Walking Through the Fire: My Fight for the Heart and Soul of America

PROLOGUE

Walk toward the fire. Don’t worry about being called a racist, a homophobe, a sociopath, a violent heteronormative xenophobe with fascistic impulses. They say all those things about you because they’re keeping you inside the Complex, forcing you to respond to their playbook.¹

—Andrew Breitbart

Before his untimely death in March 2012, I had the great fortune of being able to call Andrew Breitbart a close personal friend. I also had the profound honor to deliver his eulogy at his memorial service in Washington, D.C.

Andrew had an instinct for where the battle should be fought and an intellect that informed him as to how. In the eulogy, I described him as Horatius at the Gate. Here is my favorite excerpt, as I delivered it, from the poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the gate:

"To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds

For the ashes of his fathers

And the temples of his [god].²

Andrew Breitbart was a man who, in walking toward the fire, always walked point. The point is the one who takes the lead, sounds the warning, and makes it safer for those who come behind. In military combat, walking point takes keen instincts and steely physical courage. Lives are at stake. In political combat, walking point takes instincts and conviction but little physical courage. There are risks, great risks but no one has died from being stripped of a committee assignment, losing a primary, or getting canceled.

I began my political career years before I met Andrew Breitbart. Although we had superficially little in common—he from Hollywood, I from Iowa—we clicked when we met. The reason was simple enough. We each believed to fight the corruption of our culture, you could not, in the memorable words of Barack Obama, lead from behind. You had to take point.

Among the messages Andrew preached was this one: Telling the truth is fun. As the introductory quote suggests, however, Breitbart also knew telling the truth came at a cost. The cost part of the equation is more obvious than the benefit. It almost always is. They want to stop you in your tracks, said Andrew.

Andrew Breitbart: The inspirational theme of Andrew Breitbart’s best seller, Righteous Indignation.

In the following pages you will get a real sense of just how costly it can be to speak honestly in a political environment that has little use for truth. But if you keep going, Andrew promised, if you tell them you can stop their verbal bullets and keep walking, you’ll send messages to people who are rooting for you, who agree with you.³ The message I hope to send is this: their bullets aren’t real but the truth always is.

CHAPTER ONE

RUNNING RISKS

On the final weekend of May 2020, violent mobs of entitled young Leftists, black and white, raged through the streets of nearly every major city in America, burning, looting, and defacing all vestiges of Western Civilization they could get their hands on. Statues of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and even Abraham Lincoln were tagged, toppled, or beheaded. In England, rioters went after the statues of Winston Churchill, George Washington, and anyone even remotely linked to the slave trade no matter their other virtues or accomplishments. When the mobs toppled the statue of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, everyone should have known the mobs were attacking Western Civilization writ large.

Not a single Democrat of note protested the madness. If anything, they sang the praises of these anarchists and their mindless acolytes. The Democrats were banking on the mayhem to fire up their base for the November elections. Few Republicans were speaking out with any measure of force or purpose. Most had long ago been cowed into submission, not by the voters, but by a hostile media and the leadership of their own party.

If elected Republicans needed a reminder of the price they might pay for defending Western Civilization, they got it on the Tuesday following this unhinged weekend of broken glass. With the full-throated support of the media and the Republican establishment, an off-the-shelf state senator named Randy Feenstra bested me in the Republican primary for an Iowa congressional seat I held since 2003. My crime: warning my constituents and my colleagues that Western Civilization was under assault.

I was the Republican’s Czechoslovakia. GOP leaders figured if they just surrendered me and a few others to the Left, they could appease the beast and hold on to their own seats. They had no more luck than Chamberlain did at Munich. The brown shirts were on the march. If these GOP leaders did not know it when they launched the campaign against me starting years back, they know it now. Today, maybe even in the eyes of their own children, they are all white supremacists.

I got a taste of what was to come on January 10, 2019. That was the day the New York Times revealed something to the world no one who has known me would have ever suspected. For sixty-nine years—including twenty-five years swimming with the sharks, eighteen of them in the D.C. swamp—not one person in a huge and ever-growing circle of friends, enemies, family, and colleagues ever witnessed or reported even a whisper of me saying or doing anything meriting the devastating allegation the Times reported as fact. To their surprise and to mine, I had become a white supremacist.

