by Frontpage Editors
The founder of the Walk Away Campaign receives the Annie Taylor Award - for his courageous work in uniting Americans to leave the Left.
Walk Away Campaign Founder Brandon Straka received the Annie Taylor Award at the Freedom Center’s recent annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ.
The annual award is named in honor of schoolteacher Annie Edison Taylor—the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel—and given to individuals who exhibit great courage by “going over the ledge when others would be afraid to even go near it.”
Straka recounts his experience of having his apartment raided by FBI SWAT, put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail. Don’t miss his impacting speech of rigor, courage and determination.
Annie Taylor Award – Brandon Straka from DHFC on Vimeo.
Transcript:
Mike Finch: Our first one tonight is Brandon Straka, the founder of the Walk Away campaign. He’s a former liberal and former Democrat party supporter who has very publicly walked away from the political left and created a social movement, encouraging others to do the same. It sounds like David Horowitz. His original YouTube video about his decision to leave the Democrat party went viral in May of 2018, launching this explosive movement, uniting Americans across all demographics to leave the divisive left.
Brandon frequently provides commentary on Fox News as a recurring guest on Justice with Jeanine Pirro, Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and many more. His hour-long in-depth interview with Mark Levin on Life, Liberty and Levin exposed millions to Brandon Straka and the Walk Away campaign. Brandon also provides conservative commentary for numerous television media outlets. President Trump publicly acknowledged Brandon’s success in organizing the first ever Walk Away March in Washington, DC, with 5,000 attendees. Brandon’s charismatic leadership and the Walk Away message of unity and standing up against the left’s attack on American ideals resonate with people around the globe.
Born and raised in rural Nebraska and now a resident of New York City, Brandon travels the nation promoting the Walk Away campaign message and sharing his desire to bring a new awareness and understanding to the reality of politics today and his mission to unify America.
Now, that’s a wonderful summary of Brandon; the most — the thing that he doesn’t mention in this is the attacks that he took, and David could explain a lot — anyone who’s left the left and come over to our side, basically, their life, in a sense — they leave one life and have to come to a new life, and they lose everything. They lose their friends, sometimes you lose your family. Your life — basically, the left wants to destroy you. There’s nothing the left hates more than someone who comes, converts and comes over to our side. So Brandon has come under assault by so many of his former friends on the left side and the Democrat side, but he’s faced all those assaults and those attacks with great courage and great determination, and I think that just strengthens his resolve to continue to fight for liberty and freedom.
So ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got the award here, and now I’m going to ask Brandon Straka to please come to the stage for the presentation of the award.
Brandon Straka: Thank you very much. I know that the polite thing to do is to come up here and make statements like, oh, I’m not courageous, I don’t deserve an award like this. I totally deserve this award. Nobody deserves this award more than I do.
But before we get into that, there’s a few comments that I would like to make. First of all, I want to tell you how pleased I am to be standing in front of you right now. One year and nine months ago, an FBI SWAT raided my apartment, put me in handcuffs and took me to jail; they told me that I was facing multiple felony charges for what I had done on January 6, which we’ll get into in a moment, and I’ll leave you on a cliffhanger there for a few minutes.
I sat in my jail cell. They told me I was going to be in 23-hour-a-day lockdown in a concrete cell with a metal door that I would be allowed out one hour a day. I asked them when I would be released, and they told me they had no idea when I would be released or when I would be able to see a judge. I sat in that jail cell for two and a half days pondering what felony charges I was being charged with. I truly, legitimately believed, after two straight weeks of watching the mainstream media report on January 6 as a terrorist attack and an insurrection and an attempt to overthrow the United States government, that I was, in fact, going to be facing charges of treason and insurrection. I thought that I would be extradited to Washington, DC, that I would — it’s not a joke. I thought that I would never see my grandparents — my grandmother again, that I would never see my parents again. I thought that I would never see the light of day again, quite honestly.
Two and a half days later, a judge did order my release, and that began what has been a never-ending hell since I was arrested, but I just have to say, I never thought that I would see the outside of a jail cell again, so I just want to say what an extraordinary pleasure it is to be standing before you here tonight.
