David Horowitz critiques modern internet culture's erosion of free speech and details his 1986 departure from the left after exposing the Black Panther Party's role in Betty Van Patten's murder. He argues the Democratic Party functions as a totalitarian, crypto-religious entity enforcing identity politics, citing Keith Ellison's Muslim Brotherhood ties and Obama's alleged communism. Defending Trump against bigotry charges, Horowitz asserts the left labels opponents Nazis to silence dissent, while predicting increased violence despite his personal optimism rooted in genetics and marriage. [Automatically generated summary]
Is it just me or is internet culture, the trolling, the outrage, and the endless hate
starting to eat itself?
This election obviously brought out the worst in almost everybody from real people to twitter eggs and anime avatars.
People are constantly attacking others online and saying things they would never dare say to someone's face in real life.
The really scary part of this though isn't the words, you guys know I love free speech, but there seems to be no bottom to this hole of anger.
Just think about your Facebook and Twitter feeds for a moment.
Are they enlightening, interesting and bringing joy and goodness to your life?
Or are they an endless cascade of rants and raves, psychotic ramblings, endless fighting and nonstop virtue signaling?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that for most of you, the answer is the latter, not the former.
And yes, there are also a lot of baby pictures on Facebook, which can be quite annoying.
What I think is most interesting about our constant state of bickering isn't the obvious fact that the internet can bring out the worst in all of us, but that it seems to me that this behavior and the reaction to it is now bleeding out into the real world.
I'm slammed with emails every day in which people explain to me how they are suffering real world consequences for what they post or even what they don't post online.
People are getting fired over tweets, losing friends over Facebook posts, and God only knows what's happening on Snapchat.
But perhaps worse than all of this is the chilling effect that this state of outrage has on the rest of us.
This is why I've said it before and I'll say it again, the biggest threat to free speech is that we are actively silencing ourselves, not that the government is silencing us.
The threat to free speech isn't just that protesters are violent at a Milo event, it's the trickle down effect that that has.
Now they're violent at events for people like conservatives and libertarians such as Ben Shapiro and Charles Murray.
But of course it won't stop there either.
Eventually they'll come for liberals too, while at the same time plenty of other people who just won't want to deal with the threats simply won't accept invitations to speak in the first place.
The outrage machine will just dull us all down to the point where we won't share any original thought because we just won't want to deal with the repercussions.
This is exactly what's happening with Trump right now.
The mainstream media and the twitter brigade go bananas every time anything happens.
The result is that people won't be able to gauge the proper outrage if he does do something that truly warrants it.
Yes, he eats his steak with ketchup while it is well done.
That sounds horrible to me, but you've got to deal with it.
Remember the boy who cried wolf?
Now we've got the media who cried Trump.
You think I'm being alarmist here?
Well, do we seem more politically correct or less politically correct than 5 years ago?
What about 10 years ago?
Do you find yourself censoring yourself more or less now than you did even last year?
Who is forcing you to censor yourself?
Is it the government?
I don't think so.
I bet you need only look in the mirror.
And guess what?
This creep of stifling speech for fear of being ostracized isn't going to magically reverse itself.
We have to proactively fight it and we should have started this a long time ago.
Take a minute and think about our current television programming.
Could all in the family, arguably the best sitcom in television history, with a bigoted yet lovable Archie Bunker possibly be on network television today?
The beauty of Archie was that we all know someone like him whether that person is white, brown, or blue.
Only through seeing these people, poking fun at them, and showing the short-sightedness of bigotry can we change our society to be more thoughtful and decent for everybody.
Even when I watch Seinfeld, with all of its quirky racially based characters, jokes about gays, women and everyone else, I think that the authoritarians will come for the show about nothing, which was really a show about everything, one day as well.
It won't be the government kicking Jerry and the crew off the air, it'll be the next generation of social justice warriors Upset about the episode where George wanted a black friend, or where Kramer wouldn't wear the AIDS ribbon, or the ones with characters like Ping, the Chinese delivery guy, or Babu, the Pakistani restaurateur.
Beyond the outrage machine, there is another nefarious layer here, which is a whole group of people who get off on the outrage itself.
This is the group of people who react to anything and everything so to get clicks and ultimately money from our constant state of outrage.
