Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009 - 2041

by Kurt Schlichter

  Then I get up on the stand and start talking about what a mess the whole thing is, like if Chet the Fairness Guy and I agree on something, did we have to go out and find someone else who didn’t?

  And the government lawyers are getting furious because we are showing how stupid and fascist the whole thing was, and how unenforceable it would be even if the Constitution allowed it. They start arguing that if Chet the Fairness Guy won’t make a good case for liberalism, then the government had a right to provide someone who would. The judges by then are just shaking their heads—except for one really leftist one, they were over it. The new Fairness Doctrine could not pass the straight face test and it got struck down. But every once in a while, Chet the Fairness Guy still comes to visit my show to rail about how much he hates the idea of work.

  * * *

  Colleen Hazlitt (Conservative Journalist)

  We are walking through the New York Times reporter’s “office,” which is really no office at all but a corridor in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. She never stops moving long enough to need a desk.

  Our footsteps echo down the quiet halls of the aging building as we head toward the elevators. I struggle to keep up—the legendary reporter has to move fast to meet her deadlines. If I was not tagging along today, she’d be dictating her article into her iPhone 42 as she walks and letting the editing program proof and post it while she started her next project.

  When I got here, these buildings were packed with people. Packed! Washington was the center of the universe. It was like a black hole, sucking in all the power and money from across the country. First with Obama, then with Clinton II, Washington was a boomtown. This was the place to be if you wanted influence, or if you were like me and wanted to write about people wielding influence.

  I was conservative from a very young age. I never fell for liberalism, not in the least. I thought it was ridiculous and corrupt and I still do. But I also loved journalism. I had ever since I was a reporter on my middle school paper in the 2000s. I still do—the thrill of getting beneath the surface and getting the real story and then putting it out there . . . I love it.

  I wanted to be on one of the biggest and best-known papers. I knew they were liberal fever swamps. Columbia Journalism School pretty much required you to swear fealty to the liberal creed. But I wanted to be part of that world, yet I wanted to be true to my beliefs. By the time I got to j-school, I wanted to promote conservatism through my journalism.

  I was taught objectivity throughout my journalism education. They pounded it into us. But the fact is that “objectivity” in theory always meant liberalism in practice. Journalism education operated under the premise that we journalists were liberal and reinforced the idea that we were going to spend our careers supporting a liberal status quo. Most of my classmates, and later colleagues, were liberals, and they were happy and comfortable with their positions in the power structure. I wasn’t, nor were the other conservatives I knew.

  We wanted to shake things up, not only because conservatism was better policy-wise but because contrarian journalists would improve journalism as an institution. When I started in the second Obama term, and then when I got hired on at the Washington Post and eventually the Times, journalism was generally a low-quality product. Most journalists were trying desperately to cover for those in power while trying to hang onto their jobs in an industry most Americans had abandoned as irrelevant. If you know what the paper is always going to report—liberals good, conservatives bad—most people are going to get tired of it and go elsewhere for information.

  So we wanted to save journalism, but to do that we had to change it. Changing journalism required that we conservatives infiltrate the media. Once we did that, we could change it from the inside. That’s how guerrillas do it.

  The media was overwhelmingly liberal in large part because the people going into the media were overwhelmingly liberal. Unlike in other fields that attract young, idealistic people—by which I mean unformed, immature people—there was no incentive to grow out of liberalism over time. Say you went into business as a 24-year-old liberal. By the time you are 30, you’re probably thinking Milton Friedman was a squish . Experience and accountability spur maturation.

  But if you went into journalism as a 24-year-old liberal, six years later you are a slightly balder, slightly fatter liberal with the mentality of a 24-year-old. There was no accountability, no hard knocks, other than the changes in the industry itself. You would tell yourself that those changes were not your fault—your audience just was not wise enough to appreciate your work. And there was a newsroom full of other liberals reinforcing all the stupid things your college professors taught you.

  As a journalist, you wanted to see yourself as some kind of white knight fighting for truth and justice where, in reality, you were usually just a hack. A teacher often teaches because he can’t do, but at least he teaches. Journalists did not even do that much. They just talked about stuff—and then drank cheap, happy hour Bud Light and told each other how awesome they were.

  A whole generation of liberals became reporters because of Woodward and Bernstein and All the President’s Men, a turning point in journalism that gave them the terrible idea that they were not just there to chronicle what was happening but to put their fingers on the scale to ensure the right thing happens. Of course, the right thing was always the left thing.

  But there is something honorable and important about journalism in a free country, just not the hackneyed propaganda version of journalism we had been treated to since the 1960s. The media was barely even pretending anymore, which hastened the decline that new technology made a foregone conclusion.

  If you are going to get force-fed ideology anyway, why would you ever choose to listen to someone who denies he has one even as he forces it down your throat? The scant audiences for the network newscasts were grim testimony to the failure of the “journalist as hidden advocate” model. It was bad enough watching the endless series of commercials about Cialis and diabetes testers without having the network anchors lie to your face.

