Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (24 page)

The biggest key to the success of the ACORN story was the structure we had created. I am a single organism who can act swiftly and make decisions on the fly. The Complex is a leviathan, an entity that moves slowly, that has natural momentum and can’t stop on a dime. The Democratic Party, Barack Obama, the Progressive movement, John Podesta, and George Soros—all these entities have to
coordinate
their counterstrategy, create a game plan. I don’t have that problem. I can stick and move. And I know them down to their core. I understand their Alinsky mind-set, their Clinton mind-set, their Podesta mind-set, their Media Matters mind-set. They are
entirely predictable
. People who grant me expertise in media tactics don’t seem to recognize how ordinary the Complex’s reactions were. Every step of the way I predicted how they were going to behave, and every step of the way they came through.

Even now, it continues. John Podesta and Media Matters keep making the same mistakes, which seem to be granting me benefits that weren’t originally taken into account at the beginning. The more they come after us—and they do, with every challenging story we publish—the bigger we get. And the bigger we get, the more opportunities we’re getting to do other stories, to work with other people who work with us. As they try to destroy us, they are Palin-izing us, making us larger and stronger.

ACORN could have stopped this at the very beginning. They could have acknowledged systemic failure, hired somebody who would have done an honest and thorough investigation and come up with harsh conclusions. They could have engaged in a
Nixonian “modified limited hangout.”
^*
But I was betting that they were so unused to being challenged, so inherently arrogant, that they wouldn’t. They were so sure that their media allies would help them that they fought us every step of the way, and every step of the way emboldened us.

On February 22, 2010,
Politico.com
reported that ACORN had “dissolved as a national structure.” On March 23, 2010, Reuters reported that ACORN would be formally disbanding due to monetary problems.

On April 1, 2010, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s ranking member, Darrell Issa (R-CA), released a report finding that ACORN “is attempting to rebrand itself without instituting real reforms or removing senior leadership figures that need to be held accountable for wrongdoing. These newly renamed organizations are like career criminals who adopt aliases without changing their criminal lifestyles.”
⁵

It’s not over yet. We remain vigilant to expose the corruption. Because we proved it. We—you and I—can beat them.

On April 15, 2009, I was invited to my first Tea Party in Santa Ana, California. I dragged along my friend, actor Gary Graham, and my father-in-law, Orson Bean. We met Ian Mitchell, the newly naturalized American citizen from the ’70s Scottish music sensation the Bay City Rollers (yes, that Bay City Rollers). We met hundreds of the nicest, most congenial, most pro-America people you’d ever want to meet. Blacks and Hispanics and whites, and a labradoodle dressed in a red, white, and blue sweater.

Everyone talked about the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, about conservative principles. It was like the Claremont Institute, but with everyday working people. And labradoodles.

I was slated to speak at the event. At first, I walked around the arena’s perimeter, observing, taking it all in. But enough people had seen me on TV and the web by now that many approached me to chat. It was a great experience, exciting and affirming. It’s actually fun to be around people who
like
you (I’m not used to that
in my neighborhood these days). I suspect, however, that for many Tea Partiers, I was a bit of a broken record. Because I was by now fixated on a single topic: what was about to happen to them.

While everyone else talked about what the Tea Party stood for—limited government, lower taxes, less spending—I was compelled to talk about what it would take to protect this movement. I told everyone I could that they had started an uprising, and that the Obama administration and the media wouldn’t stand for it. I said that they’d be labeled racists and hatemongers and violent criminals, that they’d be depicted as the dregs of society, people to be excluded from dinner parties because of their made-up closet KKK status. They were about to be targeted, and I knew it. I had to warn them.

I was right, of course. It took the Complex awhile to catch on, but once they did…

After ACORN, the bull’s-eye on the Tea Party movement had only seemed to grow. The Tea Partiers were attuned to the ACORN scandal from the get-go—anti-ACORN placards were immediately a fixture at the movement’s gatherings following the videos’ releases. ACORN was a perfect foil for a movement founded on rejecting covert and overt government corruption and the lack of oversight on federal money distribution. There was no way that could be tolerated for long.

At the same time, however, and despite the media’s best efforts, ACORN had grown to embody a hell of a lot more than ACORN itself. The scandal started to expose the political Complex in a dramatic way, the same way we were hoping to expose the cultural Complex with Big Hollywood. Suddenly, people began to see where all the leftist parts fit together: Andy Stern and the SEIU; Obama and Rahm Emanuel and the other White House thugs; ACORN and its on-the-ground fraud; Media Matters and
its consistent attempts to keep the media in line, doing the bidding of one side while attempting to shut down the other. Like 1950s America gradually waking up to the existence of the mafia, more and more people were beginning to see the Complex. And this further fed the Tea Party movement, vindicated them, let them know that they weren’t seeing phantoms or descending into paranoia. They truly
were
getting screwed.

And ACORN showed them they could fight back.

Because of my self-adopted role of becoming the Tea Party’s protector from the media, I started to become a fixture, the guy who would playbook the offense/defense scheme we needed to counter the inevitable Complex crackdown. “This is the media, and this is what they’re going to do to you,” I told them every chance I got. “You’re focusing on what the country needs to do, and I’m telling you that you need to focus on the key to the whole ball game—the media.” Because more than anyone, I knew what these people—little old ladies and retired veterans and young libertarians who hadn’t even known they were libertarians until Obama—I knew what they were up against. And it wasn’t going to be pretty.