So when PewDiePie makes a stupid joke about Jews as he did a couple weeks ago, the bigger reaction is from those who want to capitalize on the moment Rather than those who are actually outraged by the joke itself.
Then the mainstream media gets involved, with the Wall Street Journal writing about the incident, which subsequently led Maker Studios to end their contract with PewDiePie.
This destructive force will take anyone down who has moved up too far.
The YouTubers attacking PewDiePie wish they had his 55 million subscribers, and the Wall Street Journal sees how his influence, believe it or not, is now dwarfing their own.
As online culture gets woven into every facet of our lives, it's vital we all pick up and choose our spots when to fight and when to be outraged.
If we're outraged at everything, then we're outraged at nothing.
If we spend all day online trying to find enemies, well then guess what?
Enemies will present themselves.
Making some intellectual point over an opponent has value, but we have to be careful that the value isn't because of the retweets and the favorites it garners.
I'm sure I could be better at some of this myself, especially on Twitter.
Trolls are always going to troll, but those of us who want to change things for the better have to actually be better ourselves.
Final thought, I was a guest on the Alex Jones Live show last week as some of you may have seen.
I'm not even fully familiar with Alex beyond the little bites I see of him screaming and generally going nuts.
That said, the guy has a huge audience and is clearly influential as mainstream media crumbles and online media rises.
As I've said before, this comes with both positives and negatives, but regardless, the fact is, the guy is talking to a huge amount of people.
Immediately when I got the request to be on the show I thought that I shouldn't do it because of the ton of hate that I was about to get.
Then I realized that if I didn't do the show I would only be holding myself hostage to the very same ideas which are silencing so many other people right now.
So I did the show, with no preparation or advanced questioning, and Alex let me say what I wanted to say.
While I got the usual hate from the usual haters just for appearing on the show, I also know that I got some of the ideas that I care about to be heard by his large audience.
Now, maybe some of them will come here and learn more about the issues that you and I care about.
If you're one of those new viewers, welcome.
I don't yell as much, but I think you'll dig it around here.
But, for the record, I do not believe that a secret group of lizard people are leading a shadow government which is trying to undermine our freedoms.
Obviously, it's actually a group of frogmen led by Pepe and they're actually a bunch of freedom fighters.
I actually fought that name, but my board said, I had named it the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
As a leftist, I thought, it's very hard to attack a center for studying anything, let alone just... But conservatives see the word culture and they think left.
I don't think anything different from certainly not the Democratic Party of today.
Although then, I mean, when Roosevelt was president, they were all happy Democrats.
When Truman declared that America would defend free peoples fighting for their freedom against the Soviet Union, they all defected and formed the Progressive Party, which was run by the Communist Party.
I was 17 at the time and that was my kind of awakening that everything that the William Buckley, who we hated, The right said Stalin had killed 7 million people.
He actually killed about 40 million.
And we said this was all anti-Soviet lies.
The Soviet Union was a paradise of the future.
Everybody equal.
Everybody working.
Everybody happy.
All lies.
My community believed them.
And then Khrushchev came along with this, gave a secret speech that the Israeli Mossad smuggled out.
And it just, it blew up my community that there were divorces in our, that we knew of, over people dividing over the Khrushchev report.
People felt betrayed, they had lived a lie.
And other people felt You know, you continue, you go on, and they defended it.
It was basically a Black Panther Party is a street gang.
And this was a Contest for leadership.
So he, he introduced me and I got involved raising money for the Panthers.
I raised for a school.
I was very impressed.
They had a lot of children and the Panther Party was a mix.
There were, you know, generally good people and there were gangsters.
And the good people impressed me.
And one of them was running the school.
A school, and they were jammed into a brown shingle house in Oakland.
I mean, they had double-decker beds from one wall to the other for the kids.
So I thought this Hollywood producer would give me the money, but it didn't turn out that way.
But I raised, oh, I think it was $125,000, which is a lot of money in those days, and bought a church.
A Baptist church in East Oakland that had been overtaken by the inner city.
It was a white Baptist church.
And I signed the check.
I created the Oakland Community Learning Center, a 501c3, to house the school.
I'll never forget, the minister said to me as I handed him the check, I hope you're not going to turn this over to the Black Panthers or the Nation of Islam.
Like most of the left today, I had no idea who they were, the Panthers.