The second thing that I would like to say is that I’ve had a great privilege of getting to hear so many incredible speakers over the last few days, and incredible voices in the conservative movement, and it’s not a criticism on anybody whatsoever, but I heard over the last few days a restatement again and again of the problems that we face and the issues. I didn’t hear a tremendous amount of solutions being offered, about how we’re going to overcome these things. Thank you, darling; I’m going to give you a whole lot of solutions tonight, okay? I’m going to tell you how we’re going to fix these problems.
But what I’m going to start by doing is giving everybody a little bit of a reality check. Because I knew that there was not going to be a red wave. I knew it in 2020 as well. I’ve been trying to tell as many people as possible that we will never see a red wave again, until we fix some of the problems that we have. And here’s what’s going on. Many of you are going, how bad does it have to get before the left comes over and votes on the right? How expensive does gas have to get? How bad does inflation have to get? How bad does crime have to get? How bad do things have to get before people wake up and start voting Republican?
Allow me to explain this to you guys in a way that nobody has before: Everybody on the left thinks that there is nothing worse in the entire world than being a Republican. They would rather spend $15 a gallon on gas than join you people here in this room, because they have spent their entire lives being indoctrinated and told by the liberal media that you are racist and bigots and Nazis and homophobes and terrorists and every other terrible thing that there is. And until the Republican party picks up the ball and comes up with a plan to change their marketing and their branding and make Republicanism appealing to people on the left, you will never see a red wave. Never.
But here’s the good news. I’m going to teach you right now how we’re going to do it. I am. Because I know. Because I used to be one of these people. My name is Brandon Straka, and in 2016 — get ready to boo — I voted for Hillary Clinton. Yes. God, you don’t know — that feeds my soul. You don’t understand. In 2016, I voted for Hillary Clinton and I hated Donald Trump and I hated all of you. Because I believed that you were exactly all of those things that I had been told for years and years and years by the liberal media that I trusted. I believed that that’s who you were and I believed that that’s what Donald Trump was. I’m so miserable after Donald Trump got elected that I literally spent two weeks crying — I spent the first couple of days calling into work sick. I worked as a hair stylist at the time. I called in and I said, cancel all my appointments; I can’t be anywhere near scissors or bleach.
And so I did what any reasonable, emotionally well-adjusted person would do: I got on Facebook and I started crying, making live videos, and trying to understand how anyone could possibly vote for this man. Why would anybody vote for a man as horrible as Donald Trump? And I kept asking this question. I kept asking, I kept asking, and nobody would answer me. I don’t know why; I’m such a nice person.
But I grew up in rural Nebraska. I knew that the majority of my friends that I had grown up with, my teachers, my — the people in the town that I grew up. I knew that they all voted for Trump. But it was okay because I had already pre-forgiven then because he was going to lose anyway. So I was taking the high road, and I was like, I forgive you. And then all of a sudden, election night happens, and oh my god, Queen Hillary did not become the first woman president. All the oxygen got sucked out of the room of my election night party and I was devastated. I was truly, truly terrified. I am a gay man living in America, being told every single day by the liberal media — Mike Pence was going to get us in the middle of the night and put us in gay concentration camps somewhere in Pennsylvania or something, and black people were all going back to Africa, we were going to resurrect the plantations — I mean, we were buying into all of this. And it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. I felt this way for about two weeks, and then I finally said to myself, I’ve got to do something about this because I can’t live the next four years feeling this unhappy and this miserable.
So I went on a quest to try to understand a couple of things. Number one, how did the media that I trusted get it so wrong? They told me Hillary Clinton was going to win in a landslide. And number two, why would anybody vote for a man as awful as Donald Trump? In January of 2017, right around the time Trump was about to take office, I got on Facebook — this is how I purge my feelings — I got on Facebook and I said that I would never be able to understand how anyone could possibly vote for a man as — who was capable of standing before a cheering crowd and mocking a reporter’s disability.
And that’s when a woman named Diane, a lifelong staunch Christian conservative who used to babysit me when I was a baby, reached out to me privately on private message on Facebook and sent me a link to a video. And she said, I’m not trying to start a fight with you; I’m just asking, have you seen this? And she sent me a video entitled, debunking that Trump mocked the disabled reporter.
For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s a compilation of footage showing Donald Trump numerous times throughout the years in numerous circumstances doing that exact same voice and that exact same gesture as he did when he was accused of mocking a reporter’s disability. But here’s the deal: In every single circumstance, he was imitating somebody who was flailing because they were caught in a lie, because they were doing something shady or something dishonest. And it began to click in my head: Oh my god, Donald Trump did not mock that reporter’s disability. He mocked that reporter because he was lying, and that reporter happened to be disabled. But he did not make fun of that reporter’s disability.