  It was clear that the new media world would shake out, and if we wanted to be part of it, we conservatives needed to show up. So I did, and so did others. We started showing up. There were more and more conservative journalists every day. While I went the traditional route—and got a solid background in the mechanics of journalism and reporting by doing so—most of them were learning their craft online either working for themselves or for some of the bigger sites. This was a huge talent pool, and one where the journalists themselves had a following.

  The question was how long the struggling mainstream media outlets could ignore them? They tried—they would hire liberals off the web, but shunned conservatives until some were just too popular to ignore. Many never did decide to hire conservatives—they would rather go bankrupt than go an inch to the right, but other outlets that wanted to survive started scooping these folks up.

  With conservative journalists who had no incentive to cover for the liberal establishment coming in, particularly during the Clinton administration, we started seeing something like investigative journalism again. That was a dying art in the Obama/Clinton years. It should be no surprise why—government was expanding and gathering more power and control over peoples’ everyday lives, and liberal journalists generally supported this. They had no incentive to reveal government’s failures and every incentive to cover them up.

  Which they did, shamelessly, causing great damage to the credibility of journalism as a whole. The American people saw journalists as simply another kind of hack, looking them in the eyes and lying to them. Not surprising, no one outside of the newsrooms was mourning when newspaper and after newspaper closed and magazine after magazine got sold off for a buck.

  Journalism had to change or die, and the most important people to the cause of changing journalism, beyond the lateral hires from established websites, were the true infiltrators. People like me. In the past, conservatives had see
med to self-select away from the media into more friendly realms like business and other fields that conservatives believed actually produce value for humanity. I disagreed. I always thought that journalism—true journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted—is hugely important in a democratic republic. The hallelujah chorus of leftist journalists was not just an embarrassment to the profession but a danger to democracy.

  So, we needed young conservatives to change the paradigm and start looking at journalism, a career they might not have otherwise considered. But we had to be sneaky about it. It was very covert.

  I would get a sense about new hires, get to know them a bit, make sure they were sympathetic, and then dramatically reveal my conservatism to them. They were usually relieved to have another weirdo right-winger in the newsroom. They were no longer alone.

  I weaseled myself onto the team that went out to college campuses to hire at career fairs. If I determined a candidate was conservative, I would be very clear: “Hide your conservatism! Keep your free market light under a basket! Let them keep thinking you are another brain-dead college grad who actually believes that stuff about America being racist, imperialist, sexist, homophobic and . . . uh . . . racist!” The word “racist” was always huge back then.

  I would tell them, “Smile when the weary hacks who have infested the newsroom for a couple decades spew their liberal silliness. They’ll be laid off soon anyway. Bide your time.” And as they bided their time, they started subtly changing the dynamic.

  For me, it began with some tiny rebellions. This Republican congressman got picked up at a brothel in Washington partying with a bunch of football players from the Washington Redskins. Now, when some Republican half-wit did something stupid, we were sure to mention his party prominently. I put it in the second paragraph—I didn’t think about it. It just seemed to fit there in the flow of the story. But I also added some detail on the last Democrat busted with hookers in the city a couple months before. Two in a couple months—I saw it as a trend and therefore relevant.

  Oh boy, was there a reaction. My editor moved the Republican reference to the first sentence, which was fair enough. But he cut out the part about the Democrat’s arrest, telling me it was not important to the story. Frankly, I thought “DC’s Hooker Happy Politicians” would have made for a great investigative series, but I’m pretty sure that would have removed my editor from most of the best guest lists so it was never going to happen.

  Oh, and my editor refused to let me call the team the “Redskins”—it was racist, you see—and he added some text about the team name controversy implying that the congressman was insensitive to Native Americans because the people he chose to cavort with in the house of ill repute were members of a team with an offensive name.

  So, the next month a Democratic congressman got caught in a Baltimore bus station sodomy sting. I wrote it up and, having learned my lesson, mentioned that he was a Democrat right in the first paragraph. Heck, he thought being a Democrat was important—he had spoken at the last Democratic convention the previous year about how the GOP did not have a monopoly on family values. I put that part in too and submitted it. My editor flipped. “What are you trying to do?” he asked me. “This will kill his career!”

  I kept up my personal campaign of clarity and truth. I did tiny things, like letting people know when a scumbag wasn’t a Republican—because if he was a Republican scumbag the media ensured everyone knew he was a Republican. Telling the whole truth became a powerful act of rebellion.

  Once we got a foothold and started restoring basic journalistic standards, we would ask hard questions of—get this, because it seemed wacky at the time—politicians of both parties. When you might ask a Republican, “Well, Senator Miser, wouldn’t the programs you propose cutting hurt the people who count on them to survive,” maybe you then ask the Democrat, “So, Senator Handout, why should people who actually work for a living have their tax money taken and given to people who refuse to?”

