Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (19 page)

There’s no time to continue backing away. If we’re standing still, we’re moving backward. Get in the game. Get in the fight.

2. Expose the left for who they are—in their own words.
It’s easy to label the left, to analyze them, to take them apart using your rationality—their program fails every time it’s tried, and their lexicon, once you know it, is as predictable as the sun rising in the east. What’s much harder than understanding the left is exposing it.

That’s where citizen journalists come in. Drudge was a citizen journalist, and he took on a president. Today, we all have the power to be citizen journalists via the Internet—there’s no Complex gatekeeper to stop us from posting the truth about enemies of freedom and liberty in this country. In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and baseless attacks on George W. Bush; exposed John Kerry’s true war record during the 2004 election cycle; debunked Reuters’s photography fraud in the Middle East; raised the question whether Barack Obama’s autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
, was
ghostwritten by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers; gotten rid of communist Van Jones; and the list goes on. The Internet has become the shining beacon of journalistic freedom, tearing apart congressional bills piece by piece for the benefit of the public, even when our own legislators won’t read them.

The key to the success of the New Media, though, is making news by breaking news. And that means that conservatives need to use their new best technological friends: the MP3 recorder, the phone camera, and the blogosphere. It’s one thing to say that the left likes socialism, but it’s a real story to get Barack Obama to admit it on camera, as he did to Joe the Plumber during the 2008 election cycle. Video journalism is the most potent kind of journalism. We live in an age of sound and sight, not text, and we have to adapt to that age.

You are the soldiers in this war against the Institutional Left. You have been issued your weapons. Go out and use them. Make it impossible for the Complex to ignore you.

3. Be open about your secrets.
If you’re going to go out in public, be absolutely open about what you’ve done in the past. Take a page from Barack Obama, who revealed in his probably Ayers-ghostwritten autobiography
²
that he had done a bit of blow, and hung out with commies and assorted lowlifes. Once it was out there, there wasn’t much that the right could do with it—he’d already admitted it.

By way of contrast, take a look at Mark Foley. If he’d admitted he was gay right off the bat, the left wouldn’t have had much to pillory him with. The left never gets cited for hypocrisy (see Clinton, Bill), but the right is cited with it all the time because we actually have standards. That means we have to out ourselves before the left does it for us. In this book, I’ve already admitted to libertine
sensibilities that were taken to absurd heights during my collegiate stint in New Orleans. I am not a Puritan. Frankly, John Waters’s movies and Johnny Knoxville’s
Jackass
series are more up my alley than Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
. The days of the left forcing us into a small, monolithic, and monochromatic box are over, and we have to fight their caricature of us.

Actually, George W. Bush did the same thing during the 2000 election. “When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid,” he said. Once he had come clean, the left was stuck—they couldn’t do anything.

Hypocrisy is such a powerful argument for the left because it appeals directly to the emotional heart of politics: one standard for you, another for me. It’s no wonder Alinsky relied heavily on his rule 4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. We have more rules than they do with regard to morality, which means we have to live up to them more often. But mistakes in the past don’t need to be skeletons waiting to come out of the closet. If you’ve made mistakes, reveal them at the first available opportunity. Embrace those mistakes. Don’t talk about how you regret them—talk about how you lived through them and how they made you who you are today. Embracing your mistakes makes you invulnerable to their slings.

Just don’t screw up badly
now
.

4. Don’t let the Complex use its PC lexicon to characterize you and shape the narrative.
If you’ve got a big story, the Complex will do what it always does: attack you personally using the PC lexicon. You immediately become a racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic nativist. Don’t let them do it. The fact is this: if you refuse to buy into their lexicon, if you refuse to back down in the face of those intimidation tactics, they can’t harm you. You’re Neo in the
hallway with Agent Smith after he figures out that the Complex is a sham—the spoon isn’t bending, he’s bending. Once it hits him that he’s not bound by the rules of the game, he can literally stop bullets. You can stop their bullets because their bullets
aren’t real
.

Leftist assassins like Max Blumenthal, a one-trick hit man, have tried to label me and many of my allies as racists. I don’t let them get away with it. I don’t just call them out, I make sure that my righteous indignation registers on the Richter scale. I don’t pull out my record on civil rights or my black friends. I simply point out that what they’re doing is pure Alinsky and that it has no basis in fact or reality, and that they’re showing themselves to be racists in their own right by citing race every time they meet someone with whom they disagree.

While I was at the 2010 CPAC, I was confronted by Daryle Jenkins of the One People’s Project based on my defense of James O’Keefe—he had been slandered online as a racist by Blumenthal because he had attended a conference at the Georgetown Law Center that included racist Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire of
National Review
(who ripped into Taylor for his racism during the forum), and African-American conservative Kevin Martin. At the event, O’Keefe sided with Derbyshire and Martin against Taylor.

Anyway, here’s how the incident went down:

At this point, Jenkins started pointing his finger inches from my face and moving his face close to mine. It then devolved into a series of accusations by Jenkins regarding details of the event. Finally, Jenkins got to his point:

That was it. Jenkins walked away.

