8

WHY ESTABLISHMENT
REPUBLICANS HATE ME

“Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.”

—Thomas Sowell

In January 2016, I got into what I thought was a friendly Twitter spat with then-editor-at-large for Breitbart, Ben Shapiro. Ben is a shorter and less successful version of me who lost his audience by freaking out against Daddy.

Shapiro’s distaste for me and his distaste for Trump are related. They’re part of a wider story of insecurity and anger on the part of the establishment right: anger that their positions of power and influence over conservative politics are slowly slipping away. Anger that they are being replaced by a new generation of young, fashionable and funny conservatives who have no time for the 1980s hang-ups of older conservatives. I mean, yes, the fact that raising tax rates past a certain point actually decreases tax revenue is very interesting, but proselytizing that message is not our number-one priority. We’re nimble navigators who can get out to protests earlier because we’re not waiting for our hearing aids to charge. And we care first and foremost about culture, not politics.

The quote at the start of this chapter isn’t just a pithy saying. It’s completely true. In 2016, there was only one type of political creature as upset as the Left—if not more so—at the rise of Donald Trump: establishment conservatives.

Establishment conservatives were so upset by Trump, they made a pathetic attempt to torpedo his efforts against Hillary Clinton. Calling themselves “Never Trump,” some of them threw their support behind Clinton or the libertarian, Gary Johnson, while others rallied around the laughable Evan McMullin, a former middle-ranking CIA operative no one ever heard of.

Naturally, as the biggest and loudest Trump fan, I had the establishment also come after me. After I objected to their attempts to brand every web-based Trump supporter a frothing Neo-Nazi and anti-Semite, I attracted the attention of their queen bee, a rotund chap called Glenn Beck.

Alas, poor Beck. He’s obsessed with me. He has, in various episodes on his sadly declining radio show, called me a “13-year old boy” and a “Goebbels” whose writings are “poison to the Republic.” Poison to the Republic? I don’t know. Poison to his ratings, maybe!

Beck was once the Left’s favorite punching bag, the target of all their false accusations of racism. Unlike most establishment conservatives, he even did things—he once led a massive march on Washington, D.C. in defense of American heritage, with some estimates putting attendance at nearly 500,000. Looking at the photos it was probably more like 85,000, but whatever.

Now, Beck’s apologized for being too conservative in the past and even pens columns for The New York Times these days.¹⁴⁸ In the run-up to the 2016 election, he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton, saying that opposing Trump was the “moral and ethical choice,” even if she were elected in his stead.¹⁴⁹

There’s a reason why conservatives like Shapiro and Beck, who were once the best the movement had to offer, now represent the past, while people like me represent the future: conservatives spent the last decade losing to the Left, and they’re tired of losing.

I don’t mean electoral defeats, either, although Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 could easily have been avoided by nominating a candidate that conjured up a compelling vision of America, rather than a compelling vision of your high school principal. No, conservatives lost in arenas that were more important than electoral politics: art, academia, and pop culture. Despite momentary political victories, the values spread by Hollywood eventually influence the ballots cast in voting booths. Conservatives lost culture, and until we win it back our political victories will only be temporary setbacks against the steady advance of leftist principles.

Actually, they didn’t simply lose the culture war. It’s worse than that. The truth is, they never even bothered to fight.

THE CULTURE WAR THAT CONSERVATISM FORGOT

There has been no serious attempt from national-level politicians to push back against the liberal dominance of universities. The Foundation For Individual Rights In Education (FIRE), which campus conservatives rely on to protect their free speech, does an excellent job fighting the worst excesses of left-wing censorship on campus. Yet the group was set up and is run by moderate liberals.

Heterodox Academy, a group of academics pushing for more political diversity in the social sciences, is spearheaded by Steven Pinker and Jonathan Haidt—also both liberals. It’s not a bad thing that some liberals still care about free speech and pluralism, but why are we letting liberals do the heavy lifting? Where are all the conservatives? With the exception of a scarce number of news sites like Campus Reform and The College Fix, it’s almost as if conservatives don’t care.

Indeed, the few establishment conservatives who do care about campus issues—and attract huge online followings of young people in doing so—privately admit their success is met with bemusement by fellow beltway conservatives, who wonder what the fuss is about, and why more people aren’t interested in the latest appropriations bill or Russian naval maneuvers in the North Sea. Young conservatives, who are on the front lines of leftist intolerance every day, fell asleep during that last sentence.

