Transcript:
I thank everybody here who came here battling the traffic on the 405 to be here. I battled the traffic, too, so I know exactly what you’re going through. And I have some good news for you. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, once the Green New Deal is passed there will be no more traffic on the 405. [Laughter] There will also be no 405. There will be no cars to drive on the 405 and you will be sent to a detention camp for even thinking about driving a car.
Now, I hope your cell phones are turned off, not because I’m really worried about somebody calling you and interrupting my speech. And if you have a really creative ringtone I can promise to hum along a little bit. But, you know, your phones have little smart assistants that are always listening and always spying and — so can I say “spying”? Or is it surveillance. I don’t want James Comey jumping out of his seat to say, “How dare you, sir? This is not spying. This is surveillance.” They’re always kind of listening. They’re sending data on through the cloud and relaying it to those boys and girls in Silicon Valley who are very interested sometimes in what people are saying. And, you know, if I come back here and on my doorstep is an Amazon Prime box with a horse’s head inside, I’ll know exactly why that happened. [Laughter] Because I’m actually going to say some not-so-nice things about Silicon Valley, believe it or not.
Now I’m an early adopter of technology. Back home I have a 300-baud modem that’s the size of a brick. I won’t try to tell you just how (inaudible) baud is because you wouldn’t believe it. And once the internet grew up it was a golden age for conservatives. You could just bypass the mainstream media. You could get information out there. And you could fact-check the mainstream media. The internet used to be about empowering individuals. And then the big dot-coms like Google came along and made it a gated community. If you wanted to exist on the internet you had to play by their rules.
Then social media came along and there was another revolution. What the social media revolution did was it made the individual the center of the internet. It was not about what Google wanted you to think. It was about what your Aunt Sally wanted you to see. And that fundamentally transformed everything. It helped make Trump’s victory possible. And of course once Trump actually won they decided to quickly shut this down. They declared there was a fake news crisis, a disinformation crisis, a Russian bot crisis — the Russian bots somehow elected Trump by posting a whole bunch of stuff after the election aimed at African Americans as the Senate report showed. But, you know, somehow this got Trump elected. And of course these are the same people who disavow conspiracy theories. [Laughter]
And social media is being censored. It’s fact-checked. It’s transformed. It’s another Google word. Somebody in San Francisco decides what you can see and what you shouldn’t see. Take YouTube. What’s the whole name? YouTube. It’s about you, you and you and you. It’s all about you. And, you know, these days a lot of you’s are being censored on YouTube, like, PragerU and Steven Crowder and James O’Keefe, Project Veritas. And, you know, a guy named Daniel Greenfield is also being censored on YouTube, because there’s no room for you on YouTube, there’s no room for you on the internet.
And there’s a reason for that. Silicon Valley and the Left have a few things in common. They both believe that bigger is always better. They believe that everybody can be reduced to groups and numbers and algorithms and statistics. And they think that the right side of history is just a single click away. And of course they’re both cults. If you’ve ever spent any time around Silicon Valley you know exactly what I’m talking about.
The Left and Silicon Valley both get very high on the fumes of their own visions of the future of history. Now, conservatives actually live in the present. We’re grounded in reality. We interact with the world as it is right now. We think about the history. We think about the past. We think about the present. And sometimes we have trouble grasping that our opponents, the people we’re fighting, they don’t live in the past. They don’t live in the present. They live in an imaginary fantasyland of the future and they’re willing to do absolutely anything to make that vision of reality happen. They think that believing in progress means never having to deal with the messy realities of human nature. And today conservatives are struggling with the dot-coms and the Left because both of them have a beautiful dream, a beautiful vision. They have a vision of a world in which there are no conservatives at all. And they’re trying to make that world happen, at least on their own platforms.
Now, how did we get here? Once upon a time we had a really fascinating concept. We used to have political debates. Political debates are a concept that was handed down to us from ancient Greece. And the concept here was you had a bunch of people with different perspectives that would get together in the same room and they would actually exchange opinions. They would debate ideas. Amazing concept, isn’t it? We don’t have debates or discussions anymore; what we have is a culture war. And in a culture war there’s no room for discussions. What you do is you express your hatred, your contempt for the other, and then you try to destroy them. You kick members of the opposition, you kick members of the administration out of restaurants. You kick people wearing Make America Great Again caps. I was just seeing a cap like that around here. Make America Great cap right there. If you wore that cap to a New York City restaurant, you would be kicked out. [Background: inaudible audience member comment] I would actually pay money to see that. [Laughter] We’ll talk afterwards. [Laughter] We’ll see if Dr. Bob can help out.
They kick them out for the same reason that a few generations ago Democrats used to kick black people out of bars and restaurants, because they’re just sub-human. Now these days that’s against the law now. You can’t kick black people out of the restaurant or a bar, but you can kick somebody wearing a Make America Great cap out of a restaurant. Or at least a New York judge — and you’ve got to love those New York Democrat judges — decided that was completely legal. The old kind of segregation went out of style. The new kind is really popular.
Now let me give you a statistic that just shows — that brings this home. In 1960 only 4% of Americans approved of interracial marriage. And only 5% had a problem with their son or daughter marrying somebody from another party. That’s what I call bipartisan marriage. [Laughter] Some of the older people here have actually experienced it. And the Millennials, that’s rarer than a hen’s tooth, also rarer than a Millennial who knows what a hen’s tooth even is. [Laughter]
But fast forward to the Obama era and 86% of Americans are on board with interracial marriage, interracial marriage is awesome. But 40% disapprove of the bipartisan marriage. That is the new segregation. The new segregation is defined not by your DNA or by your skin color, but why what you believe. That’s what’s being segregated, not race, but political belief. And the rumor’s that in Washington, DC in some government offices there are two sets of water coolers. One’s labeled “conservative”; the other’s labeled “progressive.” The conservative water cooler is about half the size of the progressive water cooler. It never gets cleaned. It’s broken down. And if they catch a conservative actually drinking from the progressive water cooler, he’s going to be found hanging from a piece of modern art abstract sculpture in the plaza. That’s a joke, but not by that much.