  Of course, this caused a furor in the newsroom. But now we were pushing back. We would say, “Look, this is great because Senator Handout will probably vapor lock and have to be carried off to a mental hospital. That’s news! People want to see what happens when it gets real for politicians.” It was crazy—we had to argue in favor of actual journalism. When our editors would have heartburn, we would look innocent and say, “Well, don’t you want me to ask tough questions?” Then we’d add, “I’m just speaking truth to power.”

  Of course, it also helped our agenda. Not only would the readers get a point of view the mainstream media tried to ensure they had never had before, but when that liberal freaked out it would leave an opening for a Republican governor to fill.

  The media then was a powerful weapon for progressives, but it was in decline as printed newspapers faded to cocktail napkin size and the nightly news became the realm of sexually dysfunctional old people pining for FDR. The new media arose, and mainstream journalism had to adapt. It is less objective today—or, rather, it pretends it is objective less—and much more decentralized.

  The old mainstream media is a thing of the past. Big, proud institutions like the New York Times and ABC and the like evolved into online content providers, albeit ones with better name recognition at the beginning. We have had to work to keep our audience at the Times—we cannot take it for granted, which is why I am here on Capitol Hill every day, talking to people, touching base with sources, getting real news the only way you can—by real reporting.

  Do I miss objectivity? I never knew objectivity. All I ever saw was a liberal echo chamber, and I figured if that was how it was going to be, then I wanted our story to be the one that was echoing. Look, I am a reporter, not a propagandist. If all I ever do is praise the Republicans and trash the Democrats, I’m going to have terrific sources among the GOP and none among the Dems. Both sides know I will give them a fair shake—I won’t give either side a break, but I will make sure their side gets told even if I have to report other facts that show their side is a crock.

  I think my views against “objectivity” as a concept—which even today are controversial among journalists—are really a reaction to what I experienced coming up in the Obama and Clinton years. Whenever anyone starts talking about “objectivity,” I immediately flash back to years and years when objectivity was just another way of saying, “Support and reinforce the liberal status quo.” I don’t think objectivity exists. I’ve never seen it truly practiced. I think I can function best by making my views known and dealing with people honestly and fairly.

  I think the media today is much better. It’s much more conservative-friendly than it was, but we did not hesitate to reveal the corruption scandals in the last couple Republican administrations. I voted for Carrie Marlowe, but when her secretary of energy got caught selling off assets as she was closing down the Department of Energy, I didn’t hesitate to run it on the front page.

  I am a conservative—I don’t cover for government failures. That’s the opposite of what I believe! In fact, I infuriated a j-school panel a few years ago when I told the audience that a liberal political reporter has a built-in conflict of interest because he loves the idea of the government he is supposed to ruthlessly show is failing. I have not been asked back!

  We succeeded in changing things, though. As conservatives, we needed to be in the game. We needed to show up. We could no longer cede the critical node of news and information to a coterie of leftists with zero compunction about turning it into a 24/7 propaganda tool for whatever leftist was in power or aspiring to it.

  We conservatives needed to become part of the media, and we did. We did it by making ourselves invaluable. To break in, we had to encourage young conservatives to hide their views just enough to get inside the fortress. We were liberal Trojan horses. And once inside, while the liberals were asleep, we crept downstairs to unlock the front gate.

  * * *

  Paul Warner (News Anchor)

  “Sometimes I wis
h I could be Walter Cronkite,” admits Paul Warner, the new anchor for the NewsRight network’s evening news show Right Update. With an average rating of 5.4, it is among the highest rated of all the evening news and political shows, even though it counts as viewers about only 1 in 20 Americans.

  Cronkite would have something like one in three TVs in America watching him every night 75 years ago. He had a lot of power, but he had to pretend to be objective although it was pretty clear he was very much a man of the left. Now, I can be open with my biases because I don’t presume to speak as some gatekeeper of acceptable ideas. You can find any ideas that interest you out there! If you come to NewsRight, you’ll get news from a constitutional conservative perspective with no apologies.

  I started with NewsRight in 2017. It used to be MSNBC, but they were doing poorly and a bunch of wealthy conservatives bought it. Let’s just say the day they revealed who the buyers were caused some consternation in the headquarters! The rest of the media was apoplectic, almost as much as when conservatives bought the old Los Angeles Times.

  We were a direct competitor to the Fox News Channel from the right. Fox had come in as a conservative alternative, but it still tried to be part of the objective paradigm. It really was fair and balanced (that was actually its motto) because it would actually acknowledge conservative ideas and concerns. I loved Fox, and it was critical to keeping conservatism alive during the Obama days and it remains a powerhouse today.

  But we were different. We were outright advocates for constitutional conservative values, where most other outfits claimed to be objective. Getting more conservatives into newsrooms and on television and on the web news shows that still embraced the objective model had a huge effect. It was not so much the on-air presentation—that was the last to start changing away from liberal bias—but the choice of stories and the production and editing.