Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! (20 page)

But just because we have reason on our side doesn’t mean that everyone is equipped to be Charles Krauthammer or Michael Barone, policy wonks who can pull facts from the Office of Management and Budget out of every orifice. Most of us aren’t experts on the latest budget package or stem-cell line regulation, but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless—it means we get to play Socrates, asking pointed questions rather than citing facts we may not be sure of.

One of the low points of my media life was getting a call after the nomination of John Roberts for the United States Supreme Court. A producer from CNN’s now-cancelled Aaron Brown show asked me to go on TV and discuss the wisdom of President Bush’s choice. I remember taking a Civil Liberties course at Tulane in summer school. As I recall there was a case called
Mapp v. Ohio
. That was the extent of my then-qualification to pontificate on such legal matters. I am not sure what demoralized me more: that I was asked to do so by a leading cable news network, or that I readily accepted. Had Wikipedia not been invented, I would have had nothing to say. But I did, and I survived. My takeaway from the revealing moment about the low standards for TV punditry was that if I valued my career, I would only accept media invites where I could dictate the terms of engagement (i.e., bring my own stories, my own perspectives, etc.) or where I could change the subject to war footing.

By avoiding talking about that which I do not know, perhaps I limit my ability to appear on more shows. But I definitely limit my ability to screw up.

Put another way: don’t be the guy with a knife at the gunfight. It rarely ends well.

9. Don’t let them pretend to know more than they do.
This is really the converse of the last rule. Your opponents will pretend to be experts if you don’t, but that’s okay, because you can always puncture their balloon with one word:
why
. Asking them to provide evidence for their assertions is always fun, and it’s even more fun asking them to provide the sources for that evidence. Attacking the fundamental basis of their arguments is fun, too—if they tell you health care is a right, for example, ask why. Liberals don’t have a why, other than their own utopianism and their dyspeptic view of the status quo and America. Reason is not their strong suit—emotion is. Force them to play on the football field of reason.

10. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
Here, Alinsky and I agree. It’s the truest of Alinsky’s statements, and it’s the most effective. Tina Fey, not the MSM, sullied Sarah Palin’s image. Chevy Chase brought down Gerald Ford. Jon Stewart brought down Bush.

And we’ll bring down Obama, but not unless we’re willing to get unserious. Stuffy old white guys wearing bow ties and talking about the danger of national deficits don’t get much done—talented people who can translate political chaos into merry pranksterism do.

11. Don’t let them get away with ignoring their own rules.
Alinsky is right again. They set up this PC Complex, and they have to be held accountable to it, if only for honesty’s sake, and we’re the only ones who will do it. Joe Biden is still vice president of
the United States even though he called the first black president “clean” and “articulate.” Harry Reid is still Senate majority leader even though he said Obama was “light-skinned” and could drop his “Negro dialect” on cue. Until his death in 2010, Senator Robert Byrd was “a lion of the Senate” even though he was a former Kleagle in the KKK. If these had been Republicans, they would have been hounded from office. They’re Democrats, so they’re not.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t hold them responsible for breaching their own standards. Every time they say things like this, we need to force them to back down and apologize, and we can’t allow their allies to let them off the hook with excuses about how they stand for the right policies. Frankfurt School tactics can’t work here—standing for liberalism doesn’t mean you’re allowed to violate the conventions of PC. At the very least, we need to force these hypocrites to stand up against their own PC regime in order to defend themselves.

12. Truth isn’t mean. It’s truth.
I know that some of you are feeling rotten about using some of these tactics. We can ignore the tactics, but the left will continue to use them to their benefit; just as the Frankfurt School relied on the good nature and honesty of Americans who wouldn’t engage in un-Christian tactics in order to achieve their massive victory, the left continues to rely on our honesty and aboveboard good nature in order to achieve theirs.

We can’t let them.

We start by uncovering the truth and telling everyone about it. I’m not religious, and I’m certainly no theologian, but if there is one thing in religion that speaks to me, it is the idea of absolute truth. In fact, the word
truth
has meaning only if it is absolute. And absolute truth will set us all free from the grip of the Complex, because the Complex lives in the clouds, in the theoretical heavens—the Frankfurt School was successful only because they were able to shift
Marxism’s basis from real-world predictions to descriptions of supposed historical processes, making Marxism unfalsifiable. We have to falsify their theory by presenting unvarnished truth after unvarnished truth until the light dawns on everyone just how right we are.

13. Believe in the audacity of hope.
It’s too bad President Obama is such a joyless, politically correct automaton, because he’s terrifically agile with his prepared words. To paraphrase his victory speech after the 2008 election, the rise of the New Media alone is not the change we seek—it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.

It can’t happen without hope for America and faith in its people—two things Obama and his leftist ilk don’t have, which is why they try to shut it down in others. We have the power to unravel the Complex and destroy the Institutional Left. It won’t be easy. It will take time and effort, and there will be false starts and roadblocks, but we’ll do it, because we have to do it. Apathy in the face of determined Frankfurt School/Alinsky/critical-theory-trained activists is national suicide.

These are some of my basic rules. Now you’ll see how a small group of people put these rules into action and took down one of the biggest and most powerful political organizations in the United States using a short skirt, a hidden camera, and the power of the Internet.

I met James O’Keefe in June 2009. James came to me at the behest of Maura Flynn, a friend and libertarian documentary producer in Virginia. I had met Maura back in 2004 when she was the associate producer of
Michael Moore Hates America
, a film to which I contributed analysis (and which allowed me to heap scorn on this engorged cicada who appears every three years or so to suck the life force from his countrymen). Maura and I are about the same age, and we are both driven by an appreciation for the sheer power of America’s pop culture. We both also obsess that conservatives are stuck in a nineteenth-century media strategy that will lose elections in perpetuity if they don’t wake up to the fact that those geeky graduate students generating the latest apps and networks won’t “rule the world someday”—they already
do
.