Now, this presented an even bigger conundrum for me. Because if Donald Trump didn’t mock that reporter’s disability, why did CNN tell me that he did? Because CNN had never lied to me before. So what went wrong at CNN on that day? I went on a quest to try to understand. I began sending this video to fellow friends and liberals, colleagues, co-workers. I was living in New York City. And I was met instantly with a wall of hostility and contempt. People started angrily asking me, what are you doing? What — so you support Trump now? Why are you defending Trump? So I don’t — I hate Trump, what are you talking about? I’m just trying to understand this. But people were becoming angry at me. They were becoming outraged. People who had known me since I was a child, knew everything that I stood for.
So it became clear to me that I was not safe asking these questions or having these conversations. So what I did instead is I came home every night after work and I began reading and researching and watching videos and trying to unravel the riddle of what was happening with the media that I trusted, and I fell down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. I have these amazing memories of watching videos of Trump rallies in 2015 and 2016 in which groups of black people went to support him at the rally. And in one circumstance, there was a group of black people who said, we situated ourselves in the arena right in front of CNN’s camera, and as soon as we sat down, CNN moved the camera so we wouldn’t be in the shot. Went and framed up a bunch of white people. Because how destructive to their narrative if they were able to show the world that a group of black people was there to support Donald Trump.
I began to see, again and again, in every single circumstance, that we were being lied to and manipulated, and that what I had believed my entire life, that I had been taught by the liberal media and the entertainment industry and all of the people that I believed in and I respected and I trusted within the ideology of liberalism, it was all unraveling like a cheaply made sweater. It was all unraveling.
And suddenly I started to realize, too, the way in which they’re exploiting minorities in this country. If you are black or brown or LGBT or a woman, we are being lied to and manipulated and exploited every single day, and they’re targeting our fear. They’re making us feel terrified and afraid and making us feel like we have no choice and no alternative but to support the Democratic party because we’re only safe under their supervision, only safe from you all, from the Republican party, under the supervision of the Democratic party.
When I realized that all of the fear and trauma that I was feeling after the election, that fear that was so intense that I stayed home for two weeks with a pit in my stomach, was the result of a complete manipulation and lie from the liberal media and the Democrat party, I became enraged. And I decided I wanted to do something about it. And hell hath no fury like a gay man scorned by the Democrat party.
And so, I created a six-minute video in which I detailed all of the reasons why I was walking away from liberalism and the Democratic party. I created a Facebook group called #WalkAway campaign, and I thought to myself, why isn’t there a movement and a network of people who are coming together to leave the Democratic party?
So just like Michael said, people who are losing friends, family, job opportunities — leaving the left is not unlike leaving a cult. They will come after you, and if you leave them, if you have the audacity to walk away from them, they will try to ruin you, destroy your life, and un-person you, and make your life absolutely miserable.
But I thought to myself, what if we build a community so no one ever has to walk away from the Democratic party alone ever again? I put out my six-minute video on May 26 of 2018 and I launched the Walk Away campaign. I encouraged people to make videos and written testimonials and tell their own studies about why they’re walking away. But I did something more than that. I looked around at the miserable lack of communication, of outreach from the Republican party toward minority communities, of the horrible non-branding, non-marketing toward any minority communities, and I thought to myself, if black people and brown people and LGBT people learned what I have learned over the last year, they would — first of all, they’d fall in love with you, too, like I have. And they would want to walk away, too, because they know deep down something is wrong with the Democratic party. Something is wrong with what they believe in. They simply don’t think they have another alternative.
So I told lifelong Republicans and conservatives, it’s time for you to speak out as well. It’s time for you to stand up and lift up your voice and speak out and make your own videos and written testimonials. You are what we call the #WalkWiths. You walk with those who walk away. And in walk-with testimonials, it’s lifelong conservatives and Republicans taking back the narrative of what it truly means to be a Republican in this country. That it’s about safe and secure borders, that it’s about capitalism and a booming economy that gives opportunities to all people regardless of skin color, gender or sexual orientation, that it’s — that it is compassionate to be a conservative. I would argue that it’s actually completely not compassionate to be a Democrat, although they present themselves as the party that cares about marginalized communities. But that’s you guys. That’s us. That’s what we are.