Think about it, really. Compare the cushy digs at Elizabeth Warren’s CFPB to the way that our soldiers — so many of our soldiers our living on food stamps. At the CFPB and a lot of these government institutions, they’re living in the lap of luxury. They have their own built-in gyms. Meanwhile, American soldiers are literally having to apply to charity to eat. Those are two very different living standards, even within the government.
And that’s why — you may have heard this — USDA employees in DC are very upset because the USDA employees might actually be forced to move to Missouri, where there actually is agriculture, because there isn’t a whole lot of crops growing in DC. It’s a swamp, you know? And they were told, “You know, you’re actually going to have to move to Missouri,” where there actually is agriculture, where there are 100,000 acres. And of course they’re there. They’ve made a point. They’re turning their backs to the Secretary of Agriculture because they’re members of the government class. You can’t expect them to move down to the farm with the serfs that they’re actually regulating. There’s supposed to be a big segregation. We’re in DC. We have the nice restaurants. We have the very nice apartments. And they’re over there and we make regulations for them. But like the lords of the manor in the medieval times, we don’t actually have to interact with them. Segregation, the new segregation, means that USDA government employees and farmers, Ivy League institutions and people who believe that biology is a reality, California dot-com tech platforms and conservatives and New York restaurants and Trump supporters, don’t mix.
You know, I’ve called this a civil war in the past. I’ve done the very popular speech where I’ve said that. But I think I actually should revise that because a civil war doesn’t really capture it. You know, a civil war — so war is actually pretty civil. You might — no, I’m not joking, actually. You think about the guys in the blue and the grey shooting cannons at each other, but were they really trying to kill each other? They were actually pretty civil to each other. And in World War I, think about that moment where the fighting stops and they’re throwing snowballs at each other, people from different armies who were living with rats, who were on the very edge of death, are throwing snowballs at each other. Can you imagine people on the Left and the Right doing that in America today? Could you imagine us just taking a break and throwing some snowballs at each other?
The war we’re in is actually grimmer. It’s uglier. It’s darker. It’s more relentless than the World War I. Think about that for a moment. What we have is uglier than a shooting war. It’s a culture war.
And I don’t really like the term “culture war” because it makes you think of we’re having a debate is Beethoven’s Fifth or Marvel’s The Avengers better. Culture is an expression of who we are. In 1960 most American’s could still share a common culture. Democrats and Republicans could eat in the same restaurants. They could marry each other. Think about that. They could marry each other. They could live in the same neighborhoods. That’s gotten very rare, by the way. That’s getting harder and harder these days. You know what happens these days? These days people get fired when their employers find out they’re conservatives. Karen could tell you about that. We have somebody in this room right now who was fired for being a conservative. And she’s not alone, unfortunately.
Well, you know, what happens very often is people hide. They hide the fact that they’re conservatives at work until something happens and they’re outed and then their career goes downhill and they’re fired. Every conservative has stories about what he’s comfortable saying at work, what he’s comfortable discussing in church or in synagogue or at a family reunion.
Here are three recent new segregation stories from this month. Steven Crowder was demonetized by YouTube. Kyle Kashuv was denied admission to Harvard for things he said when he was 16 years old. And this is a very instructive story in its own way — Representative Will Hurd, a black Republican, former CIA officer, from Texas was booted from speaking at a cyber security conference for being against abortion. And there’s a particular line from Representative Will Hurd’s segregation story, a black man facing segregation, this time not because of his skin color, not because of his race, but because he opposes partial-birth abortion. This would have blown Martin Luther King’s mind. I don’t think he would have even understood how to process that. Black Hat, which is the cyber security conference, decided it couldn’t have a liberal black Republican who doesn’t like Trump [inaudible background speakers] — that’s okay. I can just raise the volume. Everybody in the back hear me? Okay. Thank you, Scott. Scott is awesome.
There’s something that strikes me about the story of Representative Will Hurd, a black Republican who doesn’t like Trump. He’s kind of a liberal. And yet he’s booted from speaking at a cyber security conference because he opposes partial-birth abortion. And Black Hat, which is a cyber security conference, said that this liberal Republican who doesn’t like Trump but also doesn’t believe in killing babies, couldn’t speak there. And this was their words and I think it’s actually really telling. What they said was, “We misjudged the separation of technology and politics.”
Now I want you to think about that for a moment. “We misjudged the separation of technology and politics.” What does really mean? We thought that cyber security and abortion were actually two different things. We thought that we didn’t have to segregate our cyber security conference just because some people there might not agree with our views on abortion. But then we realized, yes, we do. We can’t separate technology from politics. And if you can’t separate technology from politics, what do you have to do? You have to segregate the people you disagree with.
Now think about what that means again. What happens when you post pro-life content on Facebook if there’s no separation between technology and politics? You can’t have Will Hurt at a cyber security conference. Can you have pro-life content on social media run out of companies in San Francisco? In fact, you can’t. That’s what we found out on Pinterest, we simply — where content from Live Action, a pro-life group, was censored, first falsely by claiming there was pornography, then once again falsely claiming there was harmful disinformation, which is a very popular category these days. And what Project Veritas tried to report on it its videos were censored by Twitter and YouTube. Don’t tell me there isn’t a cartel in Silicon Valley.
There’s no separation between politics and technology, means no room for anybody who disagrees with the politics of the people who control the tech platforms. And that means segregation. When you can’t separate ideas from people, you have to separate people, because there’s no room for both. We misjudge the separation of technology and politics as the new segregation in a nutshell. Conservatives are being banned from social media. I imagine most of you here probably have had some sort of experience in that regard. Anybody who’s been in Facebook jail, who’s been censored in any way, raise your hands. There you go. Even Michael.
Conservatives are being banned from social media when there’s no separation between technology and politics. They’re kicked out of restaurants because there’s no separation between food service and politics. They’re fired from their jobs because there’s no separation between politics and work.
What does (inaudible) mean when there’s no separation between politics and anything? What does that do when your politics aren’t the right kind of politics? What does living in a society in which there’s no room for disagreement because there’s no separation between politics and anything else? That’s the brave new world we’re in.