But anyway, I've told this story in Radical Son, my autobiography.
1974.
I recruited the bookkeeper, my bookkeeper at Ramparts, to do the books for the school because I believed our own propaganda that the government was racist and that they would shut down the Panthers if they didn't keep the books, which was ridiculous.
I forget, what's the name of this big Orange County Foundation?
They gave her $10,000 to speak at, I can't remember, it was UC Santa Barbara.
The students there informed me.
No, because conservatives in this country are well-meaning, liberal-minded people, generally, especially the ones with money.
Give you the benefit of the doubt.
I mean, here's a black person claiming that America is an oppressive country.
Oh, sure, here's the money.
Anyway.
I was personally devastated.
I was clinically, I would say clinically depressed for seven or eight years.
I mean, I wake up in tears every morning.
I felt responsible for having recruited Betty.
Her name was Betty Van Patten, the woman who was murdered.
She was a mother of three children.
The ideology is so pernicious that on the way to Betty's funeral, her daughter, who worked for me and was, I don't know, she was 19 or 20 at the time, I tried to warn her.
I mean, I was afraid for my children.
And I said, I think the Panthers killed your mother.
And her response was, no, they're good people.
So I set out then to warn, when I had sort of assimilated all this, my mission was to warn other people.
And that's how I know that Barack Obama's a communist.
All right, so wait, let's pause before we jump to modern day.
Because everything that you just described there was why I thought your bio was so interesting, because you grow up With communists, I didn't know about the guy in the basement, but you were firmly on the left your whole first 40 some odd years.
He said of my book that it was like a, I don't know what he said, a handbook, a bible for the left, before he called me a renegade for leaving the left.
That's right, what happened was, When this happened, I had left Ramparts with Peter Collier, who was my buddy, and it was Peter's idea to write a dynastic biography.
The Goldsworthy saga was on PBS at the time, so it was a generational saga.
So I was in the midst of writing a book on the Rockefellers, which became a bestseller.
And then we were asked to do a book on the Kennedys, which came out in 1985.
And when it came out, it was the number one New York Times bestseller.
And the Washington Post, the editor of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine called me to pick my brain about young Joe Kennedy, who was a congressman.
And he said, what have you guys been doing?
I go, oh, you won't believe this, but Peter and I just voted for Ronald Reagan.
And neither Peter and I had talked before casting that vote.
So, that's why when Trump came along, I wasn't one of these never-Trumping, inside-the-beltway snobs, although some of my good friends have found that path.
So basically, you went off the reservation officially with this article, and then you had said the knives were already out, but then- No, it was with the Reagan article.
Right, so this was, what, it was a year later, right?
Yeah.
I think it was 85 and 86, so a year later, so the knives were already out, and then this was like sort of the final door on- That's right, and so 1986 to 87, that's like 30 years ago, is that when it is?
In 30 years, My work has never been taken, the work, the ideas, my arguments with the left, why I'm no longer, I wrote a long essay on leaving the left and why I left it.
Never responded to.
The nation made one stab at it, but not a very good one.
On the other hand, there's like 100,000 attacks on me on the internet from leftists.
So it's not like they don't think that I need to be refuted.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, right before we sat down, I was scrolling my Twitter feed and some article was written about me where they referred to me as a right winger and then got a few other things incorrect about me.
And then my own audience actually started attacking them on Twitter.
And then they, they didn't issue a retraction, but they changed the headline at least and changed one other thing.
Which, of course, is not journalistically sound, but I guess maybe I'm picking up some of the heat.
So, you know, I'm an easier target than you are, because I vowed when I left the left that I was going to talk to the left, address them in the same way that they address everybody else.
So when you see, you had some nice things to say about me when you sat down, and when you see someone like me that understands the title of this book, that understands your journey and all that, do you think I was just, even though obviously we have 30 some odd years between us, that I was just late to the game in picking up what was going on here?
Or do you think something also happened in the last couple of years with the left?
The anti-American totalitarian, and I would say racist left, I will explain that more later, but racist left, was taken into the bosom of the Democratic Party in the Clinton administration.
And with Obama, they got one of theirs in the White House.
So when I hear you say that about the Clinton administration, that's hard for me to picture, because those eight years were basically I don't think we saw a lot of what we're seeing right now.