The campaign exploded. Within a matter of weeks, I was on the Tucker Carlson show. I became a regular fixture on Fox News between 2019 — 2018, 2019 and the beginning of 2020 before the shutdown. And by Election Day of 2020, we had 510,000 people who had joined the Walk Away campaign. Tens of thousands of video and written testimonials of people telling their stories, why they’re walking away. We had black people, we had brown people, white people, old, young, fat, thin, educated, non-educated and everything in between. And as I always say, in the Walk Away campaign, we also love straight white people. We love you guys. We love everybody. This is a movement of all people coming together to walk away from the Democratic party and support those who walk away.
Things were going pretty good in my life there for that two and a half years. People were standing up, supporting what I was doing. I started the Walk Away Foundation, our 501(c)(3) in which we took the profits that we made and went and did educational events all across the country. We went into black neighborhoods, Hispanic neighborhoods, LGBT neighborhoods and more, and told people that they have a better alternative than to support the Democratic party. We did voter registration at every event that we did. We went into AOC’s district, District 14 in New York City, and held our Walk Away Hispanic Americans town hall, and we changed the voter registrations of 10% of the people in the audience that night in AOC’s district.
We were talking to the RNC all the time, who wasn’t the least bit interested in anything that we were doing, but when we told them about the results that we were having, changing people’s voter registrations, they were like, wow, that’s amazing. Can we have your e-mail lists? Thanks, no. So that’s the kind of response that we were — and support that I was getting from my side of the aisle while I was a former hairstylist who had this exploding, amazing movement that had caught fire from coast to coast.
After the election of 2020, I decided to throw my name into the fight for encouraging people to rally their state legislatures and tell them that they thought that something was wrong with the 2020 election. I went out to swing states across the country. I went to Pennsylvania, I went to Georgia, I went to Washington, DC. I went to — what am I forgetting? Michigan, yeah. I was in Michigan a lot. And I held rallies in all of these states encouraging people not to lose hope, not to lose faith and tell their state legislators that we demand a forensic audit of the vote, because we want to know what happened in the 2020 election, if Joe Biden won, if — whatever million people actually came out and voted for this man, great, whatever. It is what it is. I believe that knowledge is power. If those are legitimate votes by one single living American citizen, fine. Then we can learn the truth about the election and try to figure out what we can do better to start winning elections going forward. That’s all I wanted.
I was invited to be a speaker at the Capitol on January 6 at a permitted event on Capitol grounds. I went to DC on January 6 and I stood in — sat in the front row and watched President Trump speak at the Ellipse as he told us to peacefully and patriotically assemble at the Capitol. Everything felt perfectly normal to me. I went on my way to my scheduled speaking engagement, and as I was arriving, I began getting text messages from people telling me that they were hearing that people were going inside of the Capitol. I thought, that sounds peculiar. But the first thing that I thought of was the numerous times that leftwing activists have gone inside of federal buildings to protest and make their voices heard and generally they go in, make a little bit of noise, somebody pulls them out, the entire incident lasts five seconds, and I thought that’s probably something what may be going on right now. But it seemed a little strange. I’ve never seen Trump supporters behave that way or Republicans behave that way at a protest rally.
I began shooting a video as I was approaching the Capitol, and as I arrived at the Capitol grounds, there was a man standing on the steps shouting down to the people below — you can see this in my video — shouting, “They’ve opened the doors. They’re letting us in. We’re going inside. We’re going inside.” So I ascended the steps on the east side of the Capitol, the opposite side of where people were breaking windows and struggling with police officers on the west side. I approached the east side — I climbed the east side steps, and when I got there, the two large metal Columbus Doors of the Capitol were both wide open. These are 21,000-pound metal doors that can only be opened by deactivating a magnetic lock. Somebody opened the Columbus Doors; hopefully someday we’ll find out who that was.
Nonetheless, I climbed the top of the stairs, the doors were open, and I stood there for eight minutes holding my camera above my head so that my camera could capture footage that my eyes could not see. There were about — several hundred people between me and the open doors, which were about 35 feet away. I stood there for eight minutes until a man came outside of the building, got on a bullhorn and said, “They’ve cleared Congress. Everybody’s left the building. Move out, move out.” At that moment, I immediately turned around, walked away and encouraged everyone behind me to leave as well. I said, “They’re telling us to move out. Go this way. Go this way.”