The whole premise of a liberal society, the society we used to live in, where [most] Republicans and Democrats could work in each other’s companies and play softball games, marry each other and share the internet, is that we can separate politics from our daily lives. We can put the politics away and just live together. When we can’t do that, then the country’s divided, segregated, forced into a permanent culture war.
When the Left says that there’s no separation between politics and life, what they’re really saying is if you don’t have the right kind of politics you don’t have a right to live, as Mark said before. Maybe you have a right to live maybe in another country or somewhere in Missouri, or on another planet, but definitely nowhere near us. We don’t want you near us. Segregate them. Let them have their own restaurants, their own social media. Citizenship in their society, the society of the Left, is not conditional on your papers. It’s not conditioned on where you were born because that’s why they’re welcoming in all the illegal migrants from south of the border. Come on in, everybody. Come on in as long as you illegally vote for the Democrats.
It’s conditional on politics. Your citizenship in their society is conditional on your politics. An illegal alien has a right to be here. As a conservative, you do not. If you don’t have the right kind of politics then the best — you can exist segregated into digital ghettos, temporarily tolerated outside those ghettos if you know how to keep your mouth shut. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, bad things will start happening to you. If all relationships are based on politics, then the only possible relationship between the leftists and everybody else is either no relationship, segregation or a civil war.
Now, what brought on this great social media crisis, the whole fake news crisis? Some tech guru in San Francisco swiped his phone and saw a post from somebody’s Aunt Sally gushing about Trump and he decided this is completely unacceptable. There’s no room on the Internet for both him and for Aunt Sally and, since he controls the internet, his way goes. That’s the new segregation. The old segregation confined people you didn’t want to mix with, but the internet makes it really hard to maintain that segregation, because we’re all in the same digital space together. We’re all mixed together. And that’s driving a new segregation to create a separation and to drive conservatives out of the digital space and out of all the other spaces, the way they’ve done in academia, the way they’ve done in the media. Now, if bars and restaurants are kicking out Republicans for wearing Make America Great caps again, are you surprised that Silicon Valley sites are trying to get conservatives off their sites?
Now, Silicon Valley is — I’ve called it a cult in my opening. It’s always been a strange mix of the pseudo-spiritual and the technological. Their gurus — notice the word “guru” by the way — believe that what they’re doing isn’t just making them rich and giving them the ability to afford a better class of speedboat, mansion and orgy, they think that they’re making the world a better place. Their progress has to be progressive. When President Trump won it was a huge shock for them, because he didn’t just win in Missouri or Georgia, he won on Facebook, he won on Twitter. That’s what set off the so-called fake news and misinformation and hate speech and whatever they’re calling their right-now crisis. The big dot-coms had a dark night of the soul. Google those videos of Google executives crying and weeping after Trump won. Their pain is real. Their anguish is heartfelt. It’s authentic. They’re breaking down because their platforms they were told were supposed to be moving the world to the left, making the world a better place. And when they say, “We want to make the world a better place. We want to make it more left wing. We want to make it more Marxist.” And instead of that, suddenly all their tools, their platforms, had moved the market to the right. It had made Trump President.
Now, the Arab Spring, Muslim Brotherhood using Twitter was awesome. That was fantastic. Trump using Twitter is, “Oh, no, this is not how that’s supposed to work.” [Laughter] Here’s how Twitter is supposed to work. Transgender activists are supposed to use Twitter to complain about representation in video games. And I’m not even joking about this. Now, instead, this guy who talks about banning Muslims is dominating Twitter. Trump’s victory challenged the conviction of Silicon Valley that they had dedicated their lives to the right thing. And that’s also where the new segregation is coming from.
Here’s an incredible figure. Google spent $114 million on diversity initiatives in just one year alone. Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook banned the phrase, “All lives matter.” Our security member who had a Blue Eyes Matter pin — I don’t think that would be allowed at Facebook.
Do those companies sound like they have any use for conservatives? So of course they’re banning conservatives from social media and from the internet. That’s what you do in a culture war. The whole point of a culture war is you can’t share a society, a culture, with these deplorable bitter [clingers]. First you destroy their culture, and they’ve done a pretty good job of that. And then you create a culture in which conservatives don’t exist except as villains. If you’ve watched a TV show, a movie, read a book in the last generation, you know exactly what that’s like.
And, finally, what do you do? You try to wipe out the people themselves who it turns out have no right to exist anyway. So when Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, whatever billion-dollar internet company gets caught rigging its algorithm, shadow banning, banning demonetizing, e-platforming and writing new terms of service which are enforced only against conservatives, that’s not just bias. It’s segregation. I want you to remember that. The idea is, “We’d better not catch you in our Silicon Valley platform after dark.”
Think about terms like “disparate impact.” The left loves disparate impact. Think about how the term “disparate impact” applies to conservatives when only regulations are being enforced against them and when the types of regulations that are being written are specifically intended to hurt conservatives. It’s no different than the “No Colored” sign allowed and they should be treated the same way.
We’re in this war for one reason, because the Left has decided that there’s no room in the country for us. There’s no separation between technology and politics. There’s no separation between politics and anything else. And that means there’s no room for conservatives, black or white, not just at a cyber security conference, but on Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest or anywhere else.
Now, where did the internet come from? It wasn’t invented by Google. Once upon a time American taxpayers, by the standards of the social justice Left today 99% conservative, they actually funded the creation of the internet through DARPA, which is an agency of the United States government. And not only did they fund the creation of the internet, they funded the creation of Google. And now Google doesn’t want to share the internet with us and they don’t want to share the country with us either.
Now, this war snuck up on conservatives because we don’t think this way. Conservatives are okay with having a separation between technology and politics, and food service and politics and entertainment and politics. We don’t need the waiter serving us to share our political views. And we don’t need the person whose plates we’re clearing away to actually share or agree with us on all our political issues. We’re more casual, more relaxed and less fanatical. We’re the guys who keep saying, “Can’t we just work this out?” And the other side says, “No way in hell,” because they sincerely believe that we’re evil. Would you agree to work things out with evil? Anybody here want to work things out with evil? If you really believe that the other side are Nazis, how can you work things out with them?
