Ann-Marie Murrell, Morgan Brittany, and Sonya Sasser of PolitiChicks were guests of SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss their new book, PolitiChicks: A Clarion Call to Political Activism.
Murrell said she began the PolitiChicks project in 2009 with the encouragement of Andrew Breitbart. “[He] encouraged me to use my talents and my voice and wield them like a weapon.”
She began with a video camera, which led to the PolitiChicks.com website and ultimately to a political movement for conservative women that places a hearty emphasis on activism.
“We choose not to wear body parts on our heads. That’s one of our big things. We’re not a fan of that,” she said with a laugh, referring to the infamous “vagina hats” some anti-Trump activists wear.
“There are a lot of disenfranchised Democrats. There are a lot of people who don’t relate to that, even on the left,” she noted. “We’re encouraging everyone: if you’re not happy with politicians – and no one should give all politicians a free pass, even if they’re on your side – speak up. Do something about it, but do it productively. Let’s learn how to communicate.”
“Our side is much more on communicating,” said Murrell. “We’re trying to educate people and talk to them and go one on one and explain things to people. Once they get to know us, then they can’t dispute what we’re saying, and then maybe that will cause them to think a little differently.”
The energetic activism of the PolitiChicks – fueled by the strength of their convictions, love for their families, and as they humorously admitted, a great deal of coffee – is taking them to events across the country, including a Capitol Hill book signing on Tuesday. They stressed that “Politidudes” were welcome at these events, as well as PolitiChicks.
Sasser took on the difficult task of defining conservatism in this tumultuous era, describing a conservative as “somebody who believes that our rights come from God, not government, and that it’s government’s job to secure these rights, not run our lives.”
“We don’t need the Nanny State to take care of us,” she said. “We certainly don’t need the state-run media to tell us what or how to think. Basically, we just want government to leave us the heck alone.”
The PolitiChicks called for greater unity among conservatives, who can be quick to forget what they have in common and turn on each other over ideological disputes. They also called for holding President Trump accountable, as all politicians of both left and right should be.
“Even though Donald Trump went into the presidency as a businessman, he is now officially a politician,” Murrell pointed out. “We have to hold him accountable for his actions. We’ve got to hold him accountable for all the people he’s surrounding himself with. If we start seeing things moving over toward the left, we’ve got to all speak up loudly and proudly and clearly and succinctly and factually, and continuously keep him on his toes, and remind him who put him in the White House.”
Brittany said the PolitiChicks were determined to hold the president’s “feet to the fire and call him out on things if they’re not right because this is not what we wanted.”
She talked a little about her background as a Hollywood actress, in a career ranging from her childhood appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s legendary The Birds to the TV series Dallas.
“Growing up in that atmosphere, of course, it tended to be very liberal,” she recalled. “It didn’t really start the full-force liberal until the sixties, but I saw it changing, and I saw things going in a whole different direction. When I was on Dallas, I didn’t dare say anything about Ronald Reagan because I didn’t want to lose my job. That was the beginning of conservatives having to hide in the closet.”
“If you don’t belong to the club in Hollywood, then they don’t want any part of you,” she lamented. “Now what I did is, I had a very, very successful career. I spent a lot of years doing what I love doing, but I finally decided I didn’t want to stay silent any longer. There weren’t very many Hollywood-type people who would come forward and speak on behalf of conservatives. I just decided, I said, ‘You know something? Jon Voight is doing it. I’m going to do it. I’m going to speak out. And you know what? If I don’t work again, then I don’t work again. This country is much more important to me. I need to talk to people. I need to make my voice heard.’”
Murrell talked about one of her most popular essays, “Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid! Study of an American Cult Leader,” which spotlighted the little-discussed socialist, communist, and Democratic Party ties of suicide cult leader Jim Jones.
“This guy was buddies with Jerry Brown, who is once again our governor of California, which is terrifying,” she said. “This guy was buddies with all of those top Democrats. He went and he started a religion, even though he was an atheist, because he realized that was a good way to manipulate people. He went in there under the guise of being this wonderful, righteous man who was caring and loved people and was all for social justice. And then look what happened.”
“That, to me, is such a perfect example, in a tiny little nutshell, of what socialism can be, even in that small realm. That’s something we’ve got to avoid at all costs. You have to be wary of anyone who tries to lead you down any kind of path like that.”
“They were regular folks who trusted someone that they shouldn’t have trusted,” she said of Jones’s doomed followers. “Anyone who goes into politics, we have to hold them at a higher standard. They work for us. That’s where I think the whole Republican Party lost sight of everything. We became the silent majority. We gave the fox the key to the henhouse, and then we went away and said, ‘Oh, I voted, so that’s all I need to do.’ We can never do that again, ever.”
With those warnings for conservatives and Republicans delivered, Brittany added her assessment that the Democratic Party is a “house of cards” on the verge of toppling.
“I think the Democratic Party is in big trouble. I really do,” she said. “They don’t have a real platform that they stand on. They don’t have any new blood coming into the Democrat Party. I mean, look who they pulled out: Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders? I mean, seriously, if you look at it, what do they have? They don’t stand for anything. I think that it’s all smoke and mirrors, and it’s all P.R.”
She viewed the Democrats as a party without core principles, using “anger and chaos” to cobble together a coalition of interest groups.
“The minute I would bring up facts, they would stand up and say, ‘I can’t talk to you’ – because they don’t have anything,” she said of her conversations with the Hollywood left. “They can’t argue it back. There’s a couple of them that do have some good arguments, and they’ll say things, but for the most part, they get angry and walk away from you because they have no facts.”
Sasser expounded on her slogan “Less Government, More Fun,” which she displays on a T-shirt in the book’s cover photo.
“I’m a small-government girl, and I think when we get government out of the way, the more liberty we have. We don’t want these little bureaucrats in Washington, DC, telling us how to run our lives,” she said.
The PolitiChicks gave President Trump mixed grades for his first months in office, applauding him for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and for pushing back hard against the mainstream media and permanent political class. However, they were troubled by some of the recent White House staffing intrigues.
“The Jared Kushner thing is a little disconcerting to, I think, a lot of us,” said Murrell. “We’re not sure how influential they’re going to be in the White House. There are a lot of old Obama guys that are still surrounding him. Why isn’t he getting rid of all of them? He absolutely needs to drain that swamp.”
“What about the Iran deal?” she added, recalling a dinner conversation the previous night with someone “very, very high up” that left her and Sasser in shock.
“It was scary, some of the things he was saying – that they’re having meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re not necessarily shoving them out and then not disclosing the White House guest list. That’s echoes of the Obama administration,” Murrell complained. “We don’t like that kind of stuff. We need to make changes. That’s the reason we put someone like Donald Trump in there to begin with.”
“One of the things I want to tell you about Donald Trump: I’m happy that we’re showing that the military is strong again, that we’re not going to be pushed around, that we’re not wimps, and we’re not going to apologize,” said Brittany. “I love that. It just brings back that feeling of yes, we have power again. And that’s one of the things that I like about the first hundred days.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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