Intrepid Times reporter Trip Gabriel, former Sunday Styles editor, won the hearts of his bosses, Democrats, NeverTrumpers, globalists, and elitists by showing he could race-bait with the best of them. My own Republican leadership, Kevin McCarthy and others, should have responded with outrage. Instead, they urged Gabriel on. One would think with a name like McCarthy the House minority leader would have shied from the tactics he deployed if only to avoid the obvious comparison. The truth is, though, it was far less damaging to be labeled a communist, even at the height of the Cold War, than it is to be labeled a white supremacist today. And unlike the current witch hunters, Joe McCarthy was pursuing real witches, and I was dealing with a classic narcissistic abuser.

To speak candidly today is to run risks. I know that. On sensitive subjects, illegal immigration most prominently, progressives have neutralized the effective use of language in advance by declaring it offensive, even racist. They insist Republicans speak softly and mildly about controversial issues as a way of ensuring no one hears them. I have refused to play their game. In my nine terms in Congress, I have never shied from strong language. The Irish blood in me rebels against that. I believe there is a place in our rhetoric for immoderation. Some issues demand it.

William Lloyd Garrison certainly thought so. In launching his newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, here is what he had to say on the emancipation of enslaved African Americans: On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.⁴ To be heard, Garrison had to speak immoderately to an audience largely hostile to his message. I fully understand.

The Democrats were, of course, on the wrong side of the slavery issue just as they are on the issue of illegal immigration. In fact, Democrats have been on the wrong side of many race and ethnic issues. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats presided over a century of Jim Crow. Democrat governors stood in the doorway of schoolhouses and universities and blocked the entrance of would-be students, and they did so not all that long ago—I am old enough to remember.

Today, as the Democrats see it, everyone else in America is racist but themselves. I wish I were kidding. We have a racist society from top to bottom, Bernie Sanders said at the February 2020 Democratic debate in New Hampshire. He added, our racist society is impacting health care, housing, criminal justice, education—you name it. The criminal justice system was particularly bad. What we have got to do is understand the system is broken, is racist.⁵

No one on the stage disagreed with him. Said Joe Biden, as only Joe Biden could say it, The fact is that we in fact there is systemic racism. Elizabeth Warren insisted, We need race-conscious laws in education, in employment, in entrepreneurship to make this country a country for everyone. Andrew Yang argued, given the depth of the problem, You can’t legislate away racism. Said Tom Steyer, an open champion of reparations, Anyone who thinks that racism is a thing of the past and not an ongoing problem is not dealing with reality.⁶ And this was all said before the George Floyd mania made even these unhinged accusations seem restrained.

One major reason the Left is keen on branding their political opponents as racists is so racial minorities will overlook the hardcore racist roots of a party whose two prominent standard bearers are Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. For all their many virtues, both of these men did own slaves, and every prominent Democrat in America has attended many a festive dinner in their honor.

Let me give you a quick example of how the media help the Democrats play the race card. In 2008, Nixon-era Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz died. Butz was a Republican. In 2010, U.S. Senator Robert Byrd died. Byrd was a Democrat. The New York Times headlined Butz’s obituary, Earl L. Butz, Secretary Felled by Racial Remark, Is Dead at 98.⁷ The Times headlined Byrd’s obit, Robert C. Byrd, a Pillar of the Senate, Dies at 92.⁸ From the perspective of the Times, Butz would seem to be the one haunted by a racist past.

Earl Butz’s sin? In an otherwise blameless life, Butz, the most consequential secretary of agriculture since the Depression, told his seatmate a joke. Sitting behind Butz on this Gerald Ford campaign plane was professional snitch John Dean of Watergate fame. Butz could have told this joke just as readily about any rural male, but he told it instead about coloreds, saying they wanted little more out of life—as the Times politely phrased it—than satisfying sex, loose shoes and a warm bathroom. Butz promptly apologized, but it did no good. That one joke, privately told, cost Butz his job and his reputation. Thirty-two years after he told it, the media still would not forgive him. In fact, they all but etched the joke on his tombstone.

