Deathwatch
This is not an article. But once upon a time this was a blog where I would post my unformed personal thoughts. The thoughts eventually became articles. The articles were picked up and reprinted. But this one time, Sultan Knish will return to what it once was in a simpler time.
This is self-indulgent and personal.
Feel free to skip it.
Our lives are defined by numbers. Our deaths are defined by them too.
Somewhere out of sight, in the world or in our bodies, a clock ticks insistently away. Most of the time we are fortunate enough to be deaf to the relentless clockwork march of time.
Until we begin to hear. And are unable to stop.
There are many clocks in the hospital room where she lies dying beneath a plastic blanket inflated and deflated by one of a dozen machines in the room.
There is an old fashioned clock ticking inaudibly on the wall, there are digital clocks and timers embedded in everything. And there is the insistent count of heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen. The numbers keep going down.
The beeping is constant. One alarm, for the heart rate or the oxygen or the IV follows another. The alarms are a count. The numbers they measure are ultimately the only numbers that matter. They are the numbers of life.
I had often heard the term deathwatch, but standing on the plastic pine floor while the nurses come and go, I understand it.
I am waiting for a death that I have been told is inevitable. I am waiting and dreading it all at once.
The Rabbi has come and gone. He has said his prayers and words of comfort. And I have said them with him. All the prayers in the end form one greater prayer. A fervent hope that our lives are defined by more than these numbers.
All our prayers are above all else a prayer for the existence of a G-d Whose being transcends the minutiae of material arithmetic. Whatever else we pray for, it is for a father that will never leave us and for a meaning more meaningful than our science tells us is all that there is.
We pray not merely for life but for a meaningful life. We pray not only in hope, but for hope.
We pray that there be something more on the other end of the deathwatch.
We pray that our prayers not be in vain.
Every now and then, I look from the numbers to the prayers, and back again, measuring the material life and the immaterial one, the digital prophecies of science, and the higher truth that I seek beyond the whitewashed walls, the tan blinds cutting off a view of the roof, and the endless ticking of the clocks and counts, the soft sighing of the machines trying to keep my mother comfortable and alive.
And failing at both.
Occasionally medical personnel come and go, donning purple gloves and yellow gowns, and then out again. I and she are both spectators in this play. We are amateurs at death and dying while they are the professionals. When we are gone, they will still be here, divining numbers and playing the odds.
They know secrets, not only of numbers, but of sounds and sights, and revelations of fragility and hope that the rest of us choose not to know.
But then the time comes when we poor amateurs must mount the stage and learn them anyway, when we must stumble through our paces without the benefits of schooling or script, performing poorly in our new parts.
Sometimes they ask me if I have medical training. I have. The studying of it has been more painful and expensive than theirs.
The deathwatch is a graduation. And on graduation, I will do my best to forget all that I have learned here.
After a stormy afternoon, a beam of sunlight slants through the lower half of the window.
The deathwatch has moved into the later hours of the afternoon. Perhaps it will continue on into night. I don't know and I don't want to know.
Deathwatches are always with us.
Those of us who don't fear for our loved ones, fear for our country or our way of life.
There are always things that we love and we fear losing. It is when we become aware of the very possibility of loss, as children or as adults, that we enter the outer rings of the deathwatch.
My current career began with a deathwatch of 9/11. In the ash and rubble, and the poisonous betrayals of the aftermath, the idea that we could lose our country became as real as when I first helped my mother into a wheelchair more years ago than I care to count.
I have not entered into that final deathwatch, the alarms of the end, for my country.
And I hope that I never do.
But to love something, real or ideal, or a mixture of both, is to know that it can die.
Everything we love dies. Except, perhaps our love, and the love of the Creator for his flawed creations caught between the numbers of their reason, and seeking a love and a hope that lies beyond this pale room, the fading houses stretching out in every direction, this world and all the endless worlds and stars beyond.
Hashem Hu HaElohim
The Lord is G-d, is what I will say when the deathwatch ends, and then, like Abraham and Jacob, and all my ancestors who have come before, and passed through that hope and home beyond the stars, I will seek out a place in the holy land of my ancestors to lay my dead to rest.
P.S. If you are interested in attending the funeral near Jerusalem, please contact me.