To be clear, I never entered the Capitol on January 6. I never got within 35 feet of entering the Capitol on January 6. I engaged in no violence, vandalism, theft or destruction on January 6. I had a camera in my hand the entire time, shooting a video. I uploaded my video to Twitter and about two hours later, I got back to my hotel room and turned on my television set in my hotel. That’s when for the first time I began to see footage of what had taken place on the west side of the building: people smashing windows, scaling walls and struggling with police officers, and I was shocked, truly shocked, because it was unlike anything that I witnessed when I was on the east side.
I became very concerned about what people might think about my video being on Twitter, not because in a million years I thought that I had done anything wrong or committed any crimes, but from a PR standpoint, I thought, this is a nightmare. I don’t want people to think I’m standing there — so I took the video down. But unfortunately, in the two hours that that video lived on Twitter, it had already been copied numerous times by Twitter trolls who began reposting it every single day and tagging the FBI and telling the FBI to come and arrest me.
On the morning of Monday, January 25, I woke up to the sound of pounding on my door at dawn. I knew immediately that it was the FBI. Nobody knocks like that. You could hardly call it knocking. It was the last sound you hear before a battering ram knocks your door down. I knew that I had a matter of seconds to get to the door before they would be bursting into my apartment, knocking the door down. I ran to the door, and I said, who’s out there? And I was met with, FBI, open up. I opened the door, and on the other side were about eight or nine agents in tactical gear. They presented me with a search warrant, and within 30 seconds, my hands were cuffed behind my back and a team of agents came into my apartment and began stripping it of my iPad, my computer, my phone, my hard drives, my thumb drives, my clothing — you name it, putting it into bags, while two other agents cuffed my hands behind my back, put me in a black car and took me to jail.
When I got to jail, I was told I was going to be in 23-hour-a-day lockdown; they put me — they took me into a concrete stall, took all of my clothes off. I stood naked while a stranger came, took my clothes away and came back with a pair of brown underwear, a brown t-shirt and an orange jumpsuit. From there, they took me into a room called Medical, where a nurse guard, when I walked in in my orange jumpsuit, said to me, I need your arm. And I said, why? And he had a syringe in his hand. And he said to me, all new inmates in the jail system have to take a TB test. This is mandatory.
And suddenly I became aware that I, although was sleeping peacefully in my bed just an hour or two before, was now a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit who’s lost all of his civil rights. The nurse guard slid the needle into my forearm and injected a substance which formed a bubble and told me, if that turns blue or purple, you might want to let somebody know.
From there, they took me into a room called Intake Evaluation, where a very military-like, stoic guard began asking me questions like, are you affiliated with a gang? Do you have AIDS? And my favorite question: If a fight breaks out in the jail, are you able to defend yourself? Sure.
So they took me up to my cell. All I knew was that I was facing multiple felony charges for what I had done on January 6, and I spent the next two and a half days in that cell going completely crazy, thinking that I would never see the light of day again. Two and a half days later, an attorney got me out of jail. I had a virtual hearing. I stood before a judge unshowered, dirty greasy hair, in an orange jumpsuit, while a federal judge said to me, this is the case of the United States of America versus Brandon Straka. He ordered my release and the next morning I finally had an opportunity to speak with an attorney, and that’s when I began to understand the charges against me.
My attorney said to me, they’re charging you with two felonies and a misdemeanor. Felony No. 1: Occupying restricted grounds. Felony No. 2: Impeding an officer in the line of duty. We’ll come back to that. And a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct with an intent to disrupt a hearing before Congress. I said, why don’t we back up a little bit and get to that second felony charge again; run that by me one more time? He said to me, in your video that you filmed like this, there’s a moment that lasts about six seconds where one Capitol police officer comes to the open doorframe of the Capitol, and when he gets there, somebody grabs his plastic shield out of his hand. Several voices can be heard in the crowd, some shouting, take the shield, take the shield, some shouting, take it, take it. Well, the FBI says that that’s your voice. That you were standing out there shouting to encourage the crowd to take a shield from an officer, and they’re charging you with a felony of impeding an officer in the line of duty for doing it.