It’s the same in showbiz. A conservative in Hollywood is like a gazelle in a pack of lions: only the nimblest will escape unscathed. There are rare exceptions, like Clint Eastwood, whose conservative views fit with the John Wayne-esque tough guy persona he often plays on screen. Or Tim Allen, who was hilariously candid about his political views, right before his successful sitcom was suddenly canceled, for some unknown reason. The rest have to wear lion suits and purr convincingly at feminists and Black Lives Matter activists.

All of this is a result of conservative laziness. For years, the only prominent right-winger who made any effort to organize the conservative Hollywood underground was Andrew Breitbart, a man despised by the Beltway establishment. Isn’t it funny how successful, conservative, culture warriors always end up making enemies of the D.C. establishment? It’s almost as if they agree with leftists on everything except economics and foreign policy.

Unsurprisingly, the rise of Trump gave the cultural conservative underground courage to come out into the open. I was overjoyed when Kanye West, one of my idols, came out as a Trump supporter after the election (this was promptly linked to his alleged mental health problems by Perez Hilton¹⁵⁰). Roseanne Barr, one of the funniest people on the planet, has openly supported Trump, and for good reason. She made a career out of speaking directly to the working class, same as Trump. And at the 2017 Grammys, when previously unknown singer-songwriter Joy Villa shocked attendees by wearing a dress bearing the words “TRUMP” and “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” she saw her album sales rise by 54,350,100%,¹⁵¹ proving that conservatism in showbiz can in fact be the opposite of career-ending.

There’s a long way to go yet: for every Kanye West, there’s an Adele, who told an audience she was “embarrassed” for Americans because of Trump. Does anyone remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they said almost the exact same thing about W Bush? Their CDs were literally crushed by tractors. Nevertheless, the courage I’m seeing from conservative entertainers and celebrities in the wake of Trump’s victory makes me optimistic that things will change, albeit without the help of the conservative establishment.

Stuffy Beltway types really don’t know what to do with me. I’ve introduced a brand new type of conservative to them. Listen, not everyone in the conservative movement is going to be cool and hip. But at least let’s aim to attract new members who still have both their hips.

Could it be that establishment conservatives want to lose? “Cuck” became a popular insult in 2016. Its original definition was a man whose woman gets slammed by another dude, but it’s now become a byword for needlessly relinquished manliness, for selling out and caving in. Calling someone a cuck is an expedient way to denote a beta male or coward. (See: the Republicans running against Donald Trump in the 2016 election.)

I’m constantly told by establishment types that I’m a clown. Yet for thirty years these guys have achieved nothing on campuses. In barely two, I’ve set the entire higher education system in America on fire. If I’m a clown, what does that make them? (See the last paragraph for your answer.)

There’s nothing contradictory about appreciating Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and also getting a kick out of calling Amy Schumer a boring cunt. And there’s nothing wrong with talking about very serious subjects using satire, silliness, and shock value. For instance, at one of my shows, which was called “No More Dead Babies” and dedicated to the evils of abortion, I handed out individually signed and numbered photos of dead fetuses as memorabilia.

How many Commentary writers can claim they got 400 twenty-year-olds to think about the moral consequences of abortion in a single day—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who watched the show on YouTube?

When liberals come over to the Dark Side, they become friends with me and reluctant admirers of Donald Trump. They don’t become Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg devotees. You can see the sense of mischief and joy in classical liberals who leave the Left, like chat show host Dave Rubin.¹⁵² And when unexpected cultural figures like Azealia Banks announce their support for Republican candidates, it’s Trump they go for, not Ted Cruz.

Conservatives could learn a thing or two about how to beat the Left from web culture. Godfrey Elfwick is the pseudonym of a brilliant British troll who portrays an exaggerated satire of a social justice warrior on Twitter, complete with a bio that describes him as a “genderqueer Muslim atheist.” For nearly three years now, he has almost never broken character, and his persona has fooled many an onlooker, including the incredibly annoying Chelsea Clinton, and the BBC, who invited him on the radio to explain why Star Wars is racist and sexist.¹⁵³ Acts of high-impact trolling like Elfwick’s, which expose the Left through ridicule, are more likely to turn heads and change minds than the most brilliant column in a conservative weekly.

