By DEXTER DUGGAN
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Republicans who decline to back GOP nominee Donald Trump for president are engaging in a sort of self-admiring political purity that will “undermine” the ability to defeat leftism in the November elections, a national radio host told a packed ballroom here.
Talk host Dennis Prager told an audience of more than 900 people that “feeling good about themselves is dominant on the left,” but the same sort of preening shows up today among Republicans who, Prager asserted, say, “I am a conservative, but I am such a noble conservative, I will undermine” the party ticket this year.
Prager was one of the conservative Salem Radio Network’s national talk hosts who spoke at Phoenix outlet KKNT’s (960 AM) “Taking Back America” panel event at a hotel here on September 8 that lasted just over two hours.
None of the speakers supported the anti-Trump movement. However, Trump hadn’t been the first choice of some, like Prager, who reconciled himself to the Manhattan billionaire’s nomination.
Also speaking were national hosts Hugh Hewitt and Mike Gallagher, as well as political consultant Seth Leibsohn, who broadcasts a daily evening program from the KKNT studios.
Joining them for the second hour of the presentation was national author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.
The audience repeatedly applauded support for Trump.
The presentation kicked off a September tour by Salem national radio panelists making stops from Florida to California, and including Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Colorado.
The demand for Phoenix-area tickets had been so strong that KKNT closed down sales a week before the event to avoid exceeding ballroom capacity. Nor was attendance as cheap as a movie ticket. The price for general admission was $32.64, with higher costs for reserved seating or for entry to attend a pre-show reception.
Prager asked rhetorically how such leading Never Trumpers as national pundits Bret Stephens, Jonah Goldberg, and George Will could prefer to wash their hands of Trump and see Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton elected.
The September 8 “Taking Back America” panel occurred a few days before Clinton’s presidential campaign was forced to say she has pneumonia after she collapsed on a New York City sidewalk on September 11.
“Hillary Clinton is a lowlife. . . . I’ve never said it about anyone running for office,” the generally soft-spoken Prager told the audience. “She is a contemptible human being. But if a non-contemptible Democrat were running, it would be just as dangerous.”
Talk host Leibsohn soon elaborated on this theme, commenting that the national election of 1972 could be used “as the touchstone of when the Democratic Party was at its most radical,” with leftist nominee George McGovern’s presidential candidacy then being summed up as representing “acid (drugs), amnesty, and abortion.”
But this extremism is “exactly what they stand for” now as a party, Leibsohn said.
Leibsohn went down a list including “amnesty” and “the social issues.” If people think these are difficult to deal with now, he said, “we will not recognize this country” after eight years of a Clinton presidency.
Responding to the idea that both Trump and Clinton are bad choices, talk host Gallagher contended that Americans every day are faced with having to make “the lesser choice” in some matter; they don’t only get better choices.
Later observing that “the culture is getting worse and worse and worse,” Gallagher said that Trump always makes it a positive point to thank local law enforcement at his events, but Clinton has invited radical Black Lives Matter protesters onto the stage with her.
Gallagher characterized Black Lives Matter as “a movement to denigrate and attack and oppose law enforcement. That’s all it is. . . . This is not a woman who’s going to fight for law enforcement.”
Referring to current leftist attempts to completely change gender identities, Prager said, “When you break down male and female, society as we know it is over.”
With the U.S. Supreme Court increasingly asserting powers it doesn’t legitimately have, and with four of its current eight justices around or even beyond retirement age, Prager noted that if Clinton gets to name their replacements, she wouldn’t need other levers of power to achieve her goals.
“All the left needs is the Supreme Court. It doesn’t need Congress,” Prager said.
On another topic, Prager said that every one of his black acquaintances looks askance at the idea that it’s racist to require voters to show some form of identification at the polls — as if carrying simple identification is beyond the ability of black people.
The real reason for Democratic opposition to voter ID, Prager said, is because they want illegal aliens to vote.
Hewitt generally acted as moderator, posing questions to others. He was another of the talk hosts who’d expressed doubts about Trump during the 2016 primaries, but sees the billionaire GOP nominee being far preferable to Hillary.
Joining the panel as the second hour began, D’Souza said, “We’re living at a time when we see a new crop of characters” forming the Democratic Party’s presidential line-up.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not like the party’s President Jimmy Carter, elected in 1976, D’Souza said. “Obama is cut from a completely different cloth. . . . His end goal is ideological. . . . Poor man, he believes in” leftist “transformation.”
And Bill and Hillary Clinton “are scam artists” who have run rackets since their days in Arkansas, D’Souza said.
While Hillary was Obama’s secretary of state, Bill would give a 15-minute speech of “pure rubbish” to some gathering, for which he was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, thereby prompting Hillary to reciprocate by changing some government policy to favor the funders, D’Souza said.
D’Souza’s most recent film release targets this year’s presidential race, Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.
Democrats “have taken their whole sordid history and they have covered it up,” with the assistance in part of academia and the media, D’Souza told the Scottsdale gathering.
One tool to help Trump win the presidency, D’Souza said, is “to strip the moral capital from the Democratic Party,” which Republicans usually don’t try to do, but Trump does.
D’Souza added later: “Rip away that moral capital and the whole social-justice edifice starts crumbling. . . .
“The Democratic Party is actually predicated on dysfunction,” building its fortunes on others’ problems, Prager said.
Prager observed that it’s bad news for the Democratic Party if a woman gets married and has children with her husband because this makes her less likely to be a client of Democrat welfarism.
The political left, D’Souza said, “relies on complete moral intimidation . . . on a whole range of issues,” including bathroom privacy. “Trump is the first guy, I think, who’s willing to throw a big counterpunch” instead of assuming the usual GOP “fetal position.”
Trump, however, has been notably passive regarding Obama’s aggressions against public bathroom privacy.
Apparently likening cooperation with Trump to the way 19th-century reformers succeeded, D’Souza said the Abolitionist anti-slavery crusaders “accomplished nothing” because they considered themselves so pure, they burned copies of the U.S. Constitution because they thought it approved of slavery.
It was only when Abolitionists’ ideas were incorporated into the new Republican Party that their goals succeeded, D’Souza said.
Urging individuals to make a difference in this election year, D’Souza said, “Most of us underestimate our influence,” but can reach out to three million to five million swing voters in the nation. He suggested distributing DVDs of his Hillary’s America movie to swing voters.
Don’t just wait and hope for some outside event like the FBI indicting Hillary, he said. “This is a winnable election, but it takes creativity on our part. . . .
“The American dream hangs in the balance. It is up to us to fight for it,” D’Souza said.
Let Trump Be Trump
When Hewitt asked Leibsohn what advice he’d give to Trump about facing Clinton in presidential debates, Leibsohn suggested asking what place in the world has improved under Obama.
However, Gallagher jumped in to say, “Some of us have this strange obsession” with telling Trump what to do. Trump seems to know what he’s doing, and the 16 other GOP presidential hopefuls he beat in the primaries are evidence of that, he said.
“Let’s stop trying to tell Donald Trump how to be Donald Trump,” said Gallagher, who has been favorable to Trump longer than various other conservative media figures.
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