The Conservative Revolution

This Tuesday I’ll be appearing on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central. Be sure to tune in to learn a little more about the tea party movement, FreedomWorks and what we are up to in the midterm elections.

The Colbert Report airs at 10:30pm Central on Comedy Central. I’ll be heading up to New York tomorrow to tape the show. You can follow me live on my Twitter handle @bstein80.

Should be an interesting time.

I just got back from California, where FreedomWorks joined hundreds of local volunteers for training, rallying and townhall discussions about the midterm elections. We began our Take America Back tour through California in the Bay Area, with an evening event in Santa Rosa. FreedomWorks’ leaders, and best-selling authors Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe led a discussion about the midterm elections with 250 activists at The Flamingo hotel in Santa Rosa. The crowd was fired up, and is fighting hard to defeat Barbara Boxer in her bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate. It was amazing to see so many conservatives in the beautiful wine country north of San Francisco, and we came away convinced that they were going to work hard to retire leftist politicians in California in 2010 and beyond.

Our next stop in California was Orange County, where we held events in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. We found the crowds there just as fired up, and just as focused on defeating the big government left in 2010. Armey and Kibbe also sold quite a few copies of their new book Give us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto. There are a couple of key congressional races in the area that the activists are focused on, including defeating Loretta Sanchez in her bid for re-election. Van Tranh is fighting to replace her in the district that includes parts of Anaheim, California.

The final destination on the Take America Back tour through California was Riverside County, where we joined a local conservative club in Temecula. Armey, Kibbe and I spoke to about 250 activists about how we can defend liberty for the next few decades, starting with the upcoming elections. The message was well received, and the group agreed that the invigorated freedom movement is here to stay. We left feeling confident that the folks in California are fired up and willing to work hard to make an impact in 2010 and beyond. I’ll post a few pictures from our travels in this space soon.

Our next task is to organize and execute our September 12th Taxpayer March on Washington – 2010, this week. We will bring thousands of people back to Washington, DC for a big protest down Pennsylvania Avenue right up to the steps of the US Capitol Building. Our message will be: “Remember in November.” This is the last big protest event planned before the midterm elections on November 2nd, and we hope to make it another memorable day in the annals of American liberty.

I’m currently sitting on the Acela Express train from Washington to New York, just enjoying the last day of rest before I join my colleagues at FreedomWorks for a spring to Election Day on November 2nd. Tomorrow we meet with the publisher of our new book “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.” On Tuesday, we officially launch the book on The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor and The Daily Show.

It’s a heck of a start for the new book, and it’s our hope that we will sell thousands of copies in the days to come so that we can reach the New York Times Bestsellers List for nonfiction. A lot of the hard work has been done, including the outlining, writing and editing. Matt Kibbe and Dick Armey have crafted an excellent book that is one part narrative of the tea party movement, one part explanation and one part call to action for all limited government activists.

I’m excited about the book, and about all of the events we have planned from now until Election Day. We begin tomorow in New York City and we end the tour in Jacksonville on November 2nd. My role in the tour will be to help organize local events around the country, sign up new recruits, do some GOTV training, hand out campaign literature and hopefully help our members and allies make a big difference in a dozen senate races and dozens of congressional races around the country. We will get to see a lot of places, meet thousands of people, work hard for our ambitious goals and hopefully have some fun along the way.

Please check our website to see when we will be coming to your area. I hope I get a chance to meet many of you in the weeks to come. Together I’m confident that we will Take America Back in 2010. See you down the road.

Earlier in the week I traveled up to New York City and Connecticut for FreedomWorks. I joined my colleague and Dick Armey for a grassroots event in Stamford, and then a media appearance by Armey in New York.

We arrived at La Guardia airport on Sunday morning, rented a car and got some lunch at a small Peruvian restaurant in Queens. Once Armey arrived we picked him up and drove him to the Italian Center of Stamford, where we joined Right Principles, a local conservative group there. Armey gave the keynote address and spoke about the need for conservatives to take the GOP back and then take America back in the next election.

Armey was warmly received and got a great introduction from Bob MacGuffie, a man who has been tireless in the fight for liberty in Connecticut. We also talked to a few candidates for the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. The GOP had just finished up its convention in Hartford, and the party hacks were out in full force. Armey told the conservative candidates that we had to organize and get ready for the elections, but we should also take the long view of things and build our machine to take over the GOP in the years to come.

We left Stamford after finding a great family-owned Mexican restaurant called Tacos Guadalajara, and headed back to Manhattan. We stayed the night at Le Parker Meridian on west 56th street and 7th Ave. We had to get up really early in the morning, so my colleague and I only spent an hour or so at a bar, and walked back to the hotel from the Times Sqaure area. I took a few pictures as I passed by some famous places, and ended up back at the hotel by 11pm.