While consistently missing opportunities to beat the Left in winnable fights, conservatives have also done virtually nothing to lay down deeper roots in high culture. Besides a few investments from David Koch and The Spectator’s arts section, what is there really? It’s no match for the myriad of leftist and government-supported entities that fund concerts, film festivals, art shows, and other wellsprings of culture. A search for “race,” “gender,” or “diversity” on the website of Grantmakers in the Arts, the umbrella group for private arts funding organizations in the U.S., returns opportunities that look like Salon articles.¹⁵⁴ (Are you aware that members of the theater community experience “injury every day from being marginalized?” Do you want a “Radical guide to fighting discrimination in the arts?” Grantmakers in the Arts has you covered.¹⁵⁵)

The kids and teens who idolize left-wing pop stars, watch movies made by left-wing film directors, and laugh at the jokes of left-wing comedians, grow up to be—surprise!—left-wing voters. This cannot continue.

I’m suddenly aware this may come across as an argument for obsessive representation of all kinds on screen. It is not. Black kids and lesbian kids and disabled kids don’t need to see themselves on screen so much as they need to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas. Diversity of skin color is nothing compared to diversity of opinion, and the idea that people can’t identify with movie or video game characters because they don’t have the same race or gender is a ludicrous invention of the progressive Left. When I was a kid I identified with the vulnerability and gravitas of Buffy Summers and Captain Janeway, despite the fact that I have a wonderful penis. Come off it.

Conservatives need to realize they will continue to be beaten by the Left if they keep ignoring the importance of culture. They need to spend less time obsessing over the marginal tax rates, and more time on the National Endowment for the Arts. Only then will the left-wing stranglehold on culture be beaten.

The NEA should not be disbanded completely, as some conservatives, including Daddy, have suggested. During World War II, allied forces set up a unit of 400 service members and civilians to find and safeguard European art as their enemies fought their way across the continent. Victory would be meaningless if the very heritage of western civilization was lost. Ronald Reagan said, “The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we’re a part.” He also said, “Where there’s liberty, art succeeds.” The NEA should focus on supporting great American artists, not meeting diversity quotas and pandering to progressives. And if that can’t realistically be done given the political biases of the art world, then yeah, Daddy’s right. Just get rid of it for a while.

Over the past decade, political correctness in culture has grown to the point where even left-wing creatives are feeling its stifling effect on free expression. Liberal comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld now refuse to perform for college audiences, who they say have become too sensitive for their comedy routines, even though they aren’t remotely right-wing. If conservatives make a serious effort to get back into the culture wars, they will find no shortage of grateful artists and creators eager to throw off the chains of political correctness.

On the other hand, political correctness isn’t just confined to the Left.

THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OF THE RIGHT

I’m an ardent Zionist, and it isn’t just because I have a thing for tanned, muscular IDF men with big guns. I’m ethnically Jewish on my mother’s side, and in my younger days I could be spotted on BBC appearances sporting a full-on Jewfro.

Another thing I ardently support is free speech and the freedom to tell jokes. Alas, some of my peers on the conservative Right don’t feel the same way.

I was baffled when, in 2016, conservative commentators suddenly became preoccupied with the threat to Jewish communities from internet nobodies posting offensive memes on social media. Many of these people identify as the alt-right—or at least, the alt-right’s shitposting, memester battalions. To them, breaking taboos isn’t about advancing white nationalist ideology; it’s about gleefully watching outraged reactions from their elders.

Jewish advocacy organizations, ginned up by the likes of National Review, Daily Beast and, eventually, the Clinton campaign, went so far as to declare war on memes. I’m not joking. Two months before the election, the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable, respected name in the fight against anti-Semitism, nearly torpedoed their credibility by declaring Pepe the Frog a “hate symbol.”

I won’t make excuses for actual anti-Semitic memes, particularly when they come from genuine Neo-Nazis. These sad specimens, consigned to a few irrelevant blogs like Daily Stormer, declared a “holy crusade” against me in late 2016. Unlike the ADL, I find this laughable rather than threatening. I don’t have anything to fear from these people, especially not from Stormer’s editor, Andrew Anglin, who I am told stands a mere 5’2” tall. He’s a little short for a stormtrooper, isn’t he? There’s a great picture that does the rounds now and again of Anglin in Thailand with lady-boy hookers. I also hear he’s actually Jewish. This is the leader of white power online, folks!