Now the question is what do we do, how do we fight? The David Horowitz Freedom Center in its incarnation was one of the first organizations to recognize what the Left rule was, informed by the experience of David Horowitz, who had been there deep in the trenches of the Left. And David Horowitz spent a lot of time trying to convey the nature of the war to conservatives. And the stakes are becoming more and more obvious every single day. Once we recognize the battlefield and the nature of the war, there are many ways to fight. We’re facing political segregation by businesses and institutions dominated by the Left. And to start with, we have to be willing to call it what it is. It’s not just unfair. It’s not just biased. It’s not just being mean. It’s segregation. Remember that. It’s segregation. Call it segregation.
Once we understand that, we’ve defined the problem and how it can be fought. When urging the adoption of a civil rights act in response to segregation, President Kennedy said, “I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public — hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores and similar establishments. This to me,” he said, “seems to be an elementary right.” It’s an elementary right that conservatives are starting to lose. Think about that. Generations after the Civil Rights Act we are back with people being segregated in restaurants.
And the new Republican officials are just not paying attention to it unless they themselves are being kicked out of a restaurant. We haven’t had racial segregation of restaurants in this country in a long time. Today we have political segregation. Most Americans are okay with interracial marriage. A whole lot more oppose bipartisan marriage. Most civil rights legislation in this country failed to protect political affiliation. California is actually one of the few places in the country where there are some protections for political affiliation. The Left weaponized identity politics, building protection for its own minority groups and then they used them as a shield to attack conservatives to take away their rights in the name of fighting hate speech. We’ve seen just how this works now with Steven Crowder.
Under the guise of fighting racism and a thousand other ‘ism’s, the Left brought back segregation to this country. It brought segregation to the government and to the educational system a long time ago, but now it’s beginning to impose digital segregation across the internet and across a wide swath of businesses and institutions. And if we’re not clear about what’s happening and what’s being done to us, we are going to lose. This is segregation that’s goal is to erase us, or in the new jargon, “cancel” us. It’s imposed a nightmarish world in which there is no separation between politics and life. And everyone with the wrong politics gets sent to the back of the bus — or destroyed if they don’t go quietly.
We’re not just fighting for free speech. We are fighting to end the new segregation. Generations after Kennedy’s speech the right of all Americans to be served in facilities open to the public is under siege and this speech faces an unprecedented threat from platforms which almost completely control free speech on the internet. Google controls about 80% of search; Facebook controls about 80% of social. Between them, they effectively are the internet. If we don’t fight for that elementary right, there will be no other rights left.
Now, what’s going on here underneath the surface? Why is a part of the country trying to segregate the other part? What has made the Left defying humanity around politics? Well, there is a very simple answer for that. To deeply religious people life is defined by your beliefs. It’s how you see and explain the world. It’s why you think you’re here and where you’re going and what your purpose on this earth is. Now, America these days is not a deeply religious country, unfortunately. It is, however, a deeply political country. The (inaudible) of politics completely defines how the Left sees everything. Politics isn’t just something they do on election day. It’s what you believe. It’s how you shop. It’s who you’re friends with. It’s who you marry. It’s your entire purpose in life.
For example, a growing trend among Millennials is not to have children — Ocasio-Cortez mentioned this — because they’re afraid that the great flying global-warming monster is going to eat all of them up. [Laughter] Now, when you decide to kill or die to have children, which is the most fateful fundamental decision in human life based on your beliefs, those beliefs are every bit as compelling as religion. Politics is the force that gives the Left meaning. It has the redemptive power of religion. It’s got its own apocalypse in the form of global warming. So of course they’re going to kick infidels and unbelievers out of restaurants and their sites. Because there’s a better way of describing this than the culture war — and this is why I don’t like the term “culture war” so much — it’s religious war. This is a religious war. This is about two value systems, two belief systems and two [very] convictions about why we’re here, what is morality, what is our purpose in life, all in the same country.
America was always multicultural in some ways. It had people from different religions. Had people who weren’t all that religious in some ways. But this is something very different. It goes far beyond skin color, far beyond race, far beyond religion. It’s a deeper fundamental conviction that’s a division between fundamentally different ideas about morality, life and purpose. And that’s expressed by no separation between technology and politics, no separation between politics and food service or anything else.
Now, let me define this no separation in another way, no separation between church and state. The Left has embedded its [secular] belief system into everything, into entertainment, into academia, into government. Now, two of those are violations of church and state. Embedding its belief system into the educational system, into government, are violations of church and state. And yet, that is how the Left functions. That is how it’s gotten this far. Each innovation that’s come out is indoctrinated of those schools, predictably enough, as the graduates of an ISIS academy. So of course they did. We sent them to schools run by the missionaries of a fanatical religion. And then we wondered why their belief system and values were so different than our own. Everything we’ve been doing we’ve been subsidizing somebody else’s religion, somebody else’s religious beliefs, and we’ve been subjecting our own children to that and we’ve been allowing that to take over the public square. Every time the Left does a grant to a community service organization, to a leftist nonprofit, think of it as funding somebody else’s church. And of course only their churches are the ones who get to be funded. If we try to fund churches and synagogues that are conservative, oh no.
Now our educational institutions are centralized. They’re machines for inducing conformity. We always knew that. But somewhere along the way the conformity that they were producing was not patriotism. It was not going to work. It was not any of the Protestant work ethic, for that matter. It was hating this country and doing everything possible to destroy it. And centralized institutions are fundamentally un-American. They were always going to turn on us, because they’re machines for destroying individuality and destroying you.
Silicon Valley, which collects every piece of information possible in order to group you into a vast assemblage of data, is also of course a machine for destroying individuality. Their goal is to destroy you as an individual and replace you with a trending mass to shape, control and define your behavior, and to eliminate the you, even on YouTube. Because this is about a war on you. And by you I don’t just mean conservatives. There are people here who may not be conservatives. The objective of every totalitarian collectivist movement is the destruction of the individual. A crisis, fear and hate, in this case Trump’s election, are used to mobilize groups. Peer pressure maintains intimidation and conformity.