I think back to the Clinton administration very fondly, still, that things were basically... First of all, Bill Clinton's It's not an ideologue in the way that Hillary Clinton is.
Therefore, we should be treated equally by our government.
And we have rights that are inalienable that the government can't take away.
So, it's all about individual freedom and, most importantly, individual accountability.
When I was a kid in public schools, there was this phrase, regardless of race, color, or creed, an American is somebody who doesn't look at your origins.
We're a nation of immigrants that way.
Don't look at your origins.
Of course, if you come from a terrorist country, maybe we should have a little vetting process.
Identity politics is the opposite.
What the left seeks, we are in a civil war situation now.
And the reason is, the reason it's so irreconcilable is that the left is racist.
It believes in a racial hierarchy.
So, if you're the right skin color, which is dark, you go to the head of the line for admissions to college, you go to the head of the line for a job, you go to the head of the line for a promotion, you go to the head of the line for almost anything.
Everything's not diverse enough, so we'll take anybody.
Yeah, and white people did a lot of bad things and they did good things.
And one of the good things that white America did was to liberate the slaves.
People forget that we inherited slavery.
This is how I made myself notorious in the left by coming out against reparations for slavery 137 years after the fact.
America inherited a system of slavery.
Slavery existed.
I learned this from Orlando Patterson, who is a black left-of-center sociologist at Harvard who's written prize-winning books on slavery and freedom.
Slavery existed for 3,000 years.
Nobody ever said it was immoral.
Not Jesus, not Moses, not Aristotle.
Until a white Christian males in England, led by Wilberforce, said it's immoral.
And an American slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, wrote it into the birth certificate of this country, that all men are created equal and are given Right to liberty by their creator.
Within 20 years, the slave trade was ended.
The reason that America didn't initiate a civil war in 1776 to free the slaves, one of the biggest reasons, was that England would have come and just retaken the colonies and reinstituted Anyway, and within a generation or a little more, given in those days people lived shorter lives, at the cost of 350,000 Union soldiers, we liberated the slaves and liberated them throughout the hemisphere.
So, black people, Americans can be very proud of their heritage.
You know, it's a human heritage, so it's got a lot of bad spots, but you look at any other country in the world, and forgive me, leftists, for saying this one is the best.
What other country do Asians get in boats and risk their lives to get into?
And then the funny thing is, at the same time, you go to watch some of these protests and the people that are screaming about how racist and evil and patriarchy and all this stuff, they're also the ones calling for open borders.
I mean, for example, you could take American Indians, people who've moved here from India, or their grandparents moved here from India, or you could take Asian people of virtually any nationality, and they don't count in this leftist thing because they've succeeded economically.
So they have to purge those groups, because those groups... Yeah, that's why they have to shut you up, because they can't deal with your arguments.
It's really simple, straightforward.
And it's so invaded our literary culture.
The last two National Book Awards were given to racist tracts, won by Ta-Nehisi Coates I can never remember the title.
He was just a rank racist, Coates.
What inspired him to write the book, it's about how evil America is, was the murder of his friend, not the murder, the killing of his friend by a policeman in Maryland.
It turns out, as he tells you, that the policeman accused his dead friend of trying to run him over with his car.
The policeman is black.
So what does Coates say?
He was thinking white.
Now that isn't the purest racism.
And this one now, it's called Stamped from the Beginning.
It's a semi-literate book.
That they have lowered their standards so dramatically, it still shocks me.
Because these are intelligent people, the people who give the awards, but I should know better.
But it opens with the police shootings of criminals in the last year, which were totally distorted by Black Lives Matter and other leftists into cops gunning down unarmed blacks.
These were predators.
And who did they prey on?
They preyed on black people.
Freddie Gray.
I mean, you know, you could go on.
I can't even remember the names.
The guy in Ferguson.
They're criminals who prey on black people.
But this guy has them as innocent blacks who are gunned down by racist cops.
So at the opening of his book, which he has called the definitive history of racism in America, he's exposed as a liar.
And he won the National Book Award.
So our institutions have been just generally corrupted.
No, but as I say, I made this vow, Thirty years ago, that I was going to berate the left.
I was going to say, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
I actually, when I was still sort of leaving the left, I thought about that statement a lot, saying, let's see, if I were a prisoner of war and I was in a room with my captor, would I rather it was LBJ or Ho Chi Minh?