The key to the conversation was that I didn’t start defending myself against his baseless charge of racism. I dismissed it out of hand as ridiculous because it
was
ridiculous. He
was
a punk for leveling that kind of charge without any basis whatsoever. I don’t let my enemies characterize me without any evidence, and you shouldn’t let them characterize you. Name-calling is their best strategy, and if you don’t lend it credence, and instead force them
to back up their charges with specifics, you win.
Revel
in the name-calling—it means you’ve got them reduced to their lowest, basest tactic, and the one that carries the least weight if you refuse to abide by their definition of you.

5. Control your own story—don’t let the Complex do it.
A one-and-done story isn’t worth anything. One fact can be posted on the Internet and flushed down the memory hole faster than anyone can imagine. How many incredible pieces of journalistic revelation have been lost because they weren’t properly presented to the public?

Serialization is good. Van Jones was taken down by Glenn Beck because Beck had the goods—and because he revealed them piece by piece. He got Jones and his defenders to come out of the closet and attack him. Then he calmly laid his cards on the table, one by one.

It’s the same strategy I saw Arianna pursue during the Larry Lawrence scandal. People came out of the woodwork to attack her as a scurrilous human being slandering a dead war hero. And she smiled and let them come at her. Then she put her evidence into the public eye, bit by bit, keeping the story alive. Feeding the media is like training a dog—you can’t throw an entire steak at a dog to train it to sit. You have to give it little bits of steak over and over and over again until it learns its lesson. That’s what Arianna did.

It’s the exact same thing Drudge did with Lewinsky. He broke the story in pieces rather than in a long essay laying out all the facts, and he didn’t let the media’s cries for him to reveal all his information control his decision-making process. Instead, he controlled the media.

The important thing to remember here is that the media are like a leech hanging on the back of the news makers, and the news makers have every right and ability to feed that leech little by little
instead of letting it suck them dry all at once. Keep your story alive by planning its release down to the minutest detail.

6. Ubiquity is key.
As a capitalist and as a web publisher, pageviews are certainly a desired commodity. But when playing for political or cultural keeps, impact matters most. And, when ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC and the dailies are working against you and ignoring you, ubiquity is a key weapon. That means developing relationships with like-minded allies or even enemies and news junkies and allowing them to share in the good fortune of a good scoop.

While the crux of a story can be weaponized and launched on one of my websites, there are often peripheral angles that can be developed elsewhere with a separate but related media life of their own. For instance, the ACORN story was unbelievably complex. A key component of exposing the scandal was a detailed analysis of ACORN’s structure and its past scandals. I knew legal minds were needed to weigh in on these aspects. Patrick Frey, who runs the indispensable Patterico website, created a parallel line of attack, not just against ACORN, but against its myriad defenders, who lied and misdirected to try to kill the story. The ACORN story couldn’t have been the success it was without others—talk radio and alternative news outlets that were invested in the story and could deliver scoops of their own. So, I planted scoops with what business school types would call my “competitors,” and I watched the story explode, my pageviews go through the roof, and my brand flourish. Sometimes the best ideas are counterintuitive.

I love living in Los Angeles and not DC, because in DC there are too many fighting over too little ground for their own fifteen minutes. The scarcity mentality is strangling the growth of the conservative movement. From outside DC, I can see that ubiquity is about growing the pie for everyone, spreading the stories, the
channels of distribution, the resources around so that the entire movement can benefit, because our chunk of the public square gets bigger and bigger each time we break something huge.

7. Engage in the social arena.
My first instinct about Facebook was my first instinct about Twitter was my first instinct about MySpace. I was right about MySpace—it sucks. I was definitely wrong about Facebook and Twitter.

Using my “ubiquity” rule, the citizen journalist isn’t always reporting in the ledes, headlines, and paragraphs form. Sometimes a tweet or a re-tweet can grant an idea more legs. Sometimes a status update can lead to the mother lode. Yes, there are slick advisers falsely promising a social networking Gold Rush, but a well-socially-networked person can soon carry more weight than a household-name columnist at your local news daily.

Building a movement used to take time, but now it can be done in a few hours with the right connections and the right posts on the right websites. Take, for one example, flash mobs. These are gatherings spawned over the Internet on hours’ notice, and they gather thousands of people, whether it’s for snowball fights or for rioting in the streets of Philadelphia.

The Tea Parties have used the power of social media to get their message out there in a new and incredible way. There are no leaders to the Tea Party, which is a great thing, and there’s no formal program to the Tea Party—it’s truly a party of the people, and originally, it was based on conservative people partying. If any liberal attended a Tea Party event, they’d be shocked to see that it isn’t a KKK rally; it’s a social gathering of thousands of like-minded people of all races and ages, people looking for others who believe in the same values.

It’s also particularly true in Hollywood, where socializing is the
basis of business. That’s why I’ve tried to put people in Hollywood together, and it’s already spawning actual creative projects. Seek out other people and build an army.

8. Don’t pretend to know more than you do.
This one trips up conservatives all the time. We want to argue policy because when we know policy, there’s no way they can beat us, because all they have is their lexicon of name-calling and societal expulsion. We have reason on our side.