Where do we really tend to associate the term “cultural” with? Communist China. Communist China was not trying to shut down conservatives. It was engaging in political domestic terror just like the Soviet Union, Cuba and the 2020 Democrats, which are currently trying to lynch each other over which one is more Socialist than the rest. This isn’t just about a policy. It’s about destroying individual initiatives. Why did nothing get done in the Soviet Union? There was no individual initiative. Why is China building ghost cities where nobody lives that have no purpose whatsoever? Because there’s no individual initiative. Where there’s no individual initiative there’s just an “on” switch and an “off” switch. You turn the “on” switch and everybody works. Then if you don’t turn the “off” switch at some point, everybody burns out, which is what happened in the Soviet Union and at some point will happen in China. Where there’s no individual initiative there’s no you. There’s no people striving to make the world a better place. In the Chinese version of “The Ugly Duckling” fairytale, you know what happens? The ugly duckling does not turn into a beautiful swan to express his individuality. The ugly duckling gets eaten because he sticks out from all the rest.
And that’s socialism in a nutshell. You join the party. You shout all the right slogans, or you get eaten. You post the right things on social media or you get banned. When you’re in the workplace or on campus you take all the toxic masculinity courses and the evils of whiteness courses and you agree with all of this and you repeat it back or you get eaten. When you go to a New York restaurant you pretend to be progressive or you get eaten instead of having dinner. What the radicals care about is destroying the individual and using him to conform to the mass, literally a war on you. And the culture war is their weapon to radicalize the people in their Warsaw Pact sanctuary states where abortion is legal until a child’s fourth birthday and the only people allowed to have guns are celebrity bodyguards.
And as they segregate, intimidate and terrorize people, eventually they get to the point where the only solution is just to kill everybody they oppose. Now, does that sound scary and extreme, maybe a little over the top? I might be wrong. I mean, 100 years of history and 100 million dead might just not happen here. The best-case scenario is they’re just going to destroy our economy, destroy our culture and turn us into a third-world country. Whew! We’ve really dodged a bullet there. That’s the best-case scenario.
But I want you to look carefully at the climate of hatred, the Trump derangement syndrome, the escalating violence, the constant claim that everybody who disagrees with them is a Nazi and therefore can be assaulted with absolutely no moral problems whatsoever. Now, imagine that were happening not in the United States, not in, say, Berkeley, but in some African country somewhere. Imagine if the Hutus were passing discriminatory laws, building discrimination at the workplaces and at the businesses, engaging in violence and constantly denouncing members of the other group as being evil monsters who should be destroyed and we’ll be better off when they’re all dead, which is the sort of thing you hear from feel-good gurus like Oprah — all the old white men have to die for things to change. What would you think?
Now, this isn’t a civil war. I’ve said this before. The Civil War was kind of civil. Now in a civil war you can have fundamental disagreements about government and policy. And the Democrats have done that. They’ve rejected the victory of every single president who won an election in [this] century. They built up secessionist governments. They have independent judges. And they’ve tried to even make treaties with foreign countries. They’ve obviously colluded with foreign governments. You know, when the left — just as a side note, but when a leftist accuses you of something, it’s something he’s doing. So when it comes to foreign collusion they’ve been engaging in foreign collusion for around 100 years. They’re really good at it. And for much of that time they’ve been colluding with Russia, actually which, again, they will accuse you of exactly the thing they’ve been doing all along.
Now, at some point — speaking of civil wars, at some point there might be a blue-state cop who would take a shot at an ICE agent and there will be a Fort Sumter situation. But there are worse things than a civil war. In a civil war you disagree about power. In a culture war the enemy becomes the “other,” somebody you can’t coexist with, a creature so evil that he has to be destroyed, wiped off the face of the earth. That’s not the Civil War. That’s Nazism. It’s Communism.
If you’re here you’re probably the “you” I’m talking about. You might be a conservative. You might just be an independent thinker. Or you might be a classic liberal who holds unconventional views about the feasibility of Muslims flying planes into large buildings. Or you might think that maybe the Jews should have their own country instead of a Democrat lobbying group fighting for such vital Jewish issues as Planned Parenthood. Any of those things would make you [the you] to what is becoming a radical movement. But everyone who thinks for themselves is a you and their goal is to turn the you into a they.
The culture war is physical. It’s also intellectual and it’s moral. It’s often petty. I mean, kicking people out of restaurants is petty. People might go, “What’s the big deal? Okay, so you got kicked out of a restaurant.” Okay, you got put in Facebook jail for a while. I’ve had my own Facebook account deleted. It’s no big deal. What happens is when there’s a pattern of it. The culture war is a pattern of events. They might be individually petty and you might attribute one or two of those — somebody’s having a bad day. Somebody’s making a bad decision or company is making a mistake. But when it happens often enough, it’s a pattern. And a pattern spells one word again, segregation.
When you go behind the scenes as Project Veritas did, you come away with evidence that it’s not an accident, that they calculated discrimination just like it was in the South. And of course what you see is the cartel of social media companies then banding together to censor the evidence that there’s actually discrimination going on. And, you know, you have the libertarians who are saying, “There’s no basis for antitrust action here.” Yet you’ve got two major dot-coms censoring evidence about a third dot-com — and there’s no cartel behavior here at all.
So the pattern makes a statement. The statement is you have no right to exist. It starts with the people who stick out the most, the people who wear Make America Great Again caps. It starts with the people who post provocative stuff on social media. I’m sure we know nobody like that at all. But then once the — the squeaky wheels get greased, as they say in Brooklyn or New Jersey. And once the nails that are sticking out get hammered down and the ugly ducklings get eaten as they say in the Peoples Republic of China, it moves down to the people who aren’t obvious but are still a problem. And, you know, we’re all going to be a problem at some point. To the Left, everybody’s a problem. In Cambodia, brother number three had people killed because they wore glasses. In Cuba they decided that the saxophone was an evil instrument because it had been invented by a Belgian and Belgians were guilty of colonialism. And if you think you won’t run afoul of them at some point, the odds are you’re probably wrong. You’re going to run afoul of them.
Radicals don’t just deal with problems. They create problems. And to them, everybody who is an individual is a problem. The Left is fighting to segregate the country around their politics and that’s where the struggle is. What do we do? Segregationist institutions should be condemned as the vanguard of a new Confederacy that’s dividing the country between their masters in San Francisco and the workers in Georgia, the same ones who are preventing federal law enforcement from doing their duty. And the segregated schools where it admits students based on race and expels them for their political views and their gender, they should be treated the same way that Eisenhower treated segregationist schools in the South. Imagine Harvard and Yale being treated that way.
