This feature appears in the May ‘17 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.
In a rousing speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre put the violent far Left on notice that we will fight for freedom.
Good afternoon, CPAC! How are you doing today? Are you ready to get our country back on the right track? Let me hear you! Are you ready to fight for what you believe? If you’re a member of the leftist media, a soldier for the violent Left, a violent criminal, a drug cartel gang member or a would-be terrorist, hear this: You’re not going to win. You will NOT defeat us!
I’m glad you’re pumped up, because we have a real fight on our hands. The far Left has turned protesting into a full-time profession. You’d think that for $1,500 a week, they’d know what they’re protesting. But half of them can’t even tell you.
But we’ve all seen how violent they can be. Just look at Inauguration Day. They disguised themselves with black block ski masks. They spit in the faces of Gold Star families. They tomahawked beer bottles and rocks at police, putting multiple police in the hospital. They smashed businesses’ plate-glass windows while customers cowered inside.
Ladies and gentlemen, have we ever seen such anger in this country? In California, a high school girl was asked, “Do you hate Mexicans?” When she replied “No,” they said, “You support Trump. You hate Mexicans.” And then they beat her up.
In San Francisco, they attacked a group of Trump supporters, pelted a woman with eggs, then stole their Trump hats and burned them in the street.
The Left’s message is clear: They want revenge. You’ve got to be punished. They say you’re what’s wrong with America, and now you’ve got to be purged. But maybe it’s time those protesters took some advice from Barack Obama: “Elections have consequences.”
And we won.
Folks, our long nightmare may not be over, it may be just beginning. Because right now, we face a gathering of forces willing to use violence against us.
Think about it. The leftist movement in this country right now is enraged. Among them and behind them are some of the most radical political elements there are. Anarchists. Marxists. Communists. And the rest of the left-wing, socialist brigade.
Many of these people literally hate everything America stands for: democracy, free-market capitalism, representative government and individual freedom. They want to tear down our system and replace it with their collectivist, top-down, global government-knows-best Utopia. And they’ve got money—billions—from George Soros and a vast network of leftist organizations.
They all have different complaints, agendas and motives for what they do. But they all share one thing in common: They’re angry, they’re militant and they’re willing to engage in criminal violence to get what they want.
But here’s what’s different from the leftist violence we’ve seen in the past. For the first time, we face an enemy utterly dedicated to destroying not just our country, but also Western civilization. We also face a national media machine that’s not only biased almost entirely their way, it also dumps gasoline on simple political disagreements to turn them into cultural IEDs.
They demonize and dehumanize us by calling us every evil name in the book. When the anger explodes, they step back, catch it on video and replay it nonstop for ratings and outrage and more chaos tomorrow.
Meanwhile, crime is rising again in many U.S. cities. According to the FBI, drug gangs are expanding their networks all across the country. The FBI also says gang members are infiltrating law enforcement and the military.
In jails, they’re working with extremist groups from white supremacists to black separatists to Muslim prison gangs. On the outside, gangs are committing more and more cross-border crimes. According to the FBI, Mexican drug cartels are working with 100,000 street gang members in Chicago alone.
I think we all agree we live in a more angry, more dangerous world than we’ve seen in a long time. A lot of people for a lot of reasons want to blow it all up and tear the whole thing down.
It’s in the Saul Alinsky strategy of sowing grievance and indignation to raise holy hell. It’s in the leftist radical plan to tax capitalism to collapse. It’s in the Rahm Emanuel doctrine of “Never let a crisis go to waste.” And it’s in the radical ISIS dream of a worldwide caliphate.
So what happens when it all collects and collides like a hurricane? What happens when the national media wind machine blows it up into a firestorm? And what happens if, God forbid, our enemies use that to their advantage? Is it anything but a matter of time before the terror and bloodshed we’ve seen in Brussels or Paris comes home to America? Do we need to look any further than Boston, San Bernardino or Orlando to know that time has already come?
With social media, it’s easy enough to find out where to go and when. So what happens when terrorists tag along for a flash-mob protest at your airport and gas the place like they did in Tokyo? What happens when some Facebook freeway protest brings your interstate to a screeching halt? If you’re late for work, that’s one thing. But what if you’ve had a heart attack and your ambulance is just a mile from the hospital exit?
Ladies and gentlemen, another definition of terrorism is violence in the name of politics. Criminal violence has no place in political debate. And those who incite it or engage in it need to be prosecuted and punished, period.
The Left’s violence against America has taken many forms. For example, left-wing judicial activism can be a form of violence against our constitutional system. Look at judicial efforts to block President Trump’s executive order to take a longer look at people coming from countries that sponsor or harbor terrorists. Yet the protesters show up, the media amplify their anger and the elites go into meltdown.
It’s not that the Constitution is unclear on this issue. The president handles the foreign affairs of this country. It’s an executive function. And the U.S. laws on the issue couldn’t be clearer. The president has absolute authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens [that] he may deem to be appropriate” to protect “the interest of the United States.”
Folks, when unelected, unaccountable judges can take that clear, unambiguous language and then twist it and pervert it to make it mean whatever they want, they might as well throw a Molotov cocktail at the U.S. Constitution.
