Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish articles

Thursday, January 26, 2023

What the Latest Arrest Says About FBI Corruption

By Daniel Greenfield On January 26, 2023 In Russiagate

On Saturday, the FBI arrested one of its own. Charles McGonigal, who used to head counterintel for the Bureau in New York and investigated Trump over Russiagate, was busted at JFK Airport and has been charged with violating the sanctions placed on Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska, a Russian oligarch allied with Putin, has his name scrawled on parts of Russiagate. Before Christopher Steele was brought on board to produce the infamous dossier aimed at Trump, the British ex-agent had been working on a project for Deripaska to go after Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who would also prove to be an FBI target.

In the tangled relationship that is an apt metaphor for Russiagate, the Russian billionaire appeared at times to be an FBI asset and at other times employed FBI personnel.

McGonigal is reportedly one of a number of ex-FBI agents who became freelance consultants, like American versions of Steele, under investigation. And connections between ex-FBI officials and the Russians have gone even higher than McGonigal. Louis Freeh, Bill Clinton’s former FBI director, represented a number of Russian oligarchs and his deceased predecessor, Director William Sessions worked for a top Russian mafia figure linked to Putin.

We may very well find that the retired FBI officials who haven’t gotten contracts as commentators for cable news have gone to work for the Russians. And McGonigal may be the first of a number of FBI figures who were tasked with fighting Russian influence who instead learned enough to go to work for the Russians.

If McGonigal is guilty, it’s because he was following in the footsteps of retired FBI directors and top elected officials. Deripaska had previously managed to purchase the services of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to “persuade U.S. officials his client isn’t a criminal” and of a firm linked to Hillary’s communications director and Bill Clinton’s deputy press secretary. When you can buy both sides of the 1996 presidential election, why quibble at a mere FBI official? Russia may be a mafia state, but unfortunately we’ve become one too.

A long list of American political elites had taken Deripaska’s money. And the FBI had been corrupted into serving the political interests of that elite rather than protecting the homeland.

When it came to Deripaska, the FBI’s priorities were helping Hillary Clinton win an election.

Even while Deripaska was suspected of, according to the New York Times, “extortion, bribery and even murder”, he was able to spend time in New York while the FBI tried to solicit information from him about Trump’s Russian connections. Instead of ‘flipping’ Deripaska, the Russian oligarch allegedly flipped the head of FBI counterintelligence operations in New York who would have likely led efforts to gain information from him on Trump.

Deripaska had apparently employed quite a few former government officials like Jonathan Winer, a former top Kerry aide, who lobbied for the Russian oligarch and who also promoted the Steele dossier. The Russian oligarch claims to be the victim in all this. As does Igor Danchenko: the alleged source for much of the Steele dossier and the subject of a failed prosecution effort by Special Counsel Durham. And yet even defenders of the Steele dossier have been forced to argue that it was ‘tainted’ by Russian intelligence. And that means the FBI was tainted too.

But the FBI was tainted as a secondary effect of being politicized by tainted figures.

The Clintons, who had initiated Russiagate, as usual had led the way. In 2009, Hillary Clinton arrived bearing a ‘Reset Button’. The button, pilfered from a hotel swimming pool, was meant to symbolize the desire of the Obama administration for a new relationship with Russia. All it really symbolized was that the Clintons, like the Russians, would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. And the real relationship launched with that button was between Russia and the Clintons.

This was the same year that Deripaska hired a firm tied to the Clintons. The head of that firm, who would also work for the Russian foreign ministry, would later show up working with Steele and a Justice Department official involved in Russiagate to help the Russian oligarch.

In 2010, a Russian investment bank paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to deliver a speech and Putin called to offer his personal appreciation. Meanwhile the Russians were slowly swallowing Uranium One while investors wrote their checks to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton, who would later reinvent herself as a hawk, conveniently opposed sanctions on Russia.

In 2015, McGonigal was CC’d on a briefing given by the FBI to the Clinton campaign warning that the Bureau had information that a foreign government was “attempting to influence Hillary Clinton through lobbying and campaign contributions”. Rather than investigating potential criminal activity and national security violations by the Clintons, the FBI instead gave them a ‘heads up’ that there was suspicious behavior taking place.

McGonigal had been working on Russian counterintelligence matters since at least the 90s. He had close ties to former FBI Director James Comey. When Trump fired Comey, McGonigal, speaking in an official capacity, called him “one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had” and stated that “many of us who were nominated for leadership positions by him will forever hold him in esteem as we progress through our FBI careers.”

Comey, along with other FBI figures, had signed off on Hillary Clinton’s actions. And there was every reason to believe that the Clintons were the ones who were actually tied to Russia.

Russiagate was a masterstroke that took one of Hillary’s greatest legal vulnerabilities and turned it around so that the country has spent the last six years debating Trump’s ties to Russia while at the same time justifying illegal surveillance and prosecution of her opponent’s associates.

But that victory was ultimately pyrrhic. Hillary still lost the election and her corruption, like that of the Biden family, provided an opening for foreign countries looking to buy influence in America. Beginning with the Clinton era, a generation of FBI officials have alternated between working for the Clintons and the Russians while compromising our national security and domestic politics.

A corrupted FBI leadership did the dirty work of the Clintons, who were looking to redirect the blame for their Russian ties, and then in some cases decided to cut out the middleman by working directly for the Russian oligarchs.

In Washington D.C., retired generals go to work for defense contractors, retired IRS officials teach corporations how to avoid paying taxes and retired FBI officials go to work for the Russians. And aspiring presidents, like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, open nonprofits that allow them to legally take cash from foreign countries while prepping their future administrations.

FBI officials are just copying what they’ve seen top elected officials get away with doing.

Russiagate and what happened to the FBI can’t be understood apart from the routine corruption of a city whose public servants work for the government in order to trade on that knowledge. The grand hypocrisy of Russiagate was that this corrupt political class used its Russian and international connections to smear Trump with their own crimes. Trump wasn’t working for Moscow, but sometimes it seems as if it’s hard to find anyone in Washington D.C. who isn’t.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Director of Movie Co-Starring Sex Predator Smears Justice Kavanaugh

By Daniel Greenfield On January 24, 2023 In Supreme Court

There was big news at the Sundance Film Festival, formerly the haunt of Harvey Weinstein, a new documentary smearing Justice Kavanaugh, once again, as a high school sex predator.

The folks at Sundance know all about sexual predators. Don’t take my word for it. Take it from this Washington Post op-ed, “Everyone at Sundance knew what Harvey Weinstein was.” But after the requisite political pieties, Hollywood is back to doing what it does best.

Changing the subject and smearing Republicans with projections of their own filth.

The Hollywood Reporter, splashily announced that Doug Liman, “the sought-after features director behind titles like Swingers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity — spent all of 2022 making his documentary debut about the government investigation into now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” The documentary will be, ironically, titled, “Justice”.