And segregationist companies should be treated the same way that restaurants and bars who wouldn’t admit black people were treated in the South. Now, how in the world can a small diner or restaurant in a small Southern town be considered a public accommodation, but Google and Facebook, which between them effectively control the internet, are not a public accommodation? Can someone explain that one to me? There’s room for legal activism and for more [moral] activism that includes civil disobedience. With civil disobedience you attract attention to the abuses of the system by deliberately flouting and breaking those rules. The people who are doing that are engaged in a civil rights struggle. Some people call them trolls, but that’s civil rights.
And beyond that, we should remember every person who was fired, who was banned, who was otherwise harmed from being a conservative — because conservatives in some ways lack institutional memory, at least lately. We need to be able to actually take all those issues together, to remember those people, and to use them to build the momentum of a movement. Because these stories have a legal purpose, they also have a moral purpose. They mobilize our movement. By describing this forced segregation we’re making it clear who is actually segregating this country, who is actually the abuser, who is actually seizing power wrongly and who is on the side of civil rights.
The Left built its moral power by claiming that they were the ones who had been fighting segregation. They were the ones who were anti-segregationists. And yet right now they are the ones who are imposing segregation. And we are the ones who are waging a civil rights struggle against segregation. That’s the source of their moral power. To win, we have to take that moral power away from them. We have to be the ones who are on the side of civil rights.
And we have to take it away from them the same way we took it away from their grandparents, who’d been preaching the glories of Marxism in the Soviet Union. And, you know, some of those grandparents are still alive now. One of them I believe is running for President. [Laughter]
The Left has used its power to segregate the country to deprive people of their rights and to turn us against each other. The moral authority they claimed fighting for freedom from religious compulsion, from segregation, that’s our moral authority. Ours is a new civil rights movement. We’re fighting for our freedom, our right to think, our right to believe and, yes, our right to actually build a united country instead of a segregated banana republic. Religious war or cultural war are different ways of saying we believe in how we see ourselves. We believe Americans should have the right to be free and to live together. They don’t. Every time they censor, silence and banish, they show what they really stand for and what the stakes are.
You know what? Most Americans don’t like living this way. Conservatives, independents and, for that matter, even the crazy leftists are being driven into a frothing rage and kept that way, helplessly, in a state of flight-or-fight mode. That’s what Trump derangement syndrome comes from. This stress is bad for our society. It’s also bad for them. In [Olaf Kabashan’s] book, which is really fantastic, his biography, he mentions a quote. What did Karl Marx say when Karl Marx was asked what makes him happy? What is happiness for him? Do you know what Karl Marx replied? Any Marxists in the audience? Imagine what a hard core leftist would reply. “Struggle.” What made Karl Marx happy was struggle. That was his idea of happiness. That’s a little twisted definition of a lot of leftists.
Now, what does defining happiness as struggle really mean? It means you’re only happy when you’re fighting other people, when you’re making other people miserable. Or, as Orwell put it in 1984, “Picture a boot stamping on a human face forever.” For people for whom happiness is struggle, the only joy in life comes from stamping in somebody else’s face. That’s the whole premise of the resistance. It’s the entire leftist campaign of (inaudible) the new segregation. Struggle tears apart our society, not in pursuit of a better world, which they keep claiming, but a more miserable one in which we’re permanently trapped with our hands at each others’ throats.
This is the leftist nightmare we’re living in, and we should call it out and place the blame for it exactly where it belongs. The media claims that Trump has divided the country. Really? Come on. The left and the media were dividing the country when Trump was planning new hotel sites and golf courses. The left divided the country in the name of this endless struggle, the only struggle that makes a Marxist happy. Every time they win, they don’t say, “Okay, great. Fantastic. We got gay marriage. Let’s all hold hands and have a united country and be really happy together.” You know, there’s some conservatives who think that. “We concede gay marriage. They’ll be happy. We’ll have a united country again. And we’ll cede this area. We’ll cede that area. We’ll cede on the bathrooms. We’ll cede the latest thing they’re demanding and everything will be fine.”
And of course it never goes that way. Why doesn’t it go that way? Because happiness is struggle for them. So the moment they get what they want, they’re unhappy. They’re miserable. The day after gay marriage was ratified by the Supreme Court they have to go, “What’s our next cause? What is going to make us happy by picking a fight?” Every time they win they pick another fight. They tear apart our country some more. And this is one of the most important questions we have to ask ordinary Americans — conservatives, independents, people who don’t even care, who don’t have a political identity. Do you actually like living this way? Our society has been torn apart. Families have been divided. Workplaces have been turned in battlegrounds. People just can’t live together anymore like this. And part of our moral power comes from the message that we offer the vision of a united society, of a united nation. What they offer is the vision, hatred and destructiveness, struggle after struggle after struggle after struggle, with never any kind of meaningful solution, because there can be no meaningful solution.
When America fought for independence, many thought that a republic would just degenerate into people going to vomitoriums and killing each other over chariot races and a Praetorian guard would preside over the whole thing. There was a reason that didn’t happen. George Washington thought that political factions were a terrible idea. And yet, in America we didn’t succumb, because even when we wore the blue and the grey we were still brothers and sisters.
The recent campaigns against Confederate memorials are a profound misunderstanding of everything that America stands for. Americans didn’t honor Confederate soldiers and generals because we agreed with the Confederacy. Did we really lay down 360,000 lives because we thought the Confederacy was right? Does anybody think that? We have a Union Station or a Union Plaza or a Union something in nearly every city in America. We are not actually secret Confederates. We honor the other side as part of rebuilding the Union. We understood that we had to live together, to respect and honor each other, even if we disagreed to the death. It’s not just the monuments of dead Southern men that are being toppled now. It’s the very idea of coexistence.