We woke up early the next morning and a car picked us up to take us to the News Corp. building on Avenue of the Americas. This is where Fox News is based, and where Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck broadcast their shows. Armey was scheduled to be on the popular morning show, Fox and Friends, at 7:15am. We arrived, checked into the building, and were escorted to the studio. We spent some time in the green room, and then Armey went to get his makeup for TV. I always like to make fun of him for this, but it’s a necessary evil for appearing on TV.

The producer escorted us to the studio itself and my colleague and I got to watch Armey’s interview from a few feet away, which was pretty cool. He did a good job, and the hosts seemed happy, so we were happy. We left the studio, headed out the building and back to the hotel for some breakfast. After that we were on our way back to Washington and Dallas (Armey).

It was another productive, fun time in the New York area, and I’m looking forward to going back sometime soon.

John Judis over at The New Republic tries to explain the tea party movement to his fellow leftists. His conclusion is worth quoting and should put a smile on our faces.

None of this is what liberals want to hear, but we might as well face reality: The Tea Party movement—firmly grounded in a number of durable U.S. political traditions and well-positioned for a time of economic uncertainty—could be around for a while.

John cites yours truly as an example of the types of folks organizing people in the movement.

Santelli’s appeal was answered by a small group of bloggers, policy wonks, and Washington politicos who were primarily drawn from the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. They included John O’Hara from the Illinois Policy Institute (who has written a history of the movement, titled A New American Tea Party); Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks, a Washington lobbying group run by former Representative Dick Armey; and blogger Michael Patrick Leahy, a founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter.

To be sure, some of the original Tea Party organizers were young libertarians, many of whom, like Brendan Steinhauser, voted for Ron Paul in 2008 and have rediscovered Ayn Rand’s ethic of rational selfishness. They remain part of the movement—one sign I saw at the Washington rally read, “WE ARE JOHN GALT,” referring to the hero of Atlas Shrugged—but, as the movement has grown, its adherents have become more conventionally conservative.

I think that he essentially gets the point about the organizers right. Most of the early tea party organizers were young, urban, tech-savvy libertarians that used twitter and facebook to put together street protests in February 2009. While much of the analysis in the article is odd, it is worth reading to get a sense of how some on the left view the tea party movement.

I am attending the 4th annual International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by the Chicago-based free market think tank, the Heartland Institute. You can watch live footage of the conference over at Pajamas Media. I’m a big fan of Chicago, except for its politics, of course. That makes this conference all the more enjoyable to me.

I’ve been hearing from some great speakers, most of whom are scientists that don’t buy into the leftist propaganda on climate change. Some of the speakers include. Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr.S. Fred Singer and my personal favorite, MIT professor Dr. Richard Lindzen. I’ve been tweeting from the conference, and you can follow my tweets or check out the updates on my facebook profile.

The basic arguments of most of the scientists at the conference are that climate change has always occurred, with cooling and warming trends; that it is probably due mostly to natural variability; that CO2 has not made a major impact in the climate change trends; and that man has very, very little impact on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. These scientists have basically debunked the hoax of global warming alarmism, point by point. Every conservative activist should watch their speeches, read their books and articles and keep up with their blogs. We can win the propaganda war if we highlight our best minds in this battle and work to get them more exposure.

Congratulations to the Heartland Institute for putting on such an awesome event! There are hundreds of smart people at this conference who are doing real work to defeat the left’s lies about global warming. It’s up to us, the conservative movement, to spread the word far and wide.

I just got back to Alexandria a couple of hours ago. I’ve been traveling quite a bit the past week. I was in Utah working to oust Sen. Bob Bennett, which was successful. This article was on the front page of Sunday’s The Washington Post.

Then I flew to New York for the quarterly FreedomWorks board meeting. We had a good time, gave presentations on our efforts this year, and on our strategy for this big election coming up in November.

It was a fun time, and I was able to get some work done on various campaigns when I wasn’t in meetings. We also got to take advantage of the great restaurants and bars in NYC, and that made it a very fun trip. I left this morning, made a stop in the Philly area to meet with some activist leaders, and then headed back home through Delaware, Maryland, DC and finally, Virginia.

It’s been a wonderful week for FreedomWorks, and I’m looking forward to some rest and relaxation this weekend. I leave for Chicago on Sunday for the Heartland Institute’s annual climate change conference.

Fox News has a report on our campaign to publicize the attacks by Lance Baxter, the Geico voiceover guy, against FreedomWorks and the tea party movement. Let this be a lesson to the left: We will use Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals against you. And we will use them well.

FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe talked about Ryan Hecker’s Contract from America on Fox News the other day. This is an idea that has really taken off since it was presented on tax day last week. You can find out more about the Contract by clicking here.