In liberal Los Angeles, where conservatives attract less attention than the last 10 historical gaffes, cumulatively, by President Obama, an overflow crowd of devotees of the Right poured into a private home in midtown yesterday afternoon.
Members of the little-known two-year-old Hancock Park Patriots came to hear why they must trade in their traditional courtliness and play considerably rougher to defeat liberals on Nov. 6.
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Michael Walsh
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the crowd appeared to be couples rather than singles in their 40s and 50s, since the concept of patriotism reputedly holds scant appeal for the 18-to-30 crowd.
A Hancock Park homeowner was hostess for the monthly meeting of Patriots eager to be inspired by the thinking of firebrand conservative essayist Michael Walsh.
A columnist with the New York Post and contributor to the National Review Online/The Corner, formerly a reporter in San Francisco and Rochester, Mr. Walsh addressed the patio crowd on a book he wrote two years ago, Rules for Radical Conservatives, “under the name I often use at the National Review Online, David Kahane.
“David Kahane is a fictional character I created as a kind of 35-year-old lefty, Hollywood, cool guy who is always making fun of conservatives.
Why He Wrote Book
“He, I, we wrote a whole book together, Rules for Radical Conservatives, which teaches the right how to fight back against the Left. The Right doesn’t know how to fight back effectively against the left.
“This is what I am encouraging people to do.”
If liberals and conservatives generally grew up in a common environment – global warming advocates should forgive the irony – why doesn’t the right know?
“Because they play too nice,” Mr. Walsh says.
“They are not really willing to go the extra mile that (1970s homegrown terrorist) Saul Alinsky taught the Left how to do.
“In my book, I took the Alinsky rules and modified them to teach the Right how to fight back.”
Why It Is Worthwhile
Mr. Walsh said the imprint he wanted to leave on the red, white and blue-attired crowd was “to know that the fight is worth fighting, and it is worth fighting hard. You can’t play by the Marquis of Queensberry rules when you are up against a party like the Democrats.
“As we just saw last week at their convention, they will lie straight to the American people. They will say that two-thirds of the people, that two-thirds of the ayes voted to approve of the platform amendments (“Mayor Finds That a Nun Was Telling the Truth”),” when that plainly was not the case to radio listeners and television viewers.
“When they can lie about that,” said Mr. Walsh, “they can lie about anything.”
How to Distinguish
He was asked to define the differences between the way liberals and conservatives train for the political wars, why liberals seem to enter a room with fists doubled, conservatives with a freshly pressed shirt and classically knotted necktie.
“Conservatives have real jobs,” Mr. Walsh said. “They don’t tend to work in academe, which, having worked in academe, I can tell you is not a real job.
“Conservatives don’t work for governments, get a paycheck and a handsome pension at our expense.
“In other words, liberals have time for politics. Politics is their real job. The other stuff is how they make money.
“Conservatives have real jobs. So we don’t have a lot of time for politics. It’s almost a hobby. We think,‘We’re going to vote for Reagan and we’re going to have a 49-state landslide. We finally beat the bums.’
“And liberals go, ‘Oh, damn.’ And they get right back to work and start fighting again. They never quit. They never stop. They never sleep.
“Until we conservatives learn how to fight like that, we’re never going to win.
“Never changes. Doesn’t matter who their candidate is. By definition, all Republicans are extremists.”
For information on the Hancock Park Patriots, contact email45@aol.com