What those monuments represent is coexistence with people we disagree with, maybe even people we hate, maybe even people we hate so much we’re willing to kill them. And what toppling them represents is a refusal to coexist. The Confederate monuments paradoxically represent the Union. Toppling them represents segregation. If there’s no separation between politics and life, all that’s left is a civil war, or a segregation in which the winners segregate the losers. When we can’t have a united country built on a plurality of views, then we can’t have America. We can live together as individuals, but when people form into a collective, when they go to war, not just against armies but against identities, when the [movers] declare that whiteness or masculinity is itself evil, there’s no room for us to coexist as individuals. There’s no room for a you, only for an us and a them. History is unfortunately full of examples of how that ended out.
We’re no longer in the blue or the grey. We’re no longer Democrats or Republicans. If we were, we could find common ground the way many of you remember we used to be able to do. We could marry each other, eat at the same restaurants and share the same internet. Some of us believe in living in the America we know as individuals and accept our faults and our flaws. Others have enlisted in fighting for a new world in which there is no room for any human limitations, no room for faults and flaws, in which everybody must be fed into a terrible machine and confess their sins of racism, of bigotry, of homophobia, [transformius] homophobia and 2,000 phobias that I don’t have the time to list because we’d be kicked out by then. [Laughter]
There’s no room for us in that world and no room for the individual. That’s why the war is being waged in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of this beautiful new world in which there are no individuals, only algorithms, in which everybody thinks differently in the same way. That’s the world we must rise up and fight against.
There are 1,000 ways to fight. But one of the first is to remember that we are individuals. And what they hate is our individuality. That’s what most mass movements always hate. They hate the individual. We can win by fighting them, by building our own society or refusing to let them overrun ours. But there are times, and perhaps I’m being a little bit optimistic here, where I believe we can remind them of their humanity. It can’t always work, but there were times in the Soviet Union and Communist China when indeed it did.
The Left keeps promising its followers a better country. Quite a few leftists do believe that they will get a better country by following the approach that’s been laid down for them. But instead what they keep creating is a country torn apart by anger and hatred. They can never deliver on their promise to build a better country. The promise of their better world is a lie and we need to call them out for it.
The Left now is making a terrible roller coaster plunge, from a movement of individuals recruited by playing on their pain, their aspirations, their idealism and their greed into a hateful collective mass, a mass that is depersonalized. The culture war is a symptom of a great and a terrible fall. As they become more of a mass movement their hatred for the other and obsession with destroying you and you and you and you will only grow tenfold and you will see more and more stories of people being fired, of people being persecuted, of people being terrorized just for being conservatives, because as they become more of a mass movement they’re going to become more and more intolerant of anybody who is an individual. That’s like the [Borg]. It’s like the pod people. When you see individuals they scream and head for them.
In the midst of that moment, the midst of that transition into a hateful collective mass, there’s room for reminding those giving up their humanity to rail against gender and against race and whatever talking point CNN is putting out today, there’s room for reminding them that they don’t have to be former shapes quivering under a toxic sunlamp of ideology. They can be people. They can be brothers. They can be sisters. They can be husbands and fathers. They can be friends. They can be employers and employees and bosses. We can live together as people or we can die fighting in an endless political struggle that will never have an end because the people who really want this, they’re people who enjoy the struggle for its own sake. That’s their form of happiness.
Right now, thinking for ourselves, being individuals, that’s still our greatest weapon against the Left — and against Islam, for that matter. That’s [technically my specialty,] which I haven’t spoken much about, but much of what I’ve said also applies to Islam.
Now at times being conservative, being individuals, being people who are grounded in the past and the present, we just have a disadvantage. We don’t have the same ability to organize, the same ability to be collectivists. We’re not as focused in some ways. We don’t actually enjoy hap- — we don’t actually get happiness from a struggle. We don’t come home at night and say, “I wish I had somebody to punch in the face, because — for a better world.” That’s the — you have to put the [corollary] there. I wish I had somebody to punch in the face to make the world a better place. Because they can’t just admit that they want to punch people in the face. They can’t admit that they’re hateful and angry. They have to do it for a better world.
Now at times this may leave us at a disadvantage, but there’s something we must always remember. Our greatest treasure is our individuality. Our greatest treasure is our souls. Totalitarian movements don’t just seek to break our bodies; they want to break our spirits. They want to possess our minds. They want to own our souls. When we refuse to give them up, when we never stop fighting their lies and we never give up our humanity, then we win. Just ask people in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That is ultimately how you win.
Thank you for coming out. Thank you for being part of the fight. And thank you most of all for being you — and you and you and you. [Applause]
Questions and Answers:
Unidentified Participant: Daniel, we have time for some questions, at least a few, if we have any hands up.
Daniel Greenfield: The more [social] questions the better.
Unidentified Participant: Okay. The first one right here.
Audience Member: Our wonderful President just went to England. And while he was in England he spoke against the Mayor of London. And it dawned on me that he was the only person in Europe that could have spoken against Islam and not be put in jail. And I was wondering if you could comment on that.
Daniel Greenfield: Well, it’s really helpful to speak about Islam in Europe while having diplomatic immunity. The European Union provides many human rights. One of those human rights is if you say anything negative about Islam you will go to jail. That’s a wonderful example of European human rights. And whenever you hear leftist judges and legal thinkers saying how we have a lot to learn from Europe, this is what we have to learn from Europe. If you say anything negative about Islam, you will go to jail.
By the way, I just want to add America’s really the only country with actual free speech in this regard. America’s the only country that has anything closely to unlimited free speech and pretty much every other country in the world you could potentially be prosecuted for saying something about Islam or for saying anything politically incorrect.
Nobody wants to ask me what my favorite color is? Ma’am?
Audience Member: Do you foresee the possibility of any kind of a backlash, because they’ve gone so far — like for instance, with the men setting the records in the women’s sports, setting world records. Do you foresee the possibility that at least in the voting booth, if not in the polls, that especially men in this country will be tired of being labeled as molesters and rapists and everything else and possibly, even though they can’t say it, ’cause they’d never get laid again, but at least in the voting booth and maybe the polls might be proven wrong again?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, I’m really anticipating a cultural backlash more than a political backlash. Unfortunately, I mean, we ask — where are the European men we used to ask. Now these days it’s where are the American men. For that matter, where are the American feminists, because women’s sports, as you mentioned, is on the verge of being erased. At this point I could put on a dress and enter half a dozen competitions and have a shelf full of trophies. Because it’s an obviously ridiculous situation. What I’m hoping for is more of a cultural backlash. I mean there are backlashes happening in a small level all the time. There are people waking up and going, “Wait a minute. I’m not comfortable with this. I’m not happy with this.” And most of those people are silenced, or they know to keep silent because, again, if they say anything they know peer pressure will come down on them. They might be fired. They might be persecuted. They might be harassed in other ways.