He said to me, we have several options here. We can fight the charges all the way to the end. He said, it’s going to take at least two years. You’re looking at well into six figures of legal fees. And you’re going to be found guilty, because you’re going before a DC judge and a DC jury; they hate you, they hate Donald Trump, they hate his supporters, and you don’t stand a chance. Your other option is that we begin the process of trying to facilitate a plea deal. He said to me, I’ve already had a conversation with the prosecutor about this, and he said it’s up to you, but I highly suggest you go with the second option because the prosecutor also mentioned to me that they had not yet charged me with felony obstruction of Congress, a charge which carries 20 years in prison, but that they may decide to make that decision, depending on how the case unfolds.
Long story long, I ended up taking a plea deal and pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct with an intent to disrupt a hearing before Congress. That might sound like a happy ending to you, but it’s anything but. Every day of my life, I carry around an enormous burden because of the decision that I made. The decision to me was never, how do I win and how do I lose; the decision to me was, how do I lose the least?
But before I had even had an opportunity to plead guilty or not guilty, just by virtue of being FBI raided and arrested and put in jail, the government put me on a terrorism watch list, giving me a designation of quad S, SSSS, so that when I go to the airport, I have to go through hours of selective — of special screening. When I get through the hours of special screening, a team of TSA agents follows me around the airport everywhere I go. Sometimes they bring dogs. They bring special equipment to the gate so that before I board the plane, I have to take every item out of my bag and swab it for explosive materials and get a full body pat-down in front of all of the other passengers right before we get on the plane. God forbid while in flight I have to bend over and tie my shoe; all the terrified passengers sitting beside me are like, ding, ding, ding.
I was given a 30-day notice that I was being evicted from my apartment. I have been labeled an insurrectionist and a terrorist in the media and every amazing bit of work that I did for the Walk Away campaign has been virtually erased on Google or if you search my name. As of right now, if you search my name, all you’re going to find is stories of a deranged lunatic who tried to lead an insurrection in an attempt to overthrow the government. I have been banned permanently by PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, Patreon, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Instagram, Facebook and so much more. My donor portals for the Walk Away Foundation and the Walk Away campaign PAC, although I wasn’t even in DC on behalf of Walk Away, were banned. My e-mail services for the Walk Away Foundation and the Walk Away campaign PAC were banned.
So we lost our ability to process our monthly recurring donors and we lost our ability to contact them and tell them that that had happened. My team and I had to make a decision: Are we going to survive this? Can we survive this? Is there even any point in trying to carry on? I had a conversation with Libby, my executive director, and she said, look; we’ve had an amazing run. We’ve done incredible things. And if this is where this ends for us, we have nothing to feel but incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished. We can do something else. We can start another business. We can move on. I took a breath for a moment, and I contemplated the possibility of even doing that. And I shook my head and I said, no, no. I am not going to allow these people to write the end of my story. I am going to write the end of Brandon Straka’s story and the story of the Walk Away campaign.
And so with that, we rolled up our sleeves and we got to work. We began finding conservative-friendly and Republican-friendly donor portals, payment processors, e-mail services. We implemented what we called the Freedom First Initiative, which means we will not do business with anybody, whether it’s somebody shining my shoes or hosting my website, unless we have a conversation with them first that goes something like this: I’m a Republican and I voted for Donald Trump. Do you have a problem with that? And I’m so good at knowing if they’re lying to me, because sometimes they kind of like, take a beat, and they’re like, no, I don’t think that’s a problem. And I’m like, you’re out. You’re out. You’re out. You know it’s always the ones who — you don’t even get to finish the sentence, and they’re like, oh, dude, dude, you and me, you, dude — yeah, I’m like, okay, you’re my guy. You’re my guy.
So we spent the last year rebuilding the majority of everything that was taken. As of right now, we’re operating at about 35% of our monthly recurring donorship as we had before. I refuse to give up. I refuse to be humiliated. I refuse to back down. If I have to just ride this thing until the wheels fall off and go down in a crashing blaze of fire, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to keep fighting until I have nothing left to fight with or I have nothing left to give.
But I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I don’t think that I’m going to go down in a crashing fire. I think that Walk Away is going to rise like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I think we’re going to come back bigger, better, stronger and smarter than we ever were before, and I’m going to tell you now how we’re going to do that and how we’re going to begin the process of changing the marketing and branding of the Republican party so that we can get people to leave the left and actually consider coming over and voting red.