The publication understandably neglects to mention that Harvey Weinstein gave Liman his big break by snapping up “Swingers” for $5.5 million in a mafia style event. “A Weinstein underling showed up at Liman’s house, tapped on the window, handed Liman his cell phone. Weinstein was on the line.” Liman got rich while Vince Vaughn, who actually starred in it, got paid scale.

Now Liman has thoughts about what Justice Kavanaugh was doing in high school. His partners, Story Syndicate, coming off big hits, “Harry & Meghan”, “Fauci” and “Mayor Pete”, plus a doc touting Stacey Abrams, have some more leftist agitprop nonsense here. The Syndicate’s Dan Cogan would like everyone to forget about “The Hunting Ground”: the Weinstein Company’s documentary, which used fake statistics and a scene from a prank video as proof that there was an epidemic of campus rapes. The actual rape epidemic involved Harvey Weinstein.

But it’s 2023 and Liman would like to talk about what happened in 2018, not 2017.

“I can’t stress enough how personally significant the Supreme Court is and how important it is that we vet the people who sit on it,” Liman whines. “We were promised an investigation that never happened.”

Weeks of desperate media efforts to dig up increasingly implausible smears weren’t enough.

“It shouldn’t be this hard to have an open and honest conversation about whether or not a Justice on the Supreme Court assaulted numerous women as a young man,” Liman whines.

Before Liman began conducting an investigation of Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court, perhaps he should have had “an open and honest conversation” about the co-star of his other fictional movie, “The Instigators,” which co-stars Casey Affleck. Ben Affleck’s even less talented brother was sued for sexual harassment by two women. One of them claims that he crawled into bed with her while she was asleep, the other that he “violently” grabbed her to force her to stay in his hotel room. He settled out of court.

Doug Liman’s two projects involve partnering with an alleged sexual harasser to make a movie and making a documentary accusing a Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct.

This is the height of hypocrisy even for the planet’s most hypocritical industry.

“I don’t have a political ax to grind,” Liman claims of the cinematic smear campaign.

Liman’s political axe is almost as hidden as Harvey Weinstein’s habit of attacking anything in a skirt. He shot MoveOn ads and his dad was leftist activist Arthur Liman who served as the chief counsel for the Democrat effort to take down the Reagan administration with the Iran Contra affair. And Doug Liman has suggested that a character in his Bourne anti-American movie series was modeled on Oliver North. His brother, Judge Lewis J. Liman, is a federal judge.

The director decided to self-finance a hit film on a Supreme Court justice. And if Kavanaugh were to be forced to step down, Doug’s brother could be nominated for the position.

How did Doug’s brother end up as a federal judge? Lewis J. Liman’s nomination was pitched to the Trump administration by Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Doug Liman has hosted a number of fundraisers for Schumer. You don’t need to be Jason Bourne to figure out this one.

Someone should make a documentary.

But never mind, Doug Liman wants to talk about how Justice Kavanaugh’s high school days in 1982 were not sufficiently investigated by a crack team of experts like Amy Herdy, an “investigative veteran” whose “credits include the college campus sexual assault doc The Hunting Ground”. It’s all over folks. The crack team who didn’t notice that the head of the production company behind the documentary was the one raping everyone is on the case.

“Thanks to this fantastic investigative team and the brave souls who trusted us with their stories, Justice picks up where the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh fell woefully short,” Liman claims. Not to mention the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and a billion dollars worth of media talent who couldn’t come up with anything more than Christine Blasey Ford who claimed that she can’t fly on planes except for all the times she flies on planes.

“Justice“, Liman’s documentary, claims that it has interviews with “friends of Ford’s” which is a lot like those UFO documentaries which, having completely plumbed the well of that 2-minute clip of the drunken mental patient explaining where the Little Green Men probed him, bring on his friends to testify that he sat kind of funny at the bar for a week afterward.

“What Doug and Amy were getting to was a lot of new information, and also a stunning look at the absence of diligence for one of the most important jobs in our country,” Liz Garbus, the other half of Story Syndicate, claims.

Speaking of a lack of due diligence, Garbus had interned at Miramax.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Liman kept the agitprop smear movie secret “for the safety of those working on the film”. Was the production terrified that Justice Kavanaugh would show up in Brooklyn and hit someone with a brogan?

It was Kavanaugh who faced an actual assassination attempt by a leftist nutjob last year. That attack happened because the media colluded with a court insider to leak the Dobbs decision. The Biden administration refused to enforce the law against harassing justices in their homes.

Perhaps someone should make a documentary about that.

But this isn’t the first time that Liman has played this same dishonest game.

When dramatizing the story of discredited antisemitic activist Valerie Plame, Liman’s movie, “Fair Game”, threw in fake scenes of them in danger because they were exposed for what they were by the Bush administration. American audiences were not told that the movie was being produced by a Muslim government that at the time was aligned with Islamic terrorists.

“It was important for me to create a film that lets people come to their own conclusions about the truth and to hear voices that were silenced in 2018 that should not have been silenced in 2018,” Liman claims of his latest effort into the sub-basement of leftist agitprop.

Is there anyone who would doubt that he had spent all this money to make a movie about Justice Kavanaugh whose goal is to let “people come to their own conclusions”?

“Justice” will, according to Liman, let people “hear voices that were silenced in 2018 that should not have been silenced in 2018.” The new definition of “silenced” is being platformed by every media outlet and site in the country, by Senate hearings and by Hollywood. Finally, the director of episodes of the TV series, “I Just Want My Pants Back’ will tell the real truth about what happened in Georgetown Prep in 1982. Then maybe Liman can tackle the question of what happened when the co-star of his new movie allegedly crawled into a woman’s bed in 2010.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Monday, January 23, 2023

China’s Tax-Deductible Operation to Influence American Students

By Daniel Greenfield On January 23, 2023 In recent

Senators and law enforcement officials have expressed concern about the presence of the Confucius Institute on college campuses. The Trump administration demanded that it register as a foreign mission. It has been the subject of congressional investigations, a defense boycott, warnings from cabinet members, and scrutiny at the highest levels of government.

And yet multiple Confucius Institute branches are fundraising in the United States and the D.C. office, the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, remains a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the IRS.

The Confucius Institute’s office on Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle, less than a dozen blocks from the White House, is part of a global presence that stretches from D.C. to China.

And it’s one that has many government officials worried.

The FBI has expressed concern about the CCP front group. 2021’s National Defense Authorization Act blocked Defense Department funding for campuses where Confucius Institutes were embedded. That concern has not extended to the IRS which has targeted conservative nonprofits, but has shown no interest in an enemy front group’s nonprofit status.

To the IRS, conservative politics disqualify a nonprofit, but not foreign influence or Communism.

It is too busy scrutinizing $600 Venmo transactions by Americans to bother taking a closer look at an operation by our leading geopolitical enemy trying to manipulate American students. An organization whose presence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, warned “has never been more concerning,nor more consequential.”