Thursday, May 23, 2019
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
A Government Environmentalist Experiment in Brainwashing Parents Through Children in North Carolina
#C02Kult.
That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.
The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.
“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.
The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.
As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.
Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.
There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.
A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.
Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.
What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”
That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.
The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”
They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.
Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.
Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.
"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.
This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.
Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.
The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.
Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.
The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.
“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."
Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".
A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."
One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."
Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.
Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.
An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".
The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.
The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.
Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.
Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.
Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.
A child soldier.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.
The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.
“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.
The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.
As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.
Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.
There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.
A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.
Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.
What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”
That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.
The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”
They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.
Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.
Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.
"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.
This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.
Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.
The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.
Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.
The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.
“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."
Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".
A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."
One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."
Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.
Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.
An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".
The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.
The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.
Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.
Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.
Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.
A child soldier.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Monday, May 20, 2019
What's Really Behind the Impeachment Con?
The Democrats have become a cult of anti-personality.
The ‘anti’ phenomenon is not unique. Past Democrat generations had built their identity around hating Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. But the internet monetized the cult of anti-personality in a big way.
And Democrats are paying the price.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Dem House leadership have tried everything possible to stop the talk of impeachment. But nothing that she and her deputies can do has made a dent in the madness.
In a sign of pure desperation, Pelosi has begun insisting that impeachment is a Trump conspiracy.
“Trump is goading us to impeach him," she actually claimed.
The Dem House leader is hoping to dissuade her faction from its self-destructive orgy of Trump hatred by tapping into that hatred to convince them that impeaching Trump is exactly what he wants.
And it won’t work.
Impeaching Trump is the obsession of a narrow slice of the Dem base. But it’s the one that provides much of the money and the manpower. The Democrats wouldn’t have won in 2018 without the Trump-haters, but they won’t be able to win in 2020 with them. Their fanaticism proved crucial in midterm elections where Democrats traditionally suffered from low voter turnout. But in a presidential election, voter turnout will be high. And the Democrats will need to win over independent voters.
A majority of Americans opposes impeachment. But impeachment fever turned otherwise obscure Dem politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Red. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff into resistance celebrities.
While Pelosi worries about losing moderate districts, the loudest impeachment activists can’t lose.
Most of the House impeachment noise has been coming from Congressional Black Caucus, California and New York House members who are safely ensconced in districts that Republicans can’t win. The more noise they make, the more they can fundraise, build their brand and get invited on MSNBC.
They don’t risk losing their seats through a challenge from the right, but from the left.
Joe Crowley’s defeat at the hands of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a warning. Alienating Democrats or infuriating Republicans poses no risk to Democrats in safe districts. They’re worried about another prog coming out of the woodwork and impeachment is their shield against a challenger.
While Pelosi wants to hold on to her speakership by getting and keeping House Dems in swing states, the impeachment caucus is only out for the interests of its members. Before internet fundraising, political grandstanding wasn’t nearly as profitable. But Trump and the internet have changed all that.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s fundraising take went from below a million in 2016 to $6.25 million in 2018. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s finances ballooned from $1.9 million in 2016 to over $3 million in 2018. Swalwell became so confident that he even decided to run for president. Rep. Sheila Lee Jackson had her best fundraising totals since the Bush era. Rep. Maxine Waters went from raising $729,000 in 2012 to $1.59 million.
With numbers like these, why stop?
Talking about impeaching Trump provides the old Democrats in safe districts with a cash flow and protection against usurpers backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Even if it hurts their party.
The House impeachment activism also reflects the split within the Democrat electorate.
At April's end, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed that42% of adults wanted an end to the investigation. Another 33% wanted more congressional hearings.
Only 16% were ready for impeachment.
Among Democrats, only 27% were ready for impeachment. Impeachment fever was highest among "progressives". 30% of Democrat women wanted impeachment, but only 23% of men.Support for impeaching Trump was highest in the big cities that are home to the resistance and lowest in rural areas.
(Contrary to Pelosi's exercise in reverse psychology, only 1% of Trump supporters wanted Democrats to start impeachmentproceedings.)
Support for impeachment was highest in the West.
If you want to understand why California politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff are all over the news networks talking impeachment, these numbers show why.