No, I mean, I, you know, what did I, oh, I took on the leaders of the religious right over Mark Raskol, who was the governor of Montana and was the chairman of the RNC, met with the, I think it's called the Human Rights Association, which is a gay group.
Yeah, and the woman, it's not about the woman's body alone.
You know, I think that fathers are involved as well, but certainly there's a child there.
So, you know, the argument against it is you want to bring a kid into the world that's going to have an absolutely miserable life because it's a wrong parent at the wrong time.
You know, and I think the energy should be spent on Finding ways to take care of children that their parents aren't able to take care of.
It's a very vexed problem.
I've confronted right-wingers actually within the Heritage Foundation debate.
who said it's murder.
I said, well, if you think it's murder, then you should be demanding the execution
of every mother in America who's had an abortion.
And if you don't, it's a much more complicated problem.
Did you see that change, too, that it's just, I know when you're saying that culture is the most important thing, but when did it go from, I was thinking even this morning about- The left started taking over the universities in the 70s, and now they've got the K-12 schools as well.
And, you know, I conducted a, it was literally a five or six year campaign To try to get an academic bill of rights, really a student bill of rights.
That students have a right to a professional education and in a democracy that means that professors can express their opinions but they have to present opposing sides of controversial issues in a fair-minded way.
And I was attacked from one end of the country, the other is a torquemada and a thought controller.
It was very liberal.
And I did it all out of their own documents.
There's a very famous academic freedom statement that was drawn up.
Do you find when you meet people, maybe some young people that are waking up to some of this stuff, that once they see one piece of it, that the rest of it crumbles very quickly?
Because I saw it happen with myself, obviously, and for me, it's still an unfolding process, I think, and that's why I'm happy to have these conversations.
But I see it happening with other people now.
I get emails every day, people will be like, one little thing happened, and then literally two months later, I now believe everything there is.
That's what turned him from a liberal into a conservative.
I have somebody who writes occasionally for Front Page, my website, who heard me speak in Camden, New Jersey, and I point it out as I do in my book, Big Agenda.
Every inner city of any size is 100% controlled by the Democratic Party and progressives.
It has been for 50 to 100 years, including Camden.
When Peter Collier and I wrote this bestseller on the Kennedys, we found ourselves in a green room of Good Morning America, sitting, and there were only three people, the other person was William F. Buckley, and there was dead silence in the room.
And the reason That Peter and I were silent.
We had no idea who Buckley was.
We just knew.
We didn't want to be nice to a fascist.
That's what the left called him, a fascist.
So we didn't want to be nice to a fascist.
So Peter broke the ice by saying, my mother is a big fan of yours.
And then we found out from Buckley, who is a very gracious human being, That he was silent because his son had just written a very critical attack on a Kennedy book.
There was another one that came out and he didn't know if it was ours.
The lack of civility of the left.
Yeah, just it's so it's fascist.
That's what it is.
And there's no way, I mean the only response you can have is one like Milo's and just go in their face.
No rational person could not look at Islam and say it's not a problematic religion.
It preaches hatred against all other religions.
It sanctions, there's just a series of quotes from the Koran, sanctions, murder, beheading of infidels, which is what we are.
The Prophet Muhammad has said that the day of judgment will only come When the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.
When the Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees and the rocks and the trees cry out, oh Muslim, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.
Not only is this not repudiated, By organized Islam.
But it's repeated.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi said as much.
The Holocaust was a punishment on Egyptian TV.
And he is the imam, the leading imam, not only for the Muslim Brotherhood, but for Huma Abedin, Hillary's right hand.
That's her imam.
That the Holocaust was God's punishment of the Jews for their corruption, and it will come again, this time a la willing, at the hands of the believers.
He's a genocidal Nazi, is Garudawi, and he's the imam of Hillary Clinton's right hand and deputy in charge of Muslim affairs for the State Department.
Yeah, it's a big problem, not a little one.
And Keith Ellison is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, is now the number two guy in the Democratic Party, only missed by 13 votes.
How could the Democratic Party embrace this?
And Tom Perez is no better.
But at least Ellison has an open record of being in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood, being supported by them.
And being a Farrakhan Jew hater, and America hater, and white hater.