Liu Yunshan, the Chinese Communist regime’s propaganda boss, declared that, “We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”

The Confucius Institute was described as as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”

Assistant Secretary David R. Stillwell of the State Department warned that, “Confucius Institutes who work for the Hanban, who work for the Communist Party, cannot masquerade as benign academic activities institutions.” The State Department in 2020 was tracking “around 500 Confucius classrooms; these are K through 12. Each is affiliated with a university-based Confucius Institute. Right now, we’re tracking 75 Confucius Institutes operating in the U.S.”

Even as the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department were coping with the Confucius Institute and its branches, the IRS was too busy fighting conservatives.

And as a registered nonprofit, the Confucius Institute was able to take in tax-free donations so that enemy propaganda was being subsidized by American taxpayers.

The Confucius Institute is not alone. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), often described by Iranian dissidents as the “Iran Lobby” and accused of taking its orders from Tehran, is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The Muslim Brotherhood built a vast network of 501(c)(3) nonprofits that spin off other nonprofits despite the fact that it is a foreign enemy organization.

But the IRS tolerance of the Confucius Institute is particularly glaring because multiple national security and foreign affairs arms of the government have warned about the Chinese organization. And while Democrats have obstructed oversight of the Confucius Institute, there has been some bipartisan criticism and support for more serious measures against the Institute.

Nor is it the only example of Chinese foreign influence.

The Committee of 100, which accused Republican candidates of racism before the 2022 midterms, is a 501(c)(3) that has been linked by some media outlets to organizations controlled by Communist China and its political allies. There are other nonprofits that have been accused of functioning as community groups while spreading Communist propaganda.

But it’s the Confucius Institute that remains the focus for many activists because of its large scope and its presence on college campuses. And because its status remains unique.

During the Trump administration, the State Department’s fact sheet actually noted that, “The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), an organization affiliated with the PRC Ministry of Education, has historically served as the Beijing-based parent organization of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center and, through it, supports many of the individual CIs. Filings with the Internal Revenue Service indicate that CIUS is directly funded by Hanban.”

How is it that the State Department can use IRS documents to show that the Confucius Institute is backed by the Chinese government, yet the IRS can’t seem to locate its own information?

Universities which profit from Confucius Institute cash have been the loudest defenders of the organization. The Brookings Institute, which is a neighbor of the Confucius Institute in D.C. and has a history of ties to foreign governments and influence operations, defended it. And Brookings remains one of the loudest voices in the Democrat foreign policy establishment.

The IRS leadership knows that an investigation of the Institute would not be welcome.

The Biden administration had dropped Trump’s proposed oversight of the Confucius Institute while the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act provided for a waiver for Department of Defense funding for colleges hosting the Communist group. Last year, Zhongsan Liu was convicted of fraud in a campaign to bring Chinese Communist recruiters working for their government to come to the United States. The case had ties to the Confucius Institute in Boston.

The status of the Confucius Institute demonstrates the extreme dereliction of the duty by the IRS to police foreign influence nonprofits. The Secretary of State and the Attorney General both warned of the Institute during the Trump administration. The FBI Director expressed his concern. The Justice Department has brought a case involving it, Congress has used defense spending to force it off college campuses and the IRS has documented the Confucius Institute’s ties to the Chinese government and yet it still refuses to do anything about its nonprofit status.

It’s busy chasing gig workers delivering pizza.

Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, a pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, had exposed the abuses of the tax code by radical nonprofits. But not only does the IRS tolerate blatant violations by domestic leftist groups, it’s even willing to turn a blind eye to the activities of foreign leftists up to and including an enemy regime.

Allowing the Confucius Institute to function as a nonprofit allows China to gain access to Americans. After all the disproven claims of “foreign influence” on social media, the Biden administration and its allies have shown little interest in foreign influence in our classrooms.

And the IRS, by refusing to do its job, is enabling China’s funding of enemy propaganda in America. The failure by the Internal Revenue Service to act against other leftist nonprofits has damaged the economy and society, it has also cost lives, but the refusal of the IRS to act against the Confucius Institute treasonously threatens American national security.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Saturday, January 21, 2023

A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail

By Daniel Greenfield On January 21, 2023 In recent

America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They persevered despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.

Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.

These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.

America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.

The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.

Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.

Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.

If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.

Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.

Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.

Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.

Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.

The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.

Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.

Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.

And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.

A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.

Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.

No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.

America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thursday, January 19, 2023

The Unsustainable Left

By Daniel Greenfield On January 19, 2023 In recent

“Today, the Democratic Party may be the most ruthlessly organized and efficient political entity in the world,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker wrote. “We can denounce the activism and deplore the outcome, but we can only marvel at the political efficiency with which it has been achieved.”

The Democratic consolidation is the product of ideological, economic and cultural forces. The Left seized the commanding high ground of the entertainment industry and the educational system to cultivate generations that were culturally primed to accept its ideas.

The current state of affairs that Baker bemoans, in which Democrats have captured white college graduates and Republicans now hold the working class, were triumphs of culture over economic interest. The Left did not win a debate of ideas, it formed a tribe of elites. Behind the violence, the radicalism and the posturing are the daughters of CEOs and the Ivy League.

The Democrats became the party of elites. That elitism has been thinly disguised by an ideological identity politics coalition of white elites and minority activists.

Democrats as a party retain the rigidly organized machine that Baker describes as an “impressive willingness to band together” so that “in 2009 and 2010 many of them voted for ObamaCare well aware that it could cost them their political futures. Like kamikaze pilots cheerfully climbing up into their Zero fighters at dawn, they knew they had an obligation larger than their own survival, a duty that superseded their doubts.” That was because they knew that they owed their allegiance and their careers not to their voters, but to the movement.

Dissent has virtually vanished among the members of the party, and its allied organizations, including nonprofits and the media, but there are signs that the coalition is crumbling.

The Latino voters who were supposed to turn Texas and Florida blue have been acting like a swing constituency. In Florida, DeSantis even won the Puerto Rican vote that had been engineered to transform the state. In New York, Lee Zeldin’s close showing and the GOP’s House Majority was powered by Asian and Orthodox Jewish voters.

A New York Times article described how “Democrats are trying to determine how they can stem — and, if possible, reverse — the growing tide of Asian American voters drifting away from the party.”

The two policies that are alienating Asians, legalizing crime and dismantling educational standards, are championed by the black politicians who form the core of the Democrat minority bloc.

“Why should I support Democrats who discriminate against me? We see Democrats are working for the interest of African Americans and Latino communities against Asian communities,” one Asian voter told the paper.

State Senator John Liu, a career leftist, expressed the same idea cloaked in woke jargon. “Many of the social justice issues in this country are still viewed from a Black and white lens, and Asian Americans are simply undetected by that lens and therefore feel completely marginalized.”

The Democrats are even experiencing some turbulence among black male voters and gay voters who are, in small part, becoming more comfortable voting Republican.

Like the Asian and Orthodox Jewish vote in New York City, this has more to do with the inherent instability of the Democrat coalition than a newfound Republican genius for minority outreach.