So when Maura called to tell me about a new find of hers, I knew I’d better take it seriously. Maura was always bringing me up-and-coming conservatives (people like the ballsy Evan Coyne
Maloney, director of the documentary
Indoctrinate U
), and her excitement over the phone got my attention.

Well, sort of. As is often the case, I was focused on three other things simultaneously, eyeing the television while handling the remote and my BlackBerry. Luckily, Maura plays my ADHD to perfection, and she cut in: “Andrew, I’m serious! This guy’s stuff is unbelievable! He goes into ACORN as a pimp, with a girl as a prostitute, and they
help him
.”

That woke me up. “Really?”

“Really. And it’s
on film
.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s
very
good. He’s coming out to California. You’ve gotta meet him.”

A couple of weeks later, on Friday, August 7, 2009, James showed up at my house. When he walked through the door, the first thing I thought was
This is Matthew Modine from
Vision Quest
, after he sweated himself into the lower weight division for high-school wrestling.
He was tall and thin, and the resemblance was uncanny. My next thought was:
This guy decided to take on ACORN?

I took him down to the basement, and we talked for a while, getting to know each other. I then called in my business partner, Larry Solov. Larry is your typically skeptical lawyer, who was there to protect me from committing myself to questionable projects. Hunter S. Thompson had Oscar; I’ve got Larry. I knew that if I was going to invest time and effort in something, I needed Larry to see it, too—I needed Larry to let me know whether I could trust my eyes.

James showed me the video from the Baltimore office of ACORN.

My jaw dropped.

The video showed James repeatedly proclaiming that he was running a prostitution ring, that he and his “partner” were going to
be “turning tricks” in the house for which he wanted ACORN’s tax advice, and that he was going to be importing underage prostitutes from El Salvador. The videos left no doubt in any rational viewer’s mind whether the ACORN employees misunderstood the proposition. It was like watching Western civilization fall off a cliff. Even Larry, whose heart beats about six times a minute, was stunned.

I knew it was the goods—but I also knew something else. So when the video ended, I took James outside the basement into my backyard, which overlooks the Los Angeles National Cemetery. We looked over the rows and rows of gravestones. It was a peaceful, serene setting, and we contemplated each other for a moment before I asked him: Just what the hell are you up to here?

James, it turns out, was a Rutgers University graduate, a former philosophy student driven by a singular mission: to create a whole new school of challenging, provocative filmmaking. What’s so unique about that, you ask? Unlike every other “media provocateur” you’ve ever heard lionized in the
New Yorker
, James’s target was the Institutional Left. Charming, confident, a born prankster with mischief in his eye, this reedy Irishman had been punking the entrenched orthodoxies since his Rutgers days.
^*
All he cared about—what he was consumed with—was finding a way to keep doing it. “Would you be willing to buy this?” he asked me about the ACORN tapes.

It was now that I had to tell him the “something else” I knew. I was only glad James would hear it from me. “James, the footage is awesome, and what’s more, important,” I told him—his
eyes lit up—“unfortunately, I don’t think it is worth a red cent.” I explained to him that there just wasn’t a market (yet!) for conservative product like this, that if he had done this against the NRA or Blackwater, George Soros would have bought it for $5 million, and it would be made into a movie that would premiere simultaneously in Westwood, Hollywood, and Cannes, and Laurie David would send her private jet to pick him up and he would end up sitting poolside in Saint-Tropez eating oysters with a little fork while deciding whether or not to return Harvey Weinstein’s phone calls.

That wasn’t going to happen here. James was exposing a protected Progressive group. The video showed what a “social justice” group actually does behind closed doors with the shakedown money it leeches from the U.S. taxpayers as well as Bank of America and other organizations. The cold, hard reality was that there would be no movie premiere. What he had would be rejected and even derided by ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the
New York Times
, and if these amazing videos were to find their way to the American public, it would have to be by a different route.

And this is why I love James. He didn’t throw a tantrum, or blame the messenger. Instead, he believed me, he trusted me. I think he recognized that we shared a common outlook, a desire to loosen the PC stranglehold of the culture through the simple tactic of exposure. Whatever the reason, his nimble mind saw the situation clearly, and jumped immediately to what would be the next step. It was at that moment that my total allegiance to the project really formed, and I realized that we were about to start a long, strange trip together.

Time was wasting—we had to get moving. James had, at this
point, four other videos (Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore—he was an incredible four-for-four), and we had to get them out there before they leaked and ACORN lawyered up and began devising some bullshit defense. We pledged to work nose to nose to bring the videos out, feeding off of each other’s excitement. As James left, I knew I had just had a watershed encounter in my life.

“I want it. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it,” I told Larry. “This is great. This is huge. The media don’t want it, but we’ll
force
them to watch it.” Even Larry agreed. I think I saw his pupils dilate.

What made it all so huge was the unthinkably awful nature of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s proposition. I mean, underaged Salvadoran sex slaves? I remember asking Larry if he knew a single person in his life—and we know some pretty depraved people—who would sit there and not bat an eye or look at the person beside them and blurt out, “Are you friggin’ kidding me? I’m calling the cops!” What kind of people were these? After all, they weren’t just helpful, they were skilled: “social justice” operatives with specialized training to help clients navigate complex governmental assistance programs. These were employees with entrepreneurial know-how and an understanding of the tax code (assuming such an understanding is possible). And they were using all this ability to undermine and exploit the very society that supported them. The footage was so damning, I felt sure that if the American people could see this, it would be impossible for the media to continue rejecting conservatives’ cries for investigations of ACORN. I thought the videos could even instigate criminal investigations and inspire whistle-blowers within ACORN itself.