So you really believe that, that Trump and that, you know, I was gonna say a second ago when you were talking about fighting the roots of Islamic extremism, I mean, Bannon, from what I understand, seems to be the architect of that.
I mean, he's fighting with a wife over the kids and when they go to school and maybe the school was very expensive, it is an expensive school, the Archer School.
The other evidence is an article that I wrote, I gave the title to, Bill Crystal Republican spoiler, renegade Jew.
So people who haven't read the article... I read the article.
No, he was a renegade because he's going to return Huma Abedin and Ben Rhodes, who is the architect, one of the architects of the Iran deal, back to power.
It's a death knell for Israel.
I mean, what they've done.
Not to mention the United—I mean, Iran isn't powerful enough to destroy the United States, but its leaders do chant—lead chants of, Death to America!
So I know enough people are gonna watch that and go, wait a minute, but the deal says that they can't get nukes, but you would say, well, it means it expires.
If you don't refer to the United States as a constitutional republic, you're not a conservative.
If you don't use the phrase limited government, he never said that.
Look what he's doing now.
I mean, he's cutting the government in a big... I mean, it's just crazy.
He won me over this way.
I mean, I was nervous about him through the campaign because you don't know.
You know, this is his first venture into politics.
I don't know.
I'm not nervous about him anymore, although I think he'll disappoint me on some things.
But he won me over in the first debate.
Here's a guy, he's never been a political candidate before.
He's on a platform with 12 of, you know, the top Republicans in the country.
It's in front of, I don't remember, it's 30 million people or whatever it is.
And he gets the first question, because he has the highest percentage in the polls.
And it's not a question, it's an attack from Megyn Kelly.
You called women fat pigs, slobs, and dogs.
And he says, oh, that was just Rosie O'Donnell.
I said, this guy is a guy they can't intimidate.
Because political correctness is a party line.
As I said, it comes from Mao.
It's like a communist party line.
It shuts you up.
There is no other Republican under the sun who on national TV, this time in front of 50 million people, would have looked Hillary Clinton in the eye and said, you're a liar and a crook, even though she's both.
If it were a male, they would say it.
Why?
Because there's this gigantic double standard.
It's politically incorrect to say anything critical about a woman.
This is ridiculous.
If that's the case, they shouldn't be in politics.
Now, the left will just take out that phrase.
They shouldn't be in politics.
But you can't be protected and at the same time pretend to be strong.
You know, it's interesting how pernicious some of this stuff is, because I'll even see sometimes if a man attacks me on Twitter, not that Twitter fights are that important, but I'll immediately defend myself and come back.
And I've had a few instances where women have, and I've just ignored it because I don't want to attack a woman.
And I know that's my own, it's just my own reflection of what I'm, Yeah, we've all been schooled in that.
So that desire to punch back or to not be held hostage by political correctness or all that stuff, would you argue that that is far more important than any of his political beliefs?
Once I saw, here's a guy who the Democrats can't intimidate.
I use this phrase in my speeches.
Whenever I see a Republican square off against a Democrat, it looks to me like Godzilla versus Bambi.
Because the Democrat is going to call the Republican a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, and the Republican will call the Democrat a liberal.
Who's going to win that argument?
So this is a bulldozer, or—and I love the way they call Trump a blitzkrieg, the Democrat blitzkrieg.
We have a tradition in this country.
It's sacred to a democracy of a honeymoon for an incoming president.
It says there's a peaceful transition of power.
It says we're all part of one community.
It says we're going to see what you do, and then we're free to criticize you.
And the remedy is the next election.
Trump didn't get seven seconds.
He didn't get confirmation hearings.
He got a witch hunt.
And this is another example of how political correctness works.
Jeff Sessions.
I've known him for 20 years, and I've known a lot of senators, one of a handful of the most decent human beings in the Senate, a champion of civil rights.
This was an attorney general in a deep South state who prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan, who desegregated the schools, and there's Elizabeth Warren calling him a racist, and then violating Senate rules to repeat calling him a racist, and when she's told to shut up, they say, Oh, they're silencing another woman.
To be clear for people that didn't follow that whole thing, she was reading other people's words, which isn't technically allowed in the Senate, so that she was doing something that she wasn't allowed to do by their own rules.