The ‘rainbow coalition’ and the majority-minority vision for a takeover was built on denying the tensions between different groups. Intersectionality, meant to create a victimhood hierarchy, instead further alienated different members of the coalition with competing demands.

The coalition has become a house of cards that is always threatening to overturn.

When LGBTQ activists demand sexualized material in schools, Muslim activists protest at school board meetings. Black Lives Matter rioters demand an end to police and prisons, and Asian voters decamp. Transgender activists call gay men and lesbians transphobes and they head for the door. White woke elites demand lockdowns, Latinos shrug and vote them out.

A more accurate view of the Democrats is that they are rigidly organized at the top, but coming apart at the bottom. They have persevered by controlling the narrative, introducing distractions and juggling different demographics and causes to goose turnout their way.

But this game of political Jenga can’t last forever. A simultaneous defection by two minority groups in the wrong areas of the country or by one group and white college voters would be systemically devastating to the viability of the Democrats as a national political party.

The Moneyball dictatorship backed by Big Data, ballot harvesting, media propaganda and innumerable other tactics is a highly sophisticated operation that has so thoroughly corrupted the electoral system into an oligarchy that it has become indistinguishable from a tyranny.

Every effort is made to prevent voters from understanding that. And the vast majority don’t have an inkling as to how the machine works. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not increasingly aware that the Democrats have become the party of wealthy and powerful elites.

The white working class was the first to realize it. The machine blamed their defection on racism using Obama as its human shield. But the most salient fact about Obama was not that he was black, it was that he was the child of wealthy radicals whose worldview had been shaped, despite his memoirs, by his time in the Ivy League and the institutional elite Left. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, fellow members of that same set, have been met with shrugs by the country.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Instead of reclaiming the white working class, his original function on the Obama ticket, Joe Biden has overseen the growing gap between the elites and the working class. His signature policies like electric car subsidies or student loan debt dismissal pander to the Obama class.

Worse still, the party suffered record Latino and Asian defections as it focused on black voters.

“Ruthless organization” and the ideological consolidation that governs the Democrats has its limits. The Left got this far because it understood that the objective of the battles was to win a war. Now it is taking pride in surviving battles even as its ability to win the war is coming into question. The growing alienation of minorities may have had only a limited impact in 2020 and 2020, but it’s an existential threat to the long-term survival of the Democratic Party.

If this were the result of a Republican strategy, then the Democrats could counter it, but Republican outreach to minorities, outside of New York, Florida and Texas has been weak. The general state of minority outreach lacks resources, organization on the ground and sustained commitment, while communicating to minority voters in the crudest possible cliches.

The real problem is that the Democrat coalition carries the seeds of its own destruction.

The rigid ideological consolidation at the top has paved the way for a radical agenda that may seem logically streamlined on Capitol Hill, CNN or at the Aspen Institute, but looks like an endless civil war down at the bottom. And what Democrats are discovering is that most minority voters, unlike black people and secular Jews, are not especially committed to them.

They aren’t yellow dog Democrats. They vote that way for transactional reasons.

The majority-minority strategy is built on the myth that members of minority groups identify as Democrats on a cultural level. The evidence is ample that the majority of them do not.

The cultural cult that has usurped a historic national party boasts mostly white upper class members. These are the same people who can decide to deplatform you, cut up your credit cards or fire you, but they still wield far less power than those of most oligarchies. In their echo chambers, they have overestimated their strengths and ignored their systemic weaknesses.

And that has always been true of the Left.

Like all radical ideologies, the Left is unsustainable. It has a great aptitude for developing belief systems, spreading ideas, converting new members, seizing power and maximizing control. All of that is well underway in America. But its great strength of ideological convictions is also its fatal flaw. Like most fanatics, it cannot believe anything other than that it is destined to win because it is on the right side of history. It does not understand that power, no matter how it is monopolized and guarded, is ultimately cyclical and that people eventually tire of their rulers.

Even if the Republicans never defeat the Democrats, the Left is paving the way for its defeat.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Ten People Died Because of Pro-Crime 'Bail Funds'

By Daniel Greenfield On January 18, 2023 In Seattle

Chengyan Wang was cleaning up at the Shanghai Taste restaurant when a robber broke in. Wang tried to fight back and was shot 11 times. The officer on the scene in Las Vegas said that the Chinese waiter “was bleeding all over his body and appeared as if he was going to die.”

“I can still vividly remember when the first police officer on the scene immediately helped me stop the bleeding on my neck,” Wang recalled. “He was there the whole time encouraging me and making sure I stay awake and stay conscious and not fall asleep.”

Wang credits his “second chance in life” to “God’s grace.” And he fought back, not only against the criminals, but against the wealthy interests that enabled the murderous attack on him.

Rashawn Gaston-Anderson, the vicious thug who shot him, was only on the loose because a bail fund known as The Bail Project posted bond for him. The career criminal had been arrested a month earlier on weapons charges. In 48 hours he was arrested for burglary and larceny, and pled guilty to grand larceny while getting off with probation.

Wang came after The Bail Project, which had been backed by wealthy celebrities like Lizzo, John Legend, Danny Glover, Lil Nas X, Miss USA Asya Branch, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of Broad City, Richard Branson, and others, suing it over what happened to him

The panicked pro-crime group responded by shutting down operations in Vegas. It however continues to aid and enable criminals around the country.

In St. Louis, the Bail Project bailed out a man after he beat his wife. That night, he beat her again resulting in “a broken eye socket, several broken ribs, and (bruises) from head to toe.”

She died.

Robin Steinberg, a key figure in pro-crime bail funds, insisted, “No one could have predicted this tragedy.”

Who could have predicted that freeing a man who beat his wife would lead him to kill her or that freeing criminals would lead to crime? There have been so many repeat incidents that the Bail Project has lost even the last tattered shreds of plausible deniability.

In Indianapolis, the Bail Project freed Marcus Garvin after he was arrested for stabbing a man. Garvin then stabbed Christie Holt and left her body to rot in a motel for a week before trying to dismember her. It freed Deonta Williams who then stabbed two cops in an ambush.

The Bail Project freed a thug who was facing drug and burglary charges. Lang then shot and killed Dylan McGinnis. Nikki Sterling, Dylan’s mother has become a crusader against bail funds, warning that, “This organization is bailing out violent offenders. These are not your misdemeanor charges. We are putting violent criminals back out on the street.”

The Bail Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. That means that it’s really being subsidized by taxpayers. The $33 million in donations that poured into the pro-crime group in 2021, $19 million of which were used to bail out criminals, were treated as tax deductible contributions. Millions have gone tax free to free criminals and inflict horrors on ordinary people like these.

This was done in defiance of the tax code. And so it was the IRS that really enabled the near murder of Chengyan Wang, the brutal killing of Christie Holt and the murder of Dylan McGinnis.

Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, a pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, had delved into the abuse of the tax code by radical nonprofits

IRS regulations specifically state that “exempt purposes may generally be equated with the public good, and violations of law are the antithesis of the public good”. They clearly lay out that, “violation of constitutionally valid laws is inconsistent with exemption under IRC 501(c)(3)” and that “planned activities that violate laws are not in furtherance of a charitable purpose”.

Was the shooting of Chengyan Wang really in the public good? If “violations of law are the antithesis of the public good”, how can setting violators loose be tax exempt?

The Bail Project is not alone.

In St. Paul, the Minnesota Freedom Fund set loose Shawn Michael Tillman. Three weeks later, he opened fire at a light rail station killing another black man.

Sex offender Christopher Don Boswell who was accused of sexual assault and kidnapping, and who had previously convicted in two previous sexual assault cases, got his $350,000 bail paid.

George Howard, accused of domestic abuse, was bailed out and a few weeks later allegedly shot and killed a Latino man driving on the I-94.

Other beneficiaries of the MFF’s pro-crime activities included a man who opened fire at police during the riots, and another who had weapons and drugs in his car.

Some of these cases became notorious because Kamala Harris had urged, “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund.” In the wake of violent Black Lives Matter race riots, celebrities like Seth Rogen, Steve Carrell, Don Cheadle and Cynthia Nixon, had poured money into MFF. And the IRS allowed the Minnesota Freedom Fund to operate as a 501(c)(3).

Does the IRS believe that freeing sex predators and murderers is in the “public good”.

There are currently bail funds in 37 states. The vast majority of them are also registered nonprofits that operate in defiance of the tax code with the complicity of the IRS.

And they are spreading pain, misery and taking countless lives.

In Seattle, 51-year-old Ivette Wallin became the first murder victim of 2023. Her alleged killer had been bailed out by the Northwest Community Bail Fund after he was involved in another domestic violence incident. The fund, which is another 501(c)(3), also bailed out a man facing gun charges who broke into a home and shot a father of four. The pro-crime fund bailed out a man accused of assault who then went out and stabbed a man to death in City Hall Park.

Bail fund organizers tend to argue that such horror stories are outliers, but local prosecutors found that the majority of those bailed out by the bail fund never showed up in court.

What exactly is the “public good” involved in keeping half of criminals from appearing in court?

That’s a question that the IRS should be made to answer.

In Portland, Mohamed Osman Adan, a Somali Muslim immigrant, with six domestic violence complaints, was bailed out by the Portland Freedom Fund.

Rachael Abraham, his girlfriend, had called the police after he beat, choked her, and struck her with Islamic ‘prayer beads’.

Adam allegedly kneeled on her throat and told her, “I should kill you”.

After the Portland Freedom Fund bailed him out, police found Rachael’s body covered in cuts with her blood soaking the carpet.

The PFF claims that there was no way that it could have known that a serial domestic abuser who was arrested for threatening to kill a woman would, if freed, finish the job. But statistics show that, like its Seattle counterpart, the majority of criminals it bailed out violated release agreements or didn’t show up in court. Others bailed out included “Malik Muhammad, a man later sentenced to 10 years in prison for throwing Molotov cocktails at police” along with others facing “serious charges including attempted murder, assault and strangulation”.

The PFF’s listed fiscal sponsor, the Northwest Alliance for Alternative Media and Education, is a 501(c)(3).

Perhaps someone can ask the IRS how Rachael’s murder or throwing Molotov cocktails at police serves the “public good” or what it has to do with “alternative media and education”.

The bail fund body count continues to pile up nationwide.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund freed a thug who had violently assaulted a police officer and been accused of assault and battery in Boston, who then went on to stab a 29-year-old woman to death. The Louisville Community Bail Fund and BLM bailed out an activist after he shot at a mayoral candidate. The Massachusetts Bail Fund is a 501(c)(3) while the Louisville Community Bail Fund’s fiscal sponsor is the Soros-funded Alliance for Global Justice: a 501(c)(3).

Does the IRS believe that shooting political candidates is a form of the “public good”?

While the IRS targets conservative organizations, pro-crime bail funds have unleashed a wave of terror across the country. Even in the few cases documented here, bail funds have led to ten murders, attempted murders, like those of Chengyan Wang, and numerous other crimes.

Bail funds have led to assaults on police officers, the murder of abused women and multiple killings of black people. These crimes were not only enabled by radical leftist administrators and donors, but by the IRS which has failed to enforce tax codes and treats them as nonprofits.

Ten people, white, Latino and black, male and female, young and old are dead because of it.

Ten people, Marcia Johnson, Christie Holt, Dylan McGinnis, Demitri G. Ellis-Strong, Luis Martinez Ortiz, Ivette Wallin, Damon Allen, Bradley Arabie, Ugochukwu Anaele and Rachael Abraham, lost their lives to bail funds and the criminal dereliction of duty by the IRS.

Say their names. Say them until the IRS does its job.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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The King of Hate Media

By Daniel Greenfield On January 18, 2023 In recent

MSNBC ushered in Thanksgiving to its viewers by claiming that the holiday and the nation were built on genocide.

“We are a country founded on violence. Our birth was violent,” MSNBC star Joy Reid declared.

It was another hateful lie about our country from a 24/7 hate network built on lies.

America was not founded on violence, but on a revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God-given right to liberty. By contrast, NBC’s takeover by Comcast was lubricated by a corrupt deal with hatemonger Al Sharpton who has described fellow racist Joy Reid as his “little sister.”

Faced with stiff political opposition to his plan to take control of NBC, Comcast owner Brian L. Roberts met with Sharpton to pitch him on garnering political support for the cable company’s bid. Once a pariah for his role in inciting anti-Semitic riots that lynched two innocent people, and the torching of Freddie’s Fashion Mart, a Harlem store owned by a Jew whom Sharpton referred to as a “white interloper” in which 7 people were burned to death, all of them “of color,” Sharpton was resurrected by Barack Obama as his “civil rights” adviser and accepted into the Democrat fold as the party’s kingmaker.

In his new role, Sharpton delivered the political support to ensure that Roberts didn’t encounter antitrust issues in his controversial takeover bid to acquire NBC. In return Roberts gave Sharpton his own MSNBC show, ‘PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton’, while also making Sharpton’s existing employers at black-owned Radio One – and himself – extremely rich.

In short, without the support of Sharpton and his racist admirers, Comcast would not have been able to gain control of NBC. Since Comcast’s massive power was founded on violence and corruption, it’s hardly surprising that it streams the worst lies and hate by the worst bigots as a payback for the series of dirty deals that made Roberts so rich and powerful.

During Sharpton’s lobbying for the Comcast deal, MSNBC denied that there was an offer to give the notorious racial arsonist his own show, only to debut it a few months later. Comcast not only gave Sharpton a show, but included the head of his racist National Action Network in its “diversity council.” Sharpton in turn gave MSNBC boss Phil Griffin an award after previously handing it to Jeff Zucker, who ran NBC at the time, before going off to run CNN.