Because I’ll tell you something, folks; we’ve got two choices. We can either keep losing elections and saying, they stole the election, they rigged the election, they stole the election, they rigged the election! Or we can change the hearts and minds of every person on the left who is stealing and rigging elections and get them over on our side so they don’t even have the ability to do it ever again. Those are our options.
Here’s how it’s going to happen. In addition to rebuilding everything that was taken, my team and I also spent the last year — and believe me, I considered jumping off a bridge thousands of times — building our own social media platform. And before your eyes roll back in your head and say, oh my god, do we need another social — yes, we do, and I’m going to tell you why. Because Walk Away Social, coming very soon — we’re finished. We’re actually going to be launching before the end of the year — Walk Away Social is not a replacement for Facebook or Twitter or Gettr or Truth Social or any of the platforms that are out there. Walk Away Social is literally a social media platform designed only to rebuild the Walk Away campaign and the Walk Away movement, to rebuild that platform and that community that provides a landing place for people to come when they’re leaving the Democrat party so that they don’t have to be alone, and it allows all of you, again, to step up, tell your stories, make your testimonials, write your written stories and reclaim the truth about what it really means to be a conservative.
It’s not about racism. It’s not about homophobia, bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia or any of the phobias that they’re claiming that apply to all of you. Republican policies, as I said before, are compassionate. Republican policies are the things that are going to save this country and save the country from the radical left, but we must change our image if we ever hope to start winning elections ever again.
So Walk Away Social is going to be launching within the next month or two. I’m just currently assembling a tech support team so that we can put this thing out there. God willing, it will also be available in the Apple Store and the Google Play store. I actually believe that that’s going to happen. And Walk Away Foundation is not going to stop doing the amazing events that we’ve been doing for years. We haven’t stopped doing that. This year alone, despite going through my criminal case and a civil case, because I’m also being sued by nine Capitol police officers, by a George Soros-funded nonprofit organization — they’re suing me, Roger Stone, Donald Trump and three other defendants under the KKK Act for what they’re calling a conspiracy to assault — it’s nine black and brown Capitol police officers who have targeted effective conservatives to use lawfare to try to continue to destroy our spirit. I will not allow that to happen.
So we will continue to do the amazing events that we do. We will continue to fight, to get people to wake up and leave the radical left. We will launch the world’s first platform, social media platform, to support people to walk away from the Democratic party. And all I ask in return is for your help and for your support, to stand behind me, because I tell you — I know this award — I was given this award for courage, and Michael talked about what I faced from the left, and Michael talked about the attacks and the — but I’m telling you, there has been nothing more painful and spiritually and emotionally and mentally destructive to me than the silence, the stunning silence of the right after I was arrested and taken to jail. Yeah, you can clap for that. Sure.
Despite being one of the most popular guests on Fox News for three years, I’m no longer welcome on the network because of my Class B misdemeanor charge for disorderly conduct. A number of conservative blue-check personalities and the social media influencers and even Republicans in Congress won’t take my phone calls, won’t associate with me, because apparently they feel like it’s too destructive to their brand to associate with somebody with a misdemeanor charge from January 6.
We’ve got to stand behind each other. We’ve got to stand up for one another. Normally this takes me, like, three hours, so I’m actually doing really good. And I’m almost done. I’m almost — I’m so sorry. You were probably like, five minutes. It’s kind of hard to get this all out.
Let me end with this. Well, first of all, when this dinner is over, I’m going to stand outside right there and take pictures and hugs with any of you who would like to get a picture and talk with me, and I’d love to keep in contact with any of you. If you like that, I’ll be right outside. Wait till dinner is over, but if you want, I would love to talk with each and every one of you, and I’d love to keep in touch with you as well.
I think that the most courageous thing that a person can do is continue going, no matter what they do to you. So many people said to me, I cannot believe that you didn’t just make the decision to throw in the towel and go away and go live in the mountains with goats and raise chickens and whatever else, and actually, I was like, wow, that didn’t even occur to me. That sounds great. Can I still do that? Is it too late?
But I meant what I said. I will not allow these people to write the end of my story, and I would rather go down in a crashing ball of flames fighting until the bitter end, until I have nothing else left to fight with, than allow these people to end me, my story or the story of the Walk Away campaign. Believe me when I say, we are just getting started. The best is yet to come.
Thank you so much.
Frontpage Editors
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/brandon-straka-speaks-at-the-freedom-centers-restoration-weekend/
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