And it was happening to be a letter from Coretta Scott King that she was repudiated.
What happened was, In Alabama, there were three blacks who were defrauded of their voting rights because they were in opposition to three other blacks who were NAACP corrupt officials.
That's the whole case.
And Sessions didn't know how to defend himself the first time he was up in the 80s.
I mean, this is the thing.
Republicans are not used to fighting back.
That you're used to getting out of the way.
Why wouldn't you if people are calling you racist, sexist, homophobe?
Right, so the words aren't, but what I now think is we're gonna see more violence because they've been pinned into a corner where everyone that they're against is a Nazi and a racist and all those things.
But my last question to you is, With this evolution, with now the first Republican, as you're saying, with Trump that's not gonna take it, what's the good path now?
So does that then, I already said it was the last question, but we'll keep going for a little bit.
So does that though, so when the Tea Party organized, and the Tea Party was gaining momentum, everyone was saying there were these redneck, backward, gun nuts, racists, and blah, blah, blah.
When people start referring to the left as fascists and not liberals, Then I'll say, OK, we're winning now.
Right now it isn't happening.
They go on, like I say, it's corrupted our culture, it's corrupted our schools.
It's just very, very bad.
But I think, you know, my faith is in Steve Bannon and Steve Miller.
These are two fighters.
And Trump.
And Trump understands instinctively that when you get attacked, you attack back and throw them off.
Well, I have this phrase that I I picked up from Chris Lehane, who's a Democratic, it was in the New York Times article about him, a Democratic strategist, but he stole it from Mike Tyson, which is everybody has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth.
And the Democrats have a massive punch in the mouth for Republicans, calling them racist.
And Republicans have to come back and call Democrats.
The Democratic Party is the party of racism.
It's the party of racial categories.
It's the party of identity politics.
It's the party of the inner cities.
It is a racist party.
It is also, and I love this, what Trump said in the, it was in the second debate.
He turned to the cameras and said, you have to understand, Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart.
And what he was referring to was the basket of deplorables, which she named.
She identified all of her opponents, or whatever, half, same thing.
A racist, sexist, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, you name it, and he's raised them up.
There isn't a conservative or a deviating liberal who hasn't been in an argument with a so-called liberal who hasn't been called a racist, a sexist, a homophobe.
I think interestingly people are being converted on both sides because I think what's happening is I know for sure that I've helped a lot of progressives realize what true liberalism is and at the same time I think I've had and I know that I've gotten a lot of More conservative people to realize that not all liberals are bad, and I think that's where most of us actually are That's good.
I don't want to take anything away from you, but I I found when I came into the right I've conservatives are generally very decent people and when I criticized the Religious right leadership I had different reactions from things like the Family Research Council I had people in my face the blood vessels popping, screaming at me.
And I had people who were very supportive, very Christian in that way.
And I also had this experience in the 2008, I was at the Moral Majority.
Ralph Reed had invited me to come down to Atlanta.
And the woman who was my connection there and a Moral Majority member, I asked her, I said, well, if John McCain gets a nomination, will you vote for him?
And she said, yeah.
So, what the religious right needs to understand is that there's religion and then there's politics.
And religion is about saving your immortal soul.
And if you mess with the devil, you endanger it.
And in politics, you make pacts with the devil all the time.
It's about getting into office and trying to practically change some things.
Yeah, do you remember there was a line a couple years ago that Oprah, who and I basically like Oprah and respect Oprah and I'd be happy to have her on the show, of course, when she was talking about this older generation and some of their backwards ways of thinking, and she said, well, they just have to die.
I remember thinking, even if what you're saying, yes, studies show that younger people are generally more liberal on the social issue.
All right, so that sort of fits everything else that you're saying, but my point being that when she said it, it sounds so nuts to me, because one day, if you take that logic to its end, guess what?
One day the young people are gonna want all of you dead when you're old, because it'll just keep going.
You can't try to make sense out of it, but it's actually the reverse.
See, older blacks, you know, Are not as racist as younger blacks.
Racism is pervasive now.
I mean, this is a very poignantly incorrect set to say, but I think it's pretty obvious.
Racism is pervasive in the black community, and especially among younger people who have been to schools and told that all their problems come from white racists.
Very bad, you know, The 50s were much better times in this country.