I will, however, defend anyone’s right to speak and post freely on the internet, without the threat of being banned. The best antidote to pathetic hatred is to defeat it publicly, not push it into the shadows where it will fester and grow. This is something that leftists, and a worrying number of establishment conservatives, simply don’t understand. They worry that the more people see Neo-Nazis, the more they’ll be persuaded. I have a sunnier view of human nature, and human reason.

I have no argument with those who want to condemn the Stormer’s and their ilk. But I do have an argument with those who lump everyone who uses offensive memes in with them, as part of the same “basket of deplorables.” As Allum Bokhari and I highlighted in our article on the alt-right, many of the people using offensive memes aren’t genuine Nazis at all, but rather provocateurs and trolls. They don’t want to destroy multicultural societies or restore racial hierarchies. They just want to raise hell and smash taboos. From our article:

Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock ’n’ roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish “Shlomo Shekelburg” to “Remove Kebab,” an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide. These caricatures are often spliced together with Millennial pop culture references, from old 4chan memes like Pepe the frog, to anime and My Little Pony references.

Are they actually bigots? No more than death metal devotees in the 80s were actually Satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents. Currently, the Grandfather-in-Chief is Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who attracted the attention of this group on Twitter after attacking them as “childless single men who jerk off to anime.”

Responding in kind, they proceeded to unleash all the weapons of mass trolling that anonymous subcultures are notorious for—and brilliant at. From digging up the most embarrassing parts of his family’s internet history to ordering unwanted pizzas to his house and bombarding his feed with anime and Nazi propaganda, the alt-right’s meme team, in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion, revealed their true motivations: not racism, the restoration of monarchy or traditional gender roles, but lulz.

Even I will admit these kids sometimes go too far, and that not all the taboos they want to break are in need of breaking. There is a reason why anti-Semitism and racism are not acceptable, and never should be. But the response of the establishment Right, unnervingly familiar in tone to the career-destroying mobs of SJWs, is worse. These are kids—they don’t deserve to have their lives and careers destroyed because they posted dangerous memes or flirted with dangerous ideas on the internet.

It doesn’t do these young people justice to simply rebut the establishment’s misguided allegations of retrograde racism. These people aren’t just not-racists, they’re among the best and brightest of their generation; talented, creative, and funny. No one’s life is ruined by bitchy messages on a computer screen. Get a grip, snowflakes. It’s words on a screen.

You can’t deliberately ignore context. You can’t treat a harmless hellraiser from 4chan as no different from a Daily Stormer Nazi, without pausing to examine the motives and values of the individual. Like the Left’s political correctness, the Right’s political correctness is collectivist and reductive in its logic. It will destroy the lives of innocent people if it goes unchecked. We must fight against it until it dies.

The cause of Israel is not helped by hysterical conservatives and mainstream media outlets comparing the slogan “America First” to Charles Lindbergh-style isolationism.¹⁵⁶ Nor is the fight against anti-Semitism helped by people like Bill Kristol playing into Daily Stormer talking points by suggesting that America’s white working class should be replaced by immigrants (“I hope this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere,” said Kristol after he made the comment, which was of course videotaped¹⁵⁷). I’m a staunch defender of Israel and an opponent of anti-Semitism. I have no doubt Kristol is too. But unlike him, I’m not making things worse.

DEBATE CLUB CONSERVATIVES

“Donald Trump isn’t a gentleman.”

“He’s so vulgar.”

“I have to cover my kid’s ears.”

There’s something… noble about trying to preserve the standards of decorum that existed prior to the 1960s, when a single swear word on TV could lead to a boycott campaign. That worldview is completely understandable for conservatives (and even most liberals) over 65.

If you’re under 40, however, it’s likely that you fall into the unfortunate, slightly laughable group I call Debate Club Conservatives. And it’s time to snap out of it.

If you don’t have the stomach to do what it takes to win, chances are you’re going to lose. And that’s exactly what Debate Club Conservatives did when faced with Donald Trump. Again and again, the Republican candidates tried to convince their base that they shouldn’t vote for Trump because, well, he was just so unkind. And again and again, voters didn’t listen.

“The man is a pathological liar … a bully … a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen,” said Ted Cruz in May. Republicans voted for Trump.