In the 2018 exit polls, support for impeachment was highest in California followed by New York. That’s also where much of the money that swung the midterm elections came from. California donors bought elections and special elections for Democrats in red and purple states in impeachment’s name.
But the rest of the country isn’t California or New York.
Impeachment was a con. Democrats solicited fortunes from bicoastal donors while promising them something that they knew they couldn’t and wouldn’t deliver. It’s a familiar con in politics. There’s just one problem. Pelosi, Schumer and the Dem leadership need the donors they’ve conned to keep giving.
The Democrats have been caught on the hook of their own con.
Their money is telling them one thing while their electorate is telling them another. The media desperately needs an impeachment push to goose their ratings. Impeachment is the only thing that would lift CNN’s ratings out of the toilet. And if the Democrats won’t give the media what it wants, the same outlets that profited from the Mueller witch hunt will go after Pelosi for standing in their way.
The Democrats can have the money and the media, or win elections. But they can’t have all three.
That’s why Speaker Pelosi is finding new convoluted reasons to avoid an impeachment push. The crazy lies are an effort to string along donors and media outlets until the election, without alienating the independent voters that her faction needs to win, in order to defeat Trump and the Republicans.
And that will take the impeachment question off the table and validate her strategy.
But if Trump is reelected, then Pelosi will fall. The Democrats are playing it safe by backing Biden and avoiding impeachment. But if Biden becomes the nominee and loses, lefties will claim that the election was lost because the Democrat leadership chose to play it safe instead of going radical.
Trump’s reelection will crack open the con and wipe out a faded generation of Democrat leadership.
That’s why Pelosi has made this her final rodeo. If her bet pays off, she retires after taking a victory lap. If it fails, she leaves in disgrace to sip chardonnay with Hillary Clinton and blame the Russians.
But even making it to 2020 will require keeping the lid on a furious donor class and unruly House.
Speaker Pelosi has failed to control either the freshman radicals like Rep. Ocasio Cortez and Rep. Tlaib or the rest of her California delegation which won’t stop playing the impeachment card.
The Mueller report took more pressure off Pelosi than it did Trump. In its aftermath, she’s trying to channel Dem activity into endless hearings, which are always a safe bet in Washington D.C., and into going after Trump officials whose persecution won’t alienate independents or rile up Republicans.
But it won’t be enough.
The Democrats have become a party of hate. The haters have poured money and manpower into a moribund party. It’s their party now and they will settle for nothing less than destroying Trump.
Even if it destroys them too.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
The ‘anti’ phenomenon is not unique. Past Democrat generations had built their identity around hating Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. But the internet monetized the cult of anti-personality in a big way.
And Democrats are paying the price.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Dem House leadership have tried everything possible to stop the talk of impeachment. But nothing that she and her deputies can do has made a dent in the madness.
In a sign of pure desperation, Pelosi has begun insisting that impeachment is a Trump conspiracy.
“Trump is goading us to impeach him," she actually claimed.
The Dem House leader is hoping to dissuade her faction from its self-destructive orgy of Trump hatred by tapping into that hatred to convince them that impeaching Trump is exactly what he wants.
And it won’t work.
Impeaching Trump is the obsession of a narrow slice of the Dem base. But it’s the one that provides much of the money and the manpower. The Democrats wouldn’t have won in 2018 without the Trump-haters, but they won’t be able to win in 2020 with them. Their fanaticism proved crucial in midterm elections where Democrats traditionally suffered from low voter turnout. But in a presidential election, voter turnout will be high. And the Democrats will need to win over independent voters.
A majority of Americans opposes impeachment. But impeachment fever turned otherwise obscure Dem politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Red. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff into resistance celebrities.
While Pelosi worries about losing moderate districts, the loudest impeachment activists can’t lose.
Most of the House impeachment noise has been coming from Congressional Black Caucus, California and New York House members who are safely ensconced in districts that Republicans can’t win. The more noise they make, the more they can fundraise, build their brand and get invited on MSNBC.
They don’t risk losing their seats through a challenge from the right, but from the left.
Joe Crowley’s defeat at the hands of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a warning. Alienating Democrats or infuriating Republicans poses no risk to Democrats in safe districts. They’re worried about another prog coming out of the woodwork and impeachment is their shield against a challenger.