They do violence to the Constitution’s separation of powers. They do violence to the U.S. Code and Supreme Court precedent. And they do violence to the checks and balances that keep government under control.
Because by making the law mean anything they want, they make the law mean nothing. As even the liberals’ own Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said, and I quote, “Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the leftist media is responsible for blowing the winds of violence as well. It’s bad enough when CNN openly fantasizes about “What happens if the president-elect is assassinated before he takes the oath of office on Inauguration Day?” And it’s bad enough that a London Times journalist can fret that “... the assassination is taking such a long time.”
It’s shameful and wrong. So are the media’s deliberate lies aimed at destroying our freedom. That is something the NRA has been dealing with for decades.
Back in 2003, when the 10-year Clinton gun ban was set to expire, CNN deliberately tried to mislead the public. So I called them out on their lies.
Here’s the deal: The following Monday, CNN couldn’t even make an honest retraction. They called it “additional information” and proved what I said was true. Their story was absolutely phony and deceitful.
But the sad thing was that if I hadn’t been sitting live in that studio and caught them like a bank robber running out of the bank with a bag of money and dye exploding all over him, they never would have run the so-called correction.
Folks, our country’s under siege from a media carpet-bombing campaign. You can hear it in their tone, their sneers. You can literally see the disdain on their faces. Everything from their word choices to their inflection is trained on one target: Purposely and maliciously destroying the Trump presidency. No matter what it takes and no matter what that costs.
Here’s just an example: For years, the media couldn’t have cared less about Vladimir Putin or Russia or Obama’s promise to go easy on him after he was re-elected ... which led to Obama’s slow-motion foreign policy train wreck in the region. But now, barely a month into Trump’s presidency, they’re “horrified” and all a-fret over the “Russian-American equation.”
Even more alarming is that they’ve apparently found willing co-conspirators among some in the U.S. intelligence community. If an American president can’t talk to his counterparts in Mexico or Australia on a line he knows is secure, then folks, our national security is at risk.
You know, 100 years ago, if you eavesdropped and published the affairs of the heads of state, you would have been tracked down and hanged for treason. Yet today, Obama can commute the sentence of a traitor like Chelsea Manning and all the media want to talk about are Manning’s underwear choices and makeup routines.
Today, Barack Obama is giving explicit support to these protesters. In his first public statement since the election, Obama said he was “heartened” and that the anti-Trump protests and riots are “... exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.”
“American values?” You mean like freedom of speech? Or just speech you agree with, like the safety-pin censors on college campuses today?
God help you if you’re a conservative and want to speak at a college today. Did you see their “Night of Tolerance and Diversity of Opinion” at Berkeley this month? Berkeley, the supposed “birthplace of the free speech movement” of the ’60s is now where speech is silenced, its defenders are beaten by mobs and the police are told to stand down.
They called people “fascists.” Yet they used the same brutal tactics that the fascists used in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s.
But I’ll say this: If they think they’re going to crowbar and hammer and burn the foundations of Western civilization, they’d better bring a big stick and pack a lunch because they’re going to have one hell of a fight on their hands!
November’s elections proved it: Americans wanted a fighter and we got one with President Donald J. Trump. And for the last three decades, fighting for our freedom is something the NRA has done every single day.
All across this country, it was NRA members and gun owners who made a difference. And in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, NRA members and gun owners helped put President Trump over the top.
Folks, the media said we were arranging deck chairs on the Titanic by backing Trump. But we’re still standing. We’re still here. And we’ve got President Trump’s back for the next eight years.
We’ve got 5 million active NRA members. And 25 million more who consider themselves NRA members—gun owners all across this country. So if you’re a member of the leftist media, a soldier for the violent Left, a violent criminal, a drug cartel gang member or a would-be terrorist, hear this: You’re not going to win. You will not defeat us!
You know, with all the threats facing America today, your right to protect yourself and your family may be more relevant and more urgently needed than ever before. Americans know that in their hearts and they feel it in their bones. And that’s why they join the NRA. November’s elections proved it: Americans wanted a fighter and we got one with President Donald J. Trump. And for the last three decades, fighting for our freedom is something the NRA has done every single day.
We’re the nation’s largest gathering of lawful, peaceable, right thinking people absolutely determined to live our lives without fear. In our families, in our homes, in our communities and across this country, we stand ready and resolved to defend our freedom and secure our safety against any enemy.
Terror knows no more ferocious foe than freedom in the hands of “We the people.” To defend it, we’ll go toe-to-toe with them in any arena they threaten.
We’ll fight the violent Left on the airwaves, the internet and TV. We’ll fight the violent Left in Congress and in the Washington bureaucracy. We’ll fight the violent Left in the state houses and in courthouses from coast to coast.
And make no mistake: If the violent Left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve, the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people. And we will win because we are the majority!
So what do you say? Are you ready to take on the leftists and protect the foundations of American democracy?
Stand up and show them you’re ready to stand and fight! Stand up and show them we will not submit, we will not be intimidated and we will never surrender! Stand up. Speak out. Be bold. Fight back.
Stand up with the NRA to defend the greatest expression of human freedom ever witnessed on this planet: The United States of America!
Thank you very much!
You can watch LaPierre’s speech by clicking here.