“Seriously, what’s this guy’s problem?” Jeb Bush allegedly told a donor in August. “He’s a buffoon…. a clown… an asshole.” Republicans voted for the asshole.

“I will not vote for a nominee that has behaved in a manner that reflects so poorly on our country,” said John Kasich, long after his inevitable primary defeat. “Our country deserves better.” Republican voters didn’t think so.

The American Conservative’s lament that the “graceful, dignified” Jeb Bush had been beaten by the tactics of a man who “lacks character” sums up the attitude of DCCs to elections, and to contests in general: it’s better to lose with dignity than to win without it. In the Republican primaries, they mostly got their wish, although Jeb Bush’s entreaties for audiences to “please clap” for him were anything but dignified.

The conservative sense of fair play is disastrous when it comes to fighting Democrats. Elections are not college debates, no matter how much Ted Cruz might wish it so. They are not fought with facts and opinions, but with sloganeering, media spin, opposition research, and other cloak-and-dagger tactics. In politics, victory goes to those with cunning, mettle and deviousness, not those who have facts and principles on their side. It helps to have facts and principles on your side (as conservatives usually do), but they aren’t enough to win.

There’s another reason why the DCC attitude is so damaging to the conservative movement: most people aren’t political obsessives. They don’t care about your 14-point refutation of Obamacare. They want to hear things that relate to their own experiences, not abstract policy debates.

One comment from Ben Shapiro, made on The Rubin Report in February 2016, sums up this conservative myopia.

The problem with Trump is he fails to distinguish political incorrectness from just being a jackass… There’s a difference between being rude and being politically incorrect. Being rude is telling Megyn Kelly she’s bleeding from her wherever. Being politically incorrect is saying some immigrants coming across our southern border are criminals. That’s politically incorrect but it’s not rude.

Shapiro is thinking of a world where only politics matter. To him, political correctness is a problem because it suppresses facts relevant to current affairs—and that’s it. For most other people, the stultifying rules of political correctness go far beyond the suppression of facts; it’s the suppression of jokes, banter, and yes, the suppression of rudeness.

Political correctness interrupts everyday human experiences, threatening to turn every single personal matter into a public one. You can no longer slip up in conversation without worrying if the person you’re talking to is going to tell the whole world what you said, potentially ruining your life forever (need I provide a personal example?). The internet’s erosion of privacy with the resurgence of politically correct taboos is a terrifying combination. That’s why so many people are drawn to Trump.

DCCs don’t understand this because they think politics is, well, a debate club. In their imagined political ideal, elections are fought issue-by-issue, with each candidate presenting his arguments on foreign and domestic policy in neat little 30-minute segments. In reality, politics doesn’t work like that—and if it did, voter turnout would be in even greater crisis.

There’s perhaps no better example of DCCs being outplayed by aggressive hellraisers than the replacement of Megyn Kelly, formerly the face of FOX News, with Tucker Carlson. Kelly, now at NBC, is a milquetoast moderate conservative who, during the election campaign, attracted attention for playing the resident feminist, going after Donald Trump for making demeaning comments about women. Carlson, on the other hand, is a badass warrior of the airwaves, who lives to skewer progressives in front of a national audience. In his first week, Carlson almost doubled Kelly’s ratings, including a 45% increase in the all-important 25-54 age demographic.¹⁵⁸ His show is great, that’s why he got Bill O’Reilly’s job. FOX News has provided the roadmap for conservative media organizations seeking to rescue themselves from decline: bring in someone who isn’t a total cuck.

Politics isn’t won by commanding the facts, but by connecting with people’s experiences. That’s why it’s so important for conservatives to re-engage with culture and entertainment, which are the commanding heights of people’s experiences in the modern world. All our brilliant political victories will come to an end if we don’t win the culture war. Indeed, the fact that Donald Trump’s signature election promise—enforcing immigration laws—was seen as so controversial, is a testament to how well progressives have ingrained their views on our culture. As recently as the 1990s, such a suggestion was completely mainstream. This is how progressives manage to keep winning the battle for America’s soul, despite occasional temporary setbacks on Election Day.

And that’s why, in a society increasingly frustrated by political correctness, conservatives need to grit their teeth and come to terms with the necessity of gauche, bragging provocateurs like Donald Trump…and me.