While Pelosi wants to hold on to her speakership by getting and keeping House Dems in swing states, the impeachment caucus is only out for the interests of its members. Before internet fundraising, political grandstanding wasn’t nearly as profitable. But Trump and the internet have changed all that.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s fundraising take went from below a million in 2016 to $6.25 million in 2018. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s finances ballooned from $1.9 million in 2016 to over $3 million in 2018. Swalwell became so confident that he even decided to run for president. Rep. Sheila Lee Jackson had her best fundraising totals since the Bush era. Rep. Maxine Waters went from raising $729,000 in 2012 to $1.59 million.
With numbers like these, why stop?
Talking about impeaching Trump provides the old Democrats in safe districts with a cash flow and protection against usurpers backed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Even if it hurts their party.
The House impeachment activism also reflects the split within the Democrat electorate.
At April's end, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed that42% of adults wanted an end to the investigation. Another 33% wanted more congressional hearings.
Only 16% were ready for impeachment.
Among Democrats, only 27% were ready for impeachment. Impeachment fever was highest among "progressives". 30% of Democrat women wanted impeachment, but only 23% of men.Support for impeaching Trump was highest in the big cities that are home to the resistance and lowest in rural areas.
(Contrary to Pelosi's exercise in reverse psychology, only 1% of Trump supporters wanted Democrats to start impeachmentproceedings.)
Support for impeachment was highest in the West.
If you want to understand why California politicians like Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Ted Lieu and Rep. Adam Schiff are all over the news networks talking impeachment, these numbers show why.
In the 2018 exit polls, support for impeachment was highest in California followed by New York. That’s also where much of the money that swung the midterm elections came from. California donors bought elections and special elections for Democrats in red and purple states in impeachment’s name.
But the rest of the country isn’t California or New York.
Impeachment was a con. Democrats solicited fortunes from bicoastal donors while promising them something that they knew they couldn’t and wouldn’t deliver. It’s a familiar con in politics. There’s just one problem. Pelosi, Schumer and the Dem leadership need the donors they’ve conned to keep giving.
The Democrats have been caught on the hook of their own con.
Their money is telling them one thing while their electorate is telling them another. The media desperately needs an impeachment push to goose their ratings. Impeachment is the only thing that would lift CNN’s ratings out of the toilet. And if the Democrats won’t give the media what it wants, the same outlets that profited from the Mueller witch hunt will go after Pelosi for standing in their way.
The Democrats can have the money and the media, or win elections. But they can’t have all three.
That’s why Speaker Pelosi is finding new convoluted reasons to avoid an impeachment push. The crazy lies are an effort to string along donors and media outlets until the election, without alienating the independent voters that her faction needs to win, in order to defeat Trump and the Republicans.
And that will take the impeachment question off the table and validate her strategy.
But if Trump is reelected, then Pelosi will fall. The Democrats are playing it safe by backing Biden and avoiding impeachment. But if Biden becomes the nominee and loses, lefties will claim that the election was lost because the Democrat leadership chose to play it safe instead of going radical.
Trump’s reelection will crack open the con and wipe out a faded generation of Democrat leadership.
That’s why Pelosi has made this her final rodeo. If her bet pays off, she retires after taking a victory lap. If it fails, she leaves in disgrace to sip chardonnay with Hillary Clinton and blame the Russians.
But even making it to 2020 will require keeping the lid on a furious donor class and unruly House.
Speaker Pelosi has failed to control either the freshman radicals like Rep. Ocasio Cortez and Rep. Tlaib or the rest of her California delegation which won’t stop playing the impeachment card.
The Mueller report took more pressure off Pelosi than it did Trump. In its aftermath, she’s trying to channel Dem activity into endless hearings, which are always a safe bet in Washington D.C., and into going after Trump officials whose persecution won’t alienate independents or rile up Republicans.
But it won’t be enough.
The Democrats have become a party of hate. The haters have poured money and manpower into a moribund party. It’s their party now and they will settle for nothing less than destroying Trump.