Robert Byrd had real sins to atone for. In the 1940s, while America was at war, so was Byrd. He recruited one hundred fifty of his friends and associates to form a Ku Klux Klan klavern in West Virginia. The new Klansmen, in turn, made Byrd the Exalted Cyclops (chapter president). In 1944, Byrd sent a letter to segregationist Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo. I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side, wrote Byrd. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds. Now there’s a white supremacist!

In running for Congress, Byrd tried to distance himself from his Klan past, but he did not exactly embrace the cause of civil rights. In 1964, as a U.S. Senator, he personally filibustered the Civil Rights Act for fourteen hours and voted against it. He joined twenty other Democratic Senators in opposing it. Only six Republicans opposed it and they did so on libertarian grounds. In the House, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill’s passage as well.

Yet it was not until the fifteenth paragraph of Byrd’s glowing obituary when the Times even mentioned his racially troubled past. Upon his passing, the Times quoted then-president Barack Obama as saying, America has lost a voice of principle and reason. For Byrd, a reliable Democratic vote, all was forgiven.

I cite these examples to show the reader right upfront how uneven is the playing field on which we are forced to compete. It gets more uneven by the day. Take the case of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. In February 2019, Northam confessed to being one of the two men in a medical school yearbook photo of a Klansman and a man in blackface. The next afternoon Northam, according to the New York Times, suddenly recanted, saying he was neither of the men.

A four-month investigation resulted in a fifty-five page report that proved bizarrely inconclusive. Said the investigators, No one we interviewed told us the governor was in the photograph, and no one could positively state who was in the photograph.⁹ Northam skated. Of course, it helped that the black lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax was accused of sexual assault in the interim and the Attorney General Mark Herring acknowledged that he too had worn blackface in college. So they all skated. Do you think Republicans would have? Not on your life.

The Left has to keep the playing field uneven to maintain power. In the years before the Civil War, the fear keeping slave owners awake at night was the thought the men and women they kept enslaved might rebel and slaughter them in their beds. Today, what keeps Democratic operatives awake at night is the fear blacks will see through their crippling paternalism and leave the progressive plantation. When that happens, the Party is over. Literally.

To prevent minorities from quitting the Democratic Party, Leftists in and out of the media have had to create and sustain an environment of fear. To accomplish this, they constantly remind their base that Republicans are fundamentally evil. Sometimes they even own up to the strategy. In an unusually honest moment, the Leftist former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mary Frances Berry, discussed in a Politico chat session why it was essential to brand the emerging tea party movement as racist. After admitting there was no evidence of the same, Berry argued such branding was nonetheless an effective strategy for Democrats. Said Berry in the midst of the economic doldrums of 2010, Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.¹⁰

In 2010, Barack Obama was president. In 2020, Donald Trump was. Once again, leftists did not want minorities discussing joblessness but now for the opposite reason. Pre-Covid, there was close to none. It was getting harder and harder for the media to deny Trump the credit for reviving an economy floundering for eight long years under President Obama. Once again, it became an effective strategy for Democrats to have Republicans, especially the president, rebut charges of racism rather than talk about joblessness or the lack thereof.

And so in Minneapolis, when one police officer appeared to suffocate a black man, Black Lives Matter and its allies used the opportunity to denounce the 800,000 other police officers in America as racist. A complicating factor, of course, was Democrats controlled every major city and their police forces. In its get-outto-vote video, BLM ignored this inconvenient fact and shifted voter wrath to, yes, the oppression of white supremacy. This, of course, was nonsense. At a congressional hearing in 2019, conservative black activist Candace Owens observed had she made a list of a hundred things troubling black America, white supremacy and white nationalism … would not be on it.¹¹

BLM could resurrect this phantom only because establishment Republicans have all but encouraged them to do so. This concession gave BLM a pretext to channel donations received to the Democratic Party. Ideally, the Democrats could then drive the white supremacists out of the White House, out of Washington altogether. In November 2020, they succeeded in doing this, and too many Republicans refused to protest the unholy way they pulled it off.

CHAPTER TWO

SHARING THE TRUTH

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken/Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.