BRINGING CONSERVATISM TOGETHER

I’ll be the first to admit that we need Debate Club Conservatives. It is immensely valuable to have people who can utterly dominate the Left in an argument—just compare the power and rigor of a George Will column with one by Jessica Valenti. The strongest mind on the Left today is probably Slavoj Žižek—and he supported Trump over Clinton! When the public ignores the Left’s entreaties not to watch or read or listen to conservatives because of their “bigotry,” they are often swayed by our arguments.

But arguments aren’t enough. We can’t let the Left continue to dominate culture, entertainment, and the norms of everyday language itself and expect to win elections. We can’t hope that every member of the public will see through the Left’s lies and eventually discover George Will’s columns at The Washington Post. Much of conservatism is kept hidden from the public, especially in schools and colleges, where young people are figuring out who they are and what their principles are.

As Ann Coulter says, “We don’t have time for an elegant person right now. The country is at stake.” We need our brawlers and our fighters. Whether establishment conservatives like it or not, the culture war will be won by men like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, who use straightforward language and never apologize.

One man who has long understood what Republicans need to do in order to win is Roger Stone. A legendary political operative known for pulling dirty tricks, he has been described as a “henchman,” “hit man” and a master of the “dark arts”—all in the same article.¹⁵⁹ Although he made his career in the Nixon administration, Stone has been backing anti-establishment figures for decades, including Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Donald Trump in 2016. Stone knows how to pick a winner, and given that he named me on his 2016 “Best Dressed List,” it’s clear the man has good taste in more than just political candidates.

We need all our attention focused on conservative issues, not leftist ones. Stop following the agenda of The Daily Beast and New York Times. Let the Left worry about insignificant “threats” like Pepe the Frog and the six or so remaining Klansmen in America. We need to turn our attention to issues that the Left either doesn’t care about, or doesn’t want us to notice—like their domination of academia and pop culture. I’m sure I sound like a broken record by this point, but until we make serious progress on those fronts, everything else is just noise.

Politics is more complicated than assembling facts and writing good arguments. It’s a brutal battle for the attention of the public, and always has been, even before the era of Donald Trump. That’s why fabulous, irrepressible faggots like myself, so original and compelling compared to the run of the mill copycat leftist celebrity, are so perturbatious to the Left. Much as it might irk DCCs, politics is showbiz today—and if we want to win, there will need to be more people like me in the future.

There is a blessing for the establishment here. By focusing attention on provocateurs like me, it gives breathing space for everyone else to develop their arguments and present them to the public without censure. After an encounter with a force of pure irreverence like me, a George Will column must seem like a nice break! A smart observer might realize that’s the whole fucking point.

In March of 2017, Charles Murray, renowned author of The Bell Curve, was violently pursued by an angry mob when he attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College. I know, bitch stole my act.

Perhaps you think I’m just a comedian doing all this for fun. Perhaps you think I’m just the world’s biggest narcissist. Both these things are at least partly true. But, I’m also deadly serious about the American right to speak freely on any topic. People like Charles Murray deserve to have their voices heard, and my divinely appointed job is to toughen up these kids so they can properly engage in the big debates. Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal brilliantly quoted President Eisenhower: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing the fact that they ever existed. Even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t American.”¹⁶⁰

McCarthyism is what they called it in 1953. Now, we just call it liberalism. What happened to Charles Murray is exactly why I do what I do, and it’s exactly what I’ve been warning everyone was going to happen, and I’m telling you, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Unless we fight back.

The Left would like to shut the Overton Window and push conservatives out of public view altogether. Ironically, establishment Republicans would like to do the same. Before I arrived on the scene, they were seriously close to succeeding. Even consummate moderates like the libertarian columnist Cathy Young were being banned from campuses.

That’s how the Left fights. They take control of culture, and use it to smear even moderate conservatives as racists, sexists, and bigots. By the time American youths reach college age, significant portions of them are frothing at the mouth, desperate to suppress conservatism, which they believe to be synonymous with bigotry. When they reach that point, there is little hope of them listening to our arguments, no matter how strong they are.

That’s why this civil war has to end. Conservatism needs its great thinkers and its brilliant minds—the Debate Club brigade—to persuade voters who are already open-minded. But we also need provocateurs and clowns, to grab the attention and challenge the biases of those who don’t want to be challenged.

No movement has ever survived with just moderates and intellectuals, and no movement has ever survived with just hellraisers.

If we want to win, we need both.