It got ugly fast enough. The Tea Party had been shortchanged for over a year already, with CNN’s Anderson Cooper and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow labeling them “tea baggers” and claiming that they were holdover refugees from
Birth of a Nation
. Even for me, it was stunning how the press was willing to attack head-on hundreds of thousands of people exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of association. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) picked up on the cue and demonstrated true statesmanship by himself using the egregious term “tea baggers.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went pure Alinsky and told the media that protesters were carrying “swastikas and symbols like that.”
¹
The Hollywood contingent
wouldn’t be outdone, of course, with Janeane Garofalo calling Tea Partiers “racist rednecks who hate blacks,” while Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the
New York Times
that they were driven by “cultural and racial fear.”

Then, a new low. In August 2009, MSNBC took a photo of a man carrying a gun at a rally, but cut off his head and hands in the photo, as Contessa Brewer intoned, “There are questions about whether this has racial overtones… white people showing up with guns.” Dylan Ratigan and Toure agreed with her. There was only one problem: the guy carrying the gun was
black
. MSNBC had deliberately cropped the picture to try to avoid the inconvenient fact that it contradicted their (false) narrative. They were making it up, using Photoshop to propagate a lie. Where was Media Matters now?

At the same time, SEIU gangsters in St. Louis were beating up a black man, Kenneth Gladney, and calling him the N word for handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags at a town hall meeting for Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO). In Thousand Oaks, California, a liberal activist confronted a Tea Party guy and
bit his finger off
. Yet the media ignored these incidents and instead tried to find the smoking gun of racism that just
had
to be hidden in the Tea Party DNA.

But they couldn’t find anything.

So they manufactured it. As the health-care debate drew to a close, the Democratic Party turned to its new primary concern: destroying the uprising.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the Congressional Black Caucus to walk through the peaceful Tea Party demonstrators on their way to vote for the health-care bill on March 20, 2010. There was no reason for these
elected officials to walk aboveground through the media circus. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they lied about it.

They claimed immediately, without any proof, that black congressmen had been spit at and slurred with the N word fifteen times (as Indiana representative André Carson stated and the press dutifully reported). Soon thereafter Nancy Pelosi walked through this alleged hate-fest with a gavel in hand and that marionette grin affixed to her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred, the Capitol Police would never have allowed the least popular person in Congress (to that crowd, anyway) to walk right into harm’s way.

To reiterate: there was
no proof
that the N word was used, or that anyone was purposefully spit upon. That Tea Party crowd was a sea of New Media equipment. Not only were hundreds of people armed with Handycams, BlackBerrys, and iPods, so were the mainstream media, which had come in expectation of a display of violence and backwardness by the Neanderthal Tea Partiers. They were there, covering every inch of the event. Does anyone really think that somehow they just missed it?

But never mind producing proof themselves. Let’s ask another question. Why didn’t a single mainstream media outlet even
suggest
that a video should exist to prove these events occurred? This was the same press that was still telling me that we hadn’t proved that ACORN was aiding and abetting illegal activity, that our videos were somehow faulty or edited or falsified. “Truth to power,” indeed.

The strategy adopted by Nancy Pelosi on health care soon made
it clear why it was so important that these charges go unchallenged: race would be the centerpiece of her strategy to destroy the Tea Party movement. She quickly linked the health-care bill to the Civil Rights Act, and her media followers parroted her. The implication: if you were against health care, you hated black people—specifically, President Obama. Throw in the manufactured “N word” strategy and you have a devious scheme designed to take down the Tea Party.

The Democratic Party and the media simply never tire of this approach. It hadn’t worked when Bertha Lewis defended ACORN, because we’d had videotapes. Here, without video, the Dems were free to conjure racism from thin air. Suddenly, every liberal outlet in the country—which is to say, virtually every outlet in the country—was simultaneously arguing that the Tea Party was racist and violent, a divisive and irresponsible contention lacking any shred of supporting evidence, except for the observation that the majority of the Tea Partiers were white. Well, so is the country. This was Duke Lacrosse politics at its worst.

The press went directly to petrified Republican leaders, who offered the predictable fearful apologies they weren’t qualified to give. I was becoming more Tea Party than GOP every day.

It was all a setup, and I knew it. I smelled a rat. Time to hone my media chops again.

Five days after the highly publicized incidents supposedly happened, I publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone for any evidence of use of the N word at the March 20 Tea Party rally. I wrote:

If we let them get away with Saturday’s stunt—using the imagery of the Civil Rights era and hurtful lies to cast aspersions upon the Tea Party whole—then they really will have won the
day. It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N-word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point. And surely if those cameras did not capture such abhorrence, then someone from the mainstream media—those who printed and broadcast his assertions without any reasonable questioning or investigation—must themselves surely have it on camera. Of course we already know they don’t. If they did, you’d have seen it by now. THOUSANDS OF TIMES. Rep. Lewis, if you can’t do that, I’ll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test.
If
you provide verifiable video evidence showing that a single racist epithet was hurled as you walked among the Tea Partiers, or you pass a simple lie detector test, I will provide a $10K check to the United Negro College Fund.
²

There was not one response.

Predictably, we were five full news days into this major controversy and there was still no evidence of such outrageous charges. In fact, the existing footage from that day showed members of the CBC walking through the crowd, never once moving their heads in reaction to any outbursts. Is it conceivable that
all
of them stoically walked by as the N word was hurled at them fifteen times—even as the media were holding up cameras, practically begging the crowd to do something awful?