Thank you very much for inviting me here to receive this award for courage. I’ve just come from New York City where I watched Donald Trump win the election, and frankly the much more enjoyable show of Hillary supporters wailing in agony while curled into the fetal position.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters couldn’t imagine a world in which she’d lose to Donald Trump. Look at it from their perspective — although their candidate is obviously ill, completely out of touch with the real world, an insane old megalomaniac, and surrounded by a staff curiously obsessed with cheese pizza, they thought they had this wrapped up.
They rigged the primaries against Bernie Sanders, a Jew far too foolish to be in this room, and they thought they had the general rigged too. They had pollsters putting out drastically skewed numbers, and a media completely beholden to her campaign.
They had all the parts in place, and then they rolled out their secret weapon: they started calling Donald Trump, or Daddy as I call him, mean names. Racist! Sexist! Homophobe! Transphobe!
These words have always worked on establishment conservatives, because unfortunately establishment conservatives have a strong streak of cowardice running through them. They hate being called bad names, and would seemingly prefer to bend to the will of liberalism than to risk their good name.
But Donald Trump is not a coward, and the people who voted for him are not cowards. Can you imagine an America where voting for a candidate is an act of courage, because you may face physical violence, as occurred at Trump rallies courtesy of the Clinton campaign, and you are smeared as a sexist, racist, islamophobe just for voting Republican?
The courage of Trump and his voters handed Hillary Clinton the worst electoral defeat of a Democrat in 28 years. 28 years! Some of you were the age of my typical college audiences the last time this happened!
No one in the media predicted it, vanishingly few on the conservative side predicted it, and we know a lot of cowardly conservatives didn’t even want Trump to win.
By the way, I am not arguing that liberals are not cowards. I have experienced their cowardice first hand during my college speaking tour, when they cancel shows with last minute exorbitant security fees because they are too cowardly to simply say “We are afraid to let this man speak on campus”.
But what liberals learned is that courage involves action. It involves building infrastructure and infiltrating existing institutions, like they have so effectively with academia. We are only just now seeing effective infiltration by conservatives. We need to start thinking like the Mossad infiltrating terror organizations, not like a family that must keep the peace during Thanksgiving dinner.
Courage is an excellent thing to honor. What does it say about conservatives that we give so few awards to honor it? As some of you may know, it is legally required by the United Kingdom that I quote Churchill, who pointed out “Courage is required first, for any of the other virtues to operate”.
Conservatives must understand that courage is DOING THINGS. It is not writing essays that will only be read by other conservatives over the age of 50. It is not, to bastardize Teddy Roosevelt’s famous line, talking loudly while not carrying a stick at all.
Conservatives must have the courage to risk being smeared, must be courageous enough to leave the ghetto and talk to everyone of all political persuasions, to wade into the bastions of the enemy like universities, black neighborhoods, and Silicon Valley to engage. We must be courageous enough to challenge the foe’s presuppositions directly, root & branch, not accept them first. Courageous enough to name the enemy. One thing you can say for the Left: no defeat ever stops it from getting up and trying again and again.
Why is courage needed? We are in a state of war, at home and abroad. Not because conservatives have been the aggressors. Instead, the Western civilization we love has been attacked from without by a deadly Muslim foe, and from within by a left-wing ideology that prefers our Muslim foes in Mecca to the Athens of Plato, the Jerusalem of Hillel, the Rome of John Paul II, and the Philadelphia of Madison.
Conservatives must engage in this culture war, especially young conservatives at the university level. I’ve witnessed it first hand, and am an active warrior in this battle myself. What Andrew Breitbart understood better than any other conservative is that we must fight the culture war and not the political war, because politics is downstream from culture. If you are fighting about policies, you’ve already lost.
Where are the conservative writers, filmmakers, and artists? Why was a Pro-Trump art show I took part in a unique and massive news story? Where are the conservative enclaves in universities comparable to gender studies departments? We must develop answers for these questions, and quick.