—Rudyard Kipling, If

Iknew the Left’s strategy well. I was roughed up by the imagination of one Trip Gabriel who was acting, by his own admission, under the specific direction of his editor. The Times was assaulting the president by proxy while setting me up for the political lynch mob to be unleashed by their story. There is some irony at work here. During the 2016 primary campaign, I did not stump for Trump. As history will note, I was Ted Cruz’s national campaign co-chairman.

As the first state to register its formal support for a presidential candidate through its famed Iowa Caucus, Iowa matters. It is the most important early contest in the country because it’s the first test of a candidate’s strength. It requires grassroots activism, and each caucus season Iowans prove they cannot be bought with big money and high-dollar campaign ads. Don’t believe me? Ask Jeb Bush.

The Iowa caucus must be earned with shoe leather and handshakes. For example, in the 2012 campaign Rick Santorum had a low budget but a lot of energy. Riding from event to event in the Chuck Truck, named after its driver, Chuck Laudner, my first chief of staff, Santorum gave 385 speeches in Iowa and beat Mitt Romney and his expensive consultants and ever-present entourage. Elitists don’t like to lose, especially to those whom they regard as their cultural inferiors.

Given I always took an active role in presidential politics, I had a higher profile than a Midwestern Congressman might have otherwise—and a bigger bull’s-eye on my back. I wasn’t batting a thousand with my presidential picks but I was successful enough to see Ty Cobb’s lifetime average in my rearview mirror. Then the long knives started to come out.

In 2016 I traveled with Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his entourage on his campaign bus. In town after town we hosted rallies and delivered speeches to enthusiastic audiences. Early on, establishment Republicans failed to take Trump seriously and directed much of their fire at Cruz, the most consistent conservative in the race.

King, constituent Rosie Osterberg and Senator Ted Cruz, on the Iowa Caucus, first in the nation, campaign trail. Spirit Lake, Iowa—January 6, 2016

One day, a corn-wrapped Winnebago motor home showed up at a Cruz rally even before we got there. This became a routine. As I learned, Governor Terry Branstad’s errant son, Eric, hired young people to stand on each side of the entrance doorway handing out anti-Cruz literature and promoting ethanol, which I have championed even before the first gallon was pumped.

Television commercials blanketed the airwaves. My face was featured next to Ted’s in the attack ads. We soldiered on. It was clear Governor Branstad, the very epitome of the Republican establishment, would never support the most principled conservative in the race. Although he took the pledge not to endorse a candidate, two weeks before the caucus Branstad called for Cruz’s defeat. Even a former Democrat Congressman, Dave Nagle, was put off by Branstad’s gesture. We don’t blackball people, Nagle said of his party, but Republicans could make no such claim. Branstad black-balled Cruz and let everybody know who the establishment feared. He put Iowa’s first in the nation caucus status at great risk. Why?

Establishment Republicans may dislike Democrats, but they reserve their hate for serious conservatives. They lose their ability to reason when challenged by those who take seriously the fundamental principles of Nature’s God and our Founding Fathers. An Iowa governor needs to encourage all the candidates and ensure a level playing field. If the top-tier candidates refuse to compete in Iowa, that would be the end of Iowa’s first in the nation status. Terry Branstad apparently did not care. If Branstad had the political capital to defeat Cruz, from that day forward candidates would be reluctant to campaign in Iowa for fear that, after more than a year on the ground, a governor might kill off their candidacy in a thinly veiled gambit to advance himself or another candidate.

Had Branstad gotten his way, if his political capital were sound enough, Cruz would have dropped in the polls like a rock. Branstad struck the hardest blow he could against Cruz and by far the hardest ever delivered against his own state’s first in the nation status. In both cases, they turned out to be feeble and glancing blows.

Cruz won Iowa. It was a happy time, and Cruz gave a long and rousing victory speech. I was on the stage the entire time. By now, I knew Cruz’s applause lines and delivered some of them myself as the crowd cheered. I saw the video. I actually looked too happy for my own good. I was happy partly out of sheer joy, partly out of schadenfreude. I confess to taking pleasure knowing how glum our happiness made Branstad and his deep-pocketed allies watching TV at their victory parties.

The next day, these guys launched their campaign to recruit a primary challenger to run against me. I knew this was a favorite tactic because Bruce Rastetter, a former Iowa ethanol magnate and a