Alongside Reid and Sharpton, MSNBC regularly features the unhinged Elie Mystal, who said that the United States “Constitution is trash” and bragged, “you come out as a Republican, I’m prejudiced against you”, Tiffany Cross, who argued that the media focusing on the economic concerns of midwesterners was pandering to “racist white people”, Melissa Harris-Perry, who claimed that the term “hard work” is racist, and a seemingly bottomless list of bigots.

MSNBC doesn’t just employ vile racists like Reid and Sharpton who smear our country and promote hate, but also foreign enemy propagandists like Ayman Mohyeldin, formerly of Qatar’s Al Jazeera, who defended the Islamic terrorist state during the World Cup by attacking America.

Mohyeldin is one of a number of former employees of the Qatari propaganda network who have been given a platform to attack America, Europe and Israel by MSNBC. While Mohyeldin has ‘Ayman’, his own weekend show, Mehdi Hasan, also formerly of Al Jazeera, hosts ‘The Mehdi Hasan Show’. Al Velshi, a veteran of Al Jazeera America, which faced lawsuits accusing its executives of antisemitism and discriminating against women, hosts ‘Velshi’.

MSNBC’s decision to turn itself into Al Jazeera by stocking it with the Jihadist network’s leftovers has led to constant incitement and antisemitic propaganda at its 24/7 hate network.

Even in the midst of China’s takeover of Hong Kong and the Ukraine war, Velshi ranted that Israel was the “leading occupying force in the world.” Velshi claimed that “Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan during the Six-Day War in 1967” while neglecting to mention that it was Jordan that as part of the unprovoked Arab Muslim attack on the infant state had captured half the city in 1948 launching the Arabs’ 75-year campaign “to push the Jews into the sea.” In other words Jerusalem was liberated by Israel from Jordanian occupation in 1967.

Velshi has smeared Israel as an “apartheid state” despite working as a propagandist for Qatar where 88% of the population consists of migrant workers with no rights, thousands of whom die laboring on the skyscrapers of the Islamist apartheid state. Israel by contrast is the only state in the Middle East that is actually not an apartheid state. Velshi’s comments are just the crudest form of Jew hating propaganda spawned by the apartheid regimes in Gaza and the West Bank.

On his hate-filled show, Mehdi Hasan invited Rep. Ro Khanna, a Bernie Sanders ally, to make the bizarre claim that Israel was “burning down Palestinian villages”. Hasan, who has falsely referred to Israel as having its capital in Tel Aviv, regularly hosts anti-Israel bigots like Peter Beinart. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib used her MSNBC platform to lie that Israel is “an apartheid government that is targeting a whole people based on their ethnicity and some even based on their faith.” That would be news to the Arab Israelis who have more rights as citizens of Israel than they would in any Arab Muslim state.

But it’s not just the cable network MSNBC that Roberts polluted. After the recent Colorado Springs shooting at a gay club, NBC senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny falsely blamed the attack on critics of the sexualization of children.

“If there is a pipeline it starts from some smaller accounts online like Libs of TikTok, it moves to the right-wing blogosphere, and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or it ends up out of a right-wing politician’s mouth,” she argued.

We have since learned that the shooter, who comes from a deeply dysfunctional household, identifies as “non-binary.” A normal TV network in normal times would fire a reporter for spewing such a hateful lie. But these are not normal times, and Brian Roberts’ network is a big reason why.

These lies, smears and slurs, like many others, come down to one company, Comcast, and one man, Brian L. Roberts. Comcast is a family business and Brian was born into it. “I think we have known that Brian would take over the company since he was about eight years old,” its co-founder admitted. At 30, he did just that and took the company from cable to content.

Unlike his father, Brian was not satisfied just providing cable access and was obsessed with taking control of programming. After a failed bid to take over Disney, he bought NBC.

MSNBC had begun purging its conservative personalities in a leftist makeover even before the Comcast takeover, but the process accelerated rapidly as talks began. And Comcast bought support for the takeover by handing out money to racists and their hate groups.

That was how Al Sharpton ended up with an MSNBC show.

During the Black Lives Matter race riots, Roberts promised that Comcast would donate $100 million in response to “the far too familiar and frequent acts of violence against the black community, and to acknowledge the structural racism that fuels these injustices” to a consortium of groups including Sharpton’s National Action Network. At the same time, Roberts’ protégé was busy pouring oil on the flames in a eulogy for George Floyd by condemning America for having its “knee on the neck” of black people for over 400 years. In point of fact, black slavery in America lasted 20 years in the north and 76 years in the south. Moreover, black slaves in America had been enslaved by black Africans and sold at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin. Black slaves were liberated at the cost of 360,000 mainly white lives in America’s bloodiest war. When Sharpton poured his racist poison onto America’s television screens 80% of blacks were living above the poverty line and “systemic racism” had been outlawed for over 60 years.

During the George Floyd race riots, MSNBC personnel and guests repeatedly expressed support for the rioters and their violence. In one of the hate network’s more infamous moments, Al Velshi tried to argue that “this is mostly a peaceful protest, it is not generally speaking unruly” while standing in front of a building in flames.

When challenged about Velshi’s lies at a shareholder meeting and asked to condemn Antifa, Roberts retorted that, “racism, injustice, violence have no place and cannot be tolerated.”

But the racism was coming from his personal hate network.

Roberts is not a brilliant businessman, he’s a savvy political donor. Comcast got as big and powerful as it did because it adopted the right politics and paid off the right people.

In 2020, Roberts’ wife provided $152,800 to fund the Biden campaign. But that was small change compared to the millions raised by Comcast’s chief lobbyist for Obama whom Biden has appointed as the ambassador to Canada. Roberts took to golfing with Obama and hosting him on Martha’s Vineyard. And even that money was dwarfed by the subsidies from the tax-free Comcast Foundation.

The Comcast Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that the powerful company has used to build its political connections while dodging taxes. As was noted during the NBC takeover, the Comcast Foundation, dominated by its top lobbyist, handed out “more than $3 billion since 2001” mostly to minority groups and “many of the groups to whom the Comcast Foundation has donated now support the proposed merger”. A number of the Comcast Foundation’s donations conveniently also went to organizations which had ties to Democrat politicians.

Comcast wasn’t just bribing its way to power, taxpayers were subsidizing the bribes.

This is another example of what Internal Radical Service, a report by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, delved into. Published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the report documented the abuse of the tax code by leftist foundations and nonprofits which are being used to finance the left’s agendas while the IRS watchdogs turn a blind eye to the violations.

Comcast is a corrupt company that pushes hate for profit. And Brian L. Roberts, who got the job because of his daddy, has used it to tear apart this country and reward the worst and most divisive bigots.

Despite the Jewish origins of the Roberts family, Brian Roberts has overseen a company that spreads the worst lies emanating from the terrorist propaganda machines of Hamas and the PLO. The anti-Semitic chorus at MSNBC, posing as journalists, promotes the worst smears against Israel and Jews in America.