Courage is taking action, and both Breitbart News and I take action. We are boisterous, loud, larger than life, and in your face. We don’t care whom we annoy in our persuit of the truth and speaking that truth to power. That is why Breitbart is winning. Many conservatives find both Breitbart and me to be uncouth, and THAT is the snobbery that left the conservative movement dead in the water.
I will illustrate this with an example from a college talk. I was at the University of Houston speaking about how Universities shelter and coddle their students out of fear they may find something offensive. A protestor rushed forwarded to interrupt the talk, screeching that I’m offensive and hurt the feelings of students. I answered her in my trademark caring way : “Madam, I’m grateful to you for coming, but … fuck your feelings.”
That may seem uncouth to you, but that message is critical to young conservatives who are deep behind enemy lines on campus, fighting the culture war that will shape the future of this country. Young conservatives are emboldened by seeing someone stand up for them and tell these spoiled brats to shut up and get out. Daddy Trump did the same thing for the common man at his rallies!
In just the last 12 months the so-called social justice warriors that make up the far left have gone from having a fearsome grip on American campuses to being a national laughing stock. Despite what you may think, I am a modest person, but I will take a share of the credit for creating the revolution against college crybullies.
My motto is laughter and war. If we are to win the culture war, we must do it by fighting hard and having a hell of a good time along the way. Conservatives, even non-Jews, are funnier than liberals. We can produce content that is much better and funnier than they can, because they are so obsessed with their juvenile emotions and special interest groups. Anyone unfortunate enough to have sat through the new Ghostbusters film knows I am speaking the truth.
My approach is best summarized by G.K. Chesterton, who praised living “hot as the riots of Dionysus, wild as the gargoyles of Catholicism”. This has been tremendously effective for me in reaching younger people, and the best part is, laughter and war are infectious. I’ve started to churn out an army of Milo copies fighting the culture war, although none are as handsome as me or have the hair.
My advice to everyone in this audience is to learn how to support and work with the new younger generation of conservatives. My tour has shown me there is a deep divide between the youth movement and establishment conservatives.
Young men and women at universities and amongst the Alt-Right movement find themselves in the unfortunate position of being called anti-semites by BOTH liberals and conservatives. They woke up after the election to see Donald Trump’s entire movement labeled as anti-semitic, at the same time that Prime Minister Netanyahu called Trump “A true friend of Israel”.
The rush by the right to label these young rebels as anti-semitic comes across to them as the same thing as liberals screaming at them that they are sexist, racist, homophobic, islamophobic, let’s be honest, the list grows every day.
Instead of being as quick to throw around that phrase as the Southern Poverty Law Center, conservatives must make the effort to come together with the youth to heal the rifts exposed by this election cycle. It may be easier if older conservatives recognize that kids my generation and younger have NO IDEA why anti-semitism is different from racism, sexism, and homophobia. The young fail to appreciate its historical significance because here, as in many other areas, they are educated so poorly.
At the American bicentennial, Gerald Ford said that “liberty is a flame to be fed, not ashes to be revered.”. I juxtapose that with a comment I received from the leader of a very old and distinguished conservative organization, who said of his establishment peers: “They revere ashes, have lost the truth and have forgotten how to laugh and to battle.”
I am sincerely proud to accept this courage award because the past winners never forgot how to laugh and how to battle. They were people of action, like Pam Gellar, Orianna Fallaci, and the great anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, who is surely looking down on this Trump victory from heaven.
History remembers the brave. It recalls those heroic Jewish fighters, the Maccabees, who faced down the Greeks who hoped to force them into religious conversion. It recalls Pope Leo the Great, who left his own safe space and faced down Atilla the Hun, and by his courage saved Rome and the civilization she stood for.
So let us fight, but let our motto be Risus et bellum, Laughter and war. Because nothing stings our foes, foreign and domestic, more than our hearty laughter at their lies and nonsense. And also because nothing will better remind us what we’re fighting for than the laughter of Chesterton, of Rabelais, of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and of the God who inspired them all.
A toast: To courage!
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