Even if it destroys them too.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Sunday, May 19, 2019
America Doesn't Have an Anti-Semitism Problem. American Politics Does
If anti-Semitism is thriving among Americans, there’s no sign of it in any of the latest polls. Americans are the least anti-Semitic people in the world. A 2017 poll, taken at the height of a spike in anti-Semitism, showed that 14% of Americans held anti-Semitic attitudes. That was up from 10% in 2015 and 12% in 2013. That’s not a great trend, but it also shows just how narrow the scope of the problem is.
It’s also dramatically different than the numbers from similar polls conducted in Europe.
How then can we explain the rise in anti-Semitic violence? What about the increased harassment of Jews on campuses and in major cities? And why is there a rise in anti-Semitic discourse?
There’s no climate of hatred in America. The rising anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence are the work of small but highly active political groups who have become disproportionately influential in public life.
The rise in anti-Semitism isn’t happening among ordinary Americans, but among a narrow group of influencers. An anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times isn’t representative of the country. Neither is Rep. Ilhan Omar. Nor are Richard Spencer or the alt-righters who tweet their own anti-Semitic memes.
Anti-Semitic violence is rising. But the total number of incidents remains small. The perpetrators represent a small segment of the population. The violent doesn’t come from ‘anywhere’. On campuses and in synagogues, it comes from a small radical population of the alt-left and the alt-right. In urban areas, it originates with a slightly larger, but still fairly small population, of neighborhood bigots.
Anti-Semitism is marginal among Americans, but it’s increasingly mainstream in political activism.
Anti-Semitic incidents on campuses have doubled for several years in a row. Growing numbers of Jewish students report feeling intimidated and threatened. But the intimidation is the work of a small minority motivated by political ideology. The number of students engaging in campus harassment through hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine remains tiny. The real problem is the complicity of identity politics groups in supporting campus hate groups and administrators in turning a blind eye to it.
The harassment is most intense at a handful of top, but not truly elite schools, in a few states. The situation is not representative of the country or even its average campus. Even in the most problematic schools, only a small politically active minority plays any role in the harassment. But that minority dominates campuses and the campuses provide much of the future leadership of the country.
It’s the same problem nationwide.
Americans don’t have an anti-Semitism problem. American politics has an anti-Semitism problem because, just like on college campuses, small groups are driving an anti-Semitic agenda.
American politics isn’t anti-Semitic. But its leadership is becoming complicit in anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism is a function of political radicalism. And very few Americans are political radicals. But the radicals are driving national politics by constantly shattering political norms and normalizing extremism. Hatred of Jews is just one of the radical ideas heading from the political margins into the mainstream. The mainstream of politics though is a very different thing than the mainstream of American values.
Polls show that most Americans still view anti-Semitism as disgusting. But that’s no longer the case among political activists and elites as anti-Semitism becomes embedded within political movements.
The anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times was not a sign that anti-Semitism had become normalized among Americans, but it had become so normalized in the media that it did not notice when its language of covert anti-Semitism slurred and crossed the red line into overt anti-Semitism.
America’s anti-Semitism problem is worst, not in small rural towns, but in urban media operations.
National politics was radicalized by media operations that took the marginal agendas of fringe groups and mainstreamed them. Anti-Semitism is just another one of those many radical agendas.
The media mainstreamed and normalized radicals like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour while glossing over their hateful agendas. It celebrates and defends Rep. Omar’s bigotry. Rep. Omar is one of hundreds of members of the House. She’s a freshman with no notable accomplishments. The only reason that everyone in the country knows her name is because the media chose to turn her into a celebrity.
Rep. Omar’s displays of anti-Semitism aren’t surprising. The same ADL poll that found that only 14% of Americans held anti-Semitic beliefs, also found that 34% of Muslims in Americans held those beliefs.
Muslims make up around 1% of the country.
How did a woman who represents 34% of 1% of the country suddenly become the face of a political movement that claims to represent half the country?
And why did Democrats rally behind a bigot who represents a third of a percent of the country?
Most Democrats are not anti-Semitic. Even most of the radicals backing Rep. Omar are not explicitly anti-Semitic. But they’re willing to defend anti-Semitism as part of an alliance with that hateful third.
That’s also how the anti-Semitic cartoon showed up in the New York Times.