The story of Comcast, like the tragic tale of so many other major and increasingly international companies, is that of powerful corporations turning on their own roots, on the country and the people that made them possible. Torn away from their values and roots, they become a virus that destroys everything around them. And that is what NBC and MSNBC have become as platforms for the Jew-hating, white-hating and America-hating Left.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Monday, January 16, 2023

Biden Tells Israel to Give Money to Terrorists, Not Terror Victims

By Daniel Greenfield On January 16, 2023 In Terrorism

The Biden administration condemned Israel for giving $39 million in tax revenues to the victims of terrorism instead of the terrorists.

“It is morally just and important for the war against terror. There is no greater justice than using the funds for the victims of terror,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said of the move.

State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned Israel’s actions as a “unilateral response” that will “exacerbate tensions. and warned that the administration will raise the issue with Israel.

Price did not address whether the Palestinian Authority spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to finance terrorist attacks against Israelis through the ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program raises any tensions. The ruling PLO body spending millions to kill Jews is not unilateral, but Israel refusing to finance the murder of its own citizens is a dangerous move that will make peace difficult.

Palestinian Authority PM Mohammad Shtayyeh claims that if Israel doesn’t give it $39 million, that “will promptly lead to its collapse.”

The terror organization has been claiming variations of the same thing for over two decades.

“Palestinian Authority Broke and In Disarray,” the media agonized in 2004. “Palestinians Threaten to Collapse the Palestinian Authority,” they clamored in 2009. “Suspended tax transfers leave Palestinian economy on the brink” came the warnings in 2015. “Palestinian finances near collapse as cuts deepen,” we were told in 2019.

The PLO’s terror infrastructure is always on the verge of collapse, but sadly never does.

“Israel sells us everything, including water treatment, electricity and drinking water, and in fact profits from all of this,” Shtayyeh whined.

Why after 30 years can’t the aspiring terror state do anything for itself? The “Palestinians” have received an estimated $40 billion in foreign aid. Other estimates have put it at $50 billion.

Over $14 billion of that money went directly to the Palestinian Authority. What did all that money buy apart from mansions for top terrorists?

Pinchas Rutenberg, who had unsuccessfully urged Russia’s liberal Kerensky government to execute Lenin and Trotsky before it was too late and fought to the last to defend the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks, headed to Israel and began electrifying the country.

“No one doubts the duty of the British Empire to develop the Land of Israel, but who will be charged the financial burden? The British taxpayer? Or perhaps the Arab public that has lived in the country for hundreds of years and has not lifted a finger to develop it. True, Rutenberg is a Jew, and he recruited businessmen and Jewish capitalists to develop the natural resources of the Land of Israel and create jobs for its Arab residents, but is it therefore necessary to disqualify his vision?” Churchill opined.

In a matter of years, much of Israel was powered by the generators that Rutenberg had built.

And all of this happened over two decades before Israel even achieved independence.

Somehow Jewish refugees could do a better job of providing electricity in the 1920s after only a few years than the Palestinian Authority has managed in the 2020s after 30 years.

Churchill correctly observed that the Arab invaders and colonizers had lived there for “hundreds of years” yet had not “lifted a finger to develop it.” The cost of developing the territories under PLO control has passed right back to the British taxpayer, the American taxpayer and the Israelis.

Every few years, Israel threatens to cut off the power unless the terrorists pay their debts. The last time around the debt had shot up to $500 million. Each time diplomats warn that if Israel cuts off the power, there will be a humanitarian crisis. But when isn’t there a crisis?

Biden directed over half-a-billion dollars to the terrorists since taking office. And yet the PLO claims that it’s still on the verge of collapse and Israel has to save it all over again.

“The PA must stop its involvement in terror if it wants to survive. As long as it continues to encourage terror, it is our enemy and as such, what interest do we have to help it?” Israeli Finance Minister Smotritch pointed out.

The Palestinian Authority has never run out of money to pay the terrorists, but it can’t manage to pay for its power bill or accomplish anything useful for its people.

Secretary of State Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, are headed to Israel to scold the Jewish State for not giving money to the terrorists. The administration has used every possible forum to show contempt and undermine Israel: including a recent UN session denying Jews the right to visit the Temple Mount which is the holiest site in Judaism.

When National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visited the Temple Mount, the Biden administration called it an “unacceptable” violation of the “historic status quo” that bans Jews.

And yet Ben-Gvir’s visit came and went.

Since then, he’s told the police to take down the terrorist flags of the PLO.

“It is inconceivable that lawbreakers will wave terror flags, incite and encourage terrorism,” Ben Gvir said. “I have issued instructions for the removal of the flags, which support terrorism, from the public space and to stop incitement against the State of Israel.”

The Biden administration, which funds terrorism and incitement against Israel through its foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, is probably unhappy with this. Its spokesmen repeatedly accuse Israel of “unilateral” acts that increase “tensions”. Every time a Jewish person sneezes in Jerusalem, Ned Price appears at a State Department podium to intone about unilateral sneezing, raising tensions. And yet it’s the Biden administration that is conducting unilateral actions meant to undermine Israel’s status like its rogue diplomatic operation to the PLO.

The level of pettiness included stepping in when an Iron Age spoon was seized from the founder of Birthright Israel to “return” it to the Palestinian Authority even though the Arab Muslim colonists had invaded the area a thousand years later and have no claim to the ancient artifact.

The spoon was identified in the files as coming from the country of Israel, “from the Hebron area” that “is the area of the richest Iron age Jewish tombs (many royal).”

The pettiness of seizing an artifact that originated from an Israeli source and turning it over to the Arab Muslim terrorists who currently occupy parts of Hebron to make a point is emblematic of the Biden administration’s determination to undermine the Jewish People’s claim to its land.

The Biden administration and the media are furious that Israel’s new patriotic government is asserting its rights. It’s a belated act of self-defense that the media treats as an attack.

A hysterical AP news story denounces Netanyahu’s new government as “hard-line”, “ultra-nationalist”, and the “most hard-line and religious government in Israel’s history” that is “shaking the foundations of Israel’s democracy”, “fomenting divisions” and “barreling toward conflict”.

And that’s just the first two paragraphs of a deranged screed masquerading as news coverage.

Israel’s new government is not “shaking the foundations of Israel’s democracy”, it’s restoring it after decades of hijacking by an activist judiciary by implementing a system of checks and balances to equalize its power with that of the legislature.

It is not “fomenting divisions”, it’s confronting divisions created by leftists and dealing with them. And it’s not “barreling toward conflict” but responding to the attacks against the Jewish State.

What has Israel’s “ultra-nationalist” and “hard-line” government done so far? It diverted money that will be used by terrorists to finance the murder of Jews to the victims of these attacks.

One of its cabinet members briefly visited the holiest site in Judaism. Another suggested that the terrorists need to choose between getting money through Israel and killing Jews.

