us. This is a center-right country. Most of the American people are horrified by what this administration has done. So it’s just a question of mobilizing on the ground the way they do, in order to try to get this administration dislodged.
Karen Lugo: Yes. Final question.
Unidentified Audience Member: The Obama administration keeps talking about wanting jobs. But about everything they do destroys jobs, and he keeps coming up with one excuse after another, like the EPA won’t let me do it. There is an organization–many organizations that are run by the Koch brothers, and they supply over 70,000 jobs in the United States. They have had a series of meetings over the last several years, inviting other capitalists to figure out how to create more jobs for the country, yet they are completely victimized by the Obama administration, including ex-government officials. How can the Republicans go on the offensive to say hey, we businesses create jobs. We want to have the professions–.
Stanley Kurtz: Well, in my talk I was saying we go on the offensive by attacking Occupy Wall Street. But I do think we have to say–and I think we have been saying–that regulation is stifling jobs and businessmen large and small create jobs in this country. I think people actually buy that. I think that’s what’s hurting Obama right now. We have to drive that home. If Mitt Romney is the nominee, it really is going to be interesting. In the last panel, they said, is he going to be seen as a rich guy, or as a guy who will get you a job because he knows what’s going on. If Romney is the nominee, then this whole class warfare thing is going to go to another level, because that’s going to be their attack on Romney. So you’re going to see Occupy Wall Street simultaneously with an attack on Romney. And capitalism itself, really, is going to be–it’s being debated in this campaign. And we’re going to have to defend it.
Karen Lugo: Ed–I said Ed could ask a question. We may need to ponder it as we walk out, quickly.
Unidentified Audience Member: There’s a personal (inaudible) that I have never seen mentioned or in a book. Barack Obama and Bill Ayres went to college for an overlapping year, a half block apart from each other. Obama went to Columbia. Bill Ayers was at Bank Street Teachers College. Those of you who knew–know New York, Bank Street’s a very short street five miles away from Columbia. But I served on the Columbia faculty, and I live a half mile from it. And years before Ayers attended Bank Street Teacher College, it relocated to West 114th, give or take a north-south block. But less–a half block from Columbia University. That was after Ayers and his wife were off the legal hook and were–came out in public. Ayers was perhaps the most glamorous young radical in the world, and Obama has said–.
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Stanley Kurtz: I like to–I think it’s dangerous for us to go with speculation, even plausible speculation. I rely on what’s documented because the press can’t destroy it. But I’ll tell you how I think Bill Ayers is relevant. I actually–even though I talked a lot about Bill Ayers. I helped bring up the issue during the campaign. But I always felt yes, his history of terrorism is a completely legitimate issue, absolutely. But I kept saying, but you know what’s really more important is what he and Obama were actually doing when they were together. That was my line and I believed it. But I have to say that Occupy Wall Street has really just hit me with a plank upside the head, and made me realize that the conservative base was even more right than I thought, because what are the people doing at Occupy Wall Street?
The anarchists who break all the windows and everything, they wear the mask of Guy Fawkes. You see this bizarre mask. Who was Guy Fawkes? Guy Fawkes was a fellow who tried to blow up the British Parliament. They might as well be wearing Bill Ayers masks. And what this raises is when Democrats overlook and tolerate and don’t take seriously this part of the movement–and the movement itself, even the nonviolent ones don’t want to actually say we leave you out of the movement. Then the same thing that happened in Chicago with Bill Ayers, where some of the liberals just didn’t want to seem intolerant and they put up with the guy, and others absolutely idolized Bill Ayers. And Obama worked close–very closely with him. It went way beyond one party in his home. They had a long-term political partnership. So it surprised me to see the entire Democratic Party except one little editorial in The New Republic tolerating violence of people who wear the masks of the Bill Ayers of England in the 16th or 17th Century, whatever it was.
Karen Lugo: With that incredibly thought-provoking metaphor for Occupy Wall Street, we will thank our brilliant panelists and go to lunch.
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