But at the same time, I think there is a constant toll of people who are going, “I am not comfortable with this. This is not my country. This is not how I want to live.” Now, the question is, how do you mobilize that, how do you turn that into a revolution? How do you take these people who are separately silenced and quiet, just like they were in the Soviet Union, and connect them together, make it okay for them to feel like they can speak up and resist. And I think that’s the great challenge for the conservative movement and not even the conservative movement, but the pro-liberty movement going forward.
Audience Member: And Jordan Peterson (inaudible).
Daniel Greenfield: Jordan Peterson is awesome.
Audience Member: There’s always President Trump.
Daniel Greenfield: I think we can all agree on that. Anybody here not like President Trump?
Audience Member: (Inaudible)
Daniel Greenfield: Anybody here like President Trump?
Audience Member: Yes.
Audience Member: He’s amazing. And I watched the rally last night, 25,000 people and then another 100,000 outside that wanted to get in. He’s saving our country and I love him. My nephew — [applause] — my nephew is a Marine. He served in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he’s the one that got me to stop listening to NPR and told me I was brainwashed. Thank God.
Daniel Greenfield: Well, thank you to your nephew on two counts, for his service and for actually converting you. That’s awesome. But meanwhile, I know people are very impressed by President Trump’s rally, but I actually have some scary news. Bill de Blasio increased his turnout tenfold. At a rally yesterday he had 100 people. [Laughter] I could have said 10 people; it would have been just as accurate. [Laughter]
Audience Member: Hi. Okay, I have a question about what you were mentioning about China. Tear down the culture and tear down all the statues. But first let me give you an example of my thinking of where it’s coming from. Back in 2016 when every campaign had protestors and tried to incite riots except for Hillary’s, everybody said it must be coming from her. So other than the United States — and I’m not as smart as you. Maybe you can fill me on what I don’t know. Other than the United States, Israel is the only other country where they’re trying to destroy their history. I read in an email from Israel where they created a fraudulent ancient Palestinian village to try to show the roots to the land. So other than the Muslims that are radicalized in Israel, trying to destroy culture and create their own false culture, and the United States where they’re trying to tear down these statues and create their own false culture, is there any other country in the world where this is happening? And where are the forces behind it trying to destroy the culture? Or am I just, like, wrong?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, first of all I have to start by correcting a false impression. I am not smart. If you doubt that, my wife is sitting right there. Ask her. If she won’t be honest, my mother-in-law is sitting there. She’ll also tell you.
That said, this is something that the Left does in Israel very aggressively. It does it in the United States. It does it in Europe. In just about every first-world country what the Left tries to do is it tries to eliminate the past, destroy the history, in order to create a bright future. Because if you’re going to create a future you have to get rid of the past. One of the first things the French Revolution did, it was going to rename the calendar. It was going to completely transform all of society. And to do that you have to destroy the past and then create a fake past, which of course is what Marxist dictatorships invariably do. Cambodia did it on a large scale, when they just actually drove everybody into the countryside and killed everybody who had a Western education or wore glasses. In Israel the Left is very aggressively trying to do that, in its own way. They hate the idea that there is a Jewish people. What they want is for there to be Jewish leftists who occasionally donate to the Democrat party and go to women’s march rallies. They don’t want there to be proud Jews who actually know that there’s Jewish history, who actually know that there’s a Jewish state, and who know that the Jews are people and not just people who occasionally show up to the Democrat party.
Audience Member: [I read your articles. I enjoy reading them.]
Daniel Greenfield: Thank you. You have very good taste.
Unidentified Participant: This will have to be the last question.
Audience Member: Okay. For the introducer, I want to let him know first of all I’m a MAGA- hat-wearing [Prius] owner. So just so we not categorize people. My question is this. Islam is certainly sexist. It’s certainly homophobic. It’s certainly anti-Semitic and certainly racist. And yet it is embraced by the leftist movement. Why is that? And are they making a horrible mistake swallowing that monster?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, first of all, this is a common mistake. You think that the Left is for gay rights. You think that the Left is feminist. You think that the Left cares about any of the identity politics stuff they care about. They don’t care about those for a single second. If you doubt that, look at just how Cuba treated black people or gay people, how the Soviet Union treated black people or gay people on and on ad infinitum. The Left does not believe in any of the identity politics stuff it claims to believe in. When you actually look inside their movement — the Southern Poverty Law Center, which spent so much time fighting for the rights of black people, was actually one of the more racist organizations outside the KKK.
So the Left does not care about any of this stuff. What the Left does care about is building a mass totalitarian collectiveness movement. To do that they will recruit people and they will do that under false fronts. For example, they will claim that they care about the environment. They don’t care about the environment. The Soviet Union wiped out an entire species of whale. Some of the worst environmental disasters happened in Communist China and the Soviet Union. What they care about is building a movement, creating (inaudible) and subverting American and Western civilization and any other country that they’re going after.
And the process, they will try to recruit people by claiming, “We’re very concerned about black people. We are very concerned about women. We are very concerned about gay people. We are deeply concerned about transgender people. And whatever other people come up, we are very, very concerned about them. And when we build up a Marxist totalitarian dictatorship like North Korea, we’ll show you just how much freedom we’ll give them and just how many ways we’ll shoot them and how many bullets we’ll use to kill them all.
So really, the Left and Islam are on the same page in this regard. That’s why they’re such close allies. They have no problem with Islam being homophobic. They have no problem with the idea that in Islam rape is pretty much part of the package. Why don’t they have a problem with that? Because they agree.
Unidentified Participant: Thank you, Daniel. [Applause]
Daniel Greenfield: Thank you, everybody.