All that outrage over basic acts of decency.

It’s hard to argue with any of these actions when they’re described objectively. That’s why shrill labels like “hard-line” and “ultra-nationalist” are being used to silence any meaningful debate.

The media doesn’t want to talk about why Israel and the United States should be financing Islamic terrorism against Jews. Israel’s new government is determined to make that the issue.

Anyone in the Biden administration, the media and activists who scream about “unilateralism” and “ultra-nationalists” should be asked to put away their thesauruses and answer why money should go to terrorists not terror victims.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Saturday, January 14, 2023

How Fighting 'Islamophobia' Leads to Theocracy

By Daniel Greenfield On January 14, 2023 In recent

The decision by Hamline University to purge a minority art teacher for showing a Shiite painting of Mohammed has traveled from the outskirts of a few blogs, and a student paper of the small private college in St. Paul, to art sites, a PEN condemnation and finally the New York Times.

Erika Lopez Prater, an adjunct at Hamline, showed a Persian painting of Mohammed to her class. Aram Wedatalla, a president of the Muslim Student Association, objected. The MSA rallied to denounce her, along with its advisor, Nur Mood: the college’s Assistant Director of Social Justice Programs. The Latina professor was dumped and condemned as an Islamophobe. Jaylani Hussein, CAIR-Minnesota’s director came in to hold a session on Islamophobia. The MSA and CAIR have both been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

When a religion professor pointed out that Muslims have different views on paintings of Mohammed, Hussein described such Muslims as “extremists” and argued that, “You can teach a whole class about why Hitler was good.”

The New York Times then describes how “Ms. Baker, the department head, and Dr. Everett, the administrator, separately walked up to the religion professor, put their hands on his shoulders and said this was not the time to raise these concerns”.

After years of ridiculing warnings that an alliance with Islamists would require them to enforce sharia law, liberals did just that at Hamline University. And this time their targets weren’t white men, but a minority woman and Shiite Muslim paintings.

Minnesota liberals have embraced diversity. And sometimes diversity requires purging a Latina academic trying to teach students about Islamic art because she used works from the Shiite side of the spectrum, rather than the Sunni one that the Muslim Brotherhood belongs to.

One of the paintings comes from Rashid al-Dīn: a Jewish man who converted to Shiite Islam. His motives like those of the vast majority of converts was to avoid persecution and get ahead. The painting, like most Islamic pictoral art, is objectively terrible and could be improved on by a moderately talented six-year-old. The only reason Islamic art is ever taught is for diversity.

Islam was quickly tossed into everything after September 11 as a show of tolerance. Muslims, formerly obscure, became ground zero for diversity. A market for Islamic art heated up. Despite hard strictures against religion in the workplace, corporations and government offices felt the need to virtue signal with a show of support for Muslims. That meant posters with women wearing hijab and a lot of Koranic calligraphy in places that would never display a Bible.

Many Muslims were not happy to see Islamic scriptures displayed in ‘filthy’ places. Muslim groups had previously accused everything from a Nike sneaker to an ice cream swirl, and any set of curves, of blasphemously containing Allah’s name. They were enraged to see it being offered up for tattoos or hanging in the bathroom of a urologist’s office.

Islamists were never interested in “diversity”. What they wanted was for everyone to respect Islamic laws. In the name of tolerance, liberals became theocrats and Islamists used the grammar of diversity to eliminate any diversity. Confronted with objections, Hamline’s Islamists resorted to equating Shiite pictures of Mohammed with Hitler or the ‘N-word’.

Liberals, who accepted the premise that tolerance requires theocracy, are unable to navigate the issue. The New York Times interviewed a Persian Shiite professor at Duke who explained that he loves and shows pictures of Mohammed all the time. Yet the entire article never uses the terms, “Sunni” or “Shiite” or suggests that there are sectarian differences at work.. After having taken it on themselves to impose Islamic theocracy, they are reluctant to adjudicate it.

And yet, unlike Mohammed cartoons, what happened at Hamline University shows that the intersectional enforcement of Islamic theocracy alongside Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ and Planned Parenthood requires more than just banning criticism of Mohammed, but even suppressing other Islamic doctrines in favor of the supremacy of Sunni Islamists.

Anything else is a hate crime.

Hamline University’s social justice administration purged a Latina art teacher because she dared to show works from the Shiite canon which offended Sunnis linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Liberals found it very easy to support Islamic supremacism when it was a matter of banning conservative protesters from burning the Koran or mentioning that Mohammed was a child molester. But that was just the camel’s nose creeping into the tent. The rest of the camel requires that America be reordered thoroughly in line with Islamic law in every possible detail.

While liberals see a distinction between a defaced Koran, a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Mohammed and a Shiite painting of Mohammed, to the Muslim Brotherhood there is no difference. And the Democrat political establishment and the leftist cultural affiliates that surrendered to the Brotherhood’s front groups have to decide where to draw the line.

Islam has been in a state of perpetual civil war for most of its existence. Muslim civil wars have killed far more people in the last decade than all our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And we’ve imported that civil war into America.

That’s not just idle talk or conspiracy theories. The worst series of Muslim murders in America were carried out by an Afghan Sunni targeting Afghan Shiites in Albuquerque. Importing Islam doesn’t just mean machete attacks in Times Square, it also meant three teens who were arrested in November for plotting to kill everyone in a Shiite mosque in Chicago.

The leftists who got into bed with Sunni Islamists thought that all they had to do was make Americans defer to Islamic theocracy, but getting schoolchildren to visit mosques or convincing our leaders to ban criticism of Islam was the easy part. The hard part is doing what the Muslims themselves were never able to do for any real length of time: maintain a unified theocracy.

Hamline University had a lot more Sunnis than Shiites. Its Islamic student organization is the MSA. And the leadership found it expedient to accept Sunni Islamic theocracy and denounce Shiite depictions of Mohammed. Nationally, liberals are less comfortable with that bargain. PEN has denounced Hamline and the New York Times awkwardly suggests it’s a complex issue.

It’s complex, but not in a way that the media or their party are willing to discuss or accept.

Islamists repeatedly tell us that there is “only one Islam”. What they really mean is that there’s only one Islam that they will accept. Sunnis, with their superior numbers and Muslim Brotherhood organizations financed by oil money, dominate. And it is now our job to help them enforce that “one Islam” in America. Sharia means that we are their religious police.

Intersectionality has outsourced the enforcement of Islamic theocracy to social justice groups, campus administrators, corporations, government offices and all the woke institutions.

Wokeness is sharia. That is the awkward reality playing out at Hamline which brought in its first black president, who denounced academic freedom for permitting the display of Mohammed art, where Islamists were appointed to administer social justice, and now faces a liberal backlash.

But the backlash carefully avoids the central issues, especially the conflation of theocracy with tolerance, which is at the heart of the post 9/11 dirty deal that liberals made with Islamists.

Until they’re ready to rethink that deal, they’ll have to enforce Islamic law in America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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