American politics isn’t anti-Semitic. But it’s full of politically active people who will defend anti-Semites against charges of anti-Semitism because they agree with them on the rest of their political agenda.
Anti-Semitism in American politics is a symptom of this mainstreaming of political radicals.
The media may not be trying to intentionally mainstream anti-Semitism. As in Omar’s case, it’s collateral damage from mainstreaming radicals. The New York Times editorial staff didn’t wake up one morning and decide on the best way to mainstream anti-Semitism by printing a cartoon of Trump in Jewish religious garb. The anti-Semitic cartoon was collateral damage from mainstreaming radicals like Rep. Omar and Linda Sarsour who blurred the line between hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews.
Once the media mainstreamed anti-Semitic radicals, it defended them against charges of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism may not be growing, but tolerance for it is. And that can be just as dangerous. The things that you justify, whitewash and minimize, can become the things that you eventually get on board with.
Racial supremacism and obsessive hatred of Israel are radical views shared by few Americans. But they are the feverish obsessions of small, determined groups of activists who are defining national politics. As their activists gain traction, anti-Semitism leaks from the fringes and into movement organizations.
Radicals make up an even tinier percentage of the country than the campus. But anyone who reads, listens to and watches the media would think that a minority of radicals have become the majority.
This isn’t the Corbynization, but the ‘Campusization’ of American politics.
American politics have come to resemble the college campus with a small group of radicals calling the shot and a media that hardly anyone pays attention to defending them, while the majority doesn’t care.
Campus radicals are no longer just allotting student funds. They’re trying to run the country.
The lessons of the battle against anti-Semitism on campuses will need to be applied to national politics. Jewish groups failed to fight the problem on college campuses. The graduates from many of these institutions went on to bigger and better things. And now the problem has gone nationwide.
Anti-Semitism isn’t an American problem. It’s a radical problem.
The Campusization’ of American politics is the challenge of fighting to prevent a tiny minority of extremists from doing to the country what they have already done to the college campus.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
It’s also dramatically different than the numbers from similar polls conducted in Europe.
How then can we explain the rise in anti-Semitic violence? What about the increased harassment of Jews on campuses and in major cities? And why is there a rise in anti-Semitic discourse?
There’s no climate of hatred in America. The rising anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence are the work of small but highly active political groups who have become disproportionately influential in public life.
The rise in anti-Semitism isn’t happening among ordinary Americans, but among a narrow group of influencers. An anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times isn’t representative of the country. Neither is Rep. Ilhan Omar. Nor are Richard Spencer or the alt-righters who tweet their own anti-Semitic memes.
Anti-Semitic violence is rising. But the total number of incidents remains small. The perpetrators represent a small segment of the population. The violent doesn’t come from ‘anywhere’. On campuses and in synagogues, it comes from a small radical population of the alt-left and the alt-right. In urban areas, it originates with a slightly larger, but still fairly small population, of neighborhood bigots.
Anti-Semitism is marginal among Americans, but it’s increasingly mainstream in political activism.
Anti-Semitic incidents on campuses have doubled for several years in a row. Growing numbers of Jewish students report feeling intimidated and threatened. But the intimidation is the work of a small minority motivated by political ideology. The number of students engaging in campus harassment through hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine remains tiny. The real problem is the complicity of identity politics groups in supporting campus hate groups and administrators in turning a blind eye to it.
The harassment is most intense at a handful of top, but not truly elite schools, in a few states. The situation is not representative of the country or even its average campus. Even in the most problematic schools, only a small politically active minority plays any role in the harassment. But that minority dominates campuses and the campuses provide much of the future leadership of the country.
It’s the same problem nationwide.
Americans don’t have an anti-Semitism problem. American politics has an anti-Semitism problem because, just like on college campuses, small groups are driving an anti-Semitic agenda.
American politics isn’t anti-Semitic. But its leadership is becoming complicit in anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism is a function of political radicalism. And very few Americans are political radicals. But the radicals are driving national politics by constantly shattering political norms and normalizing extremism. Hatred of Jews is just one of the radical ideas heading from the political margins into the mainstream. The mainstream of politics though is a very different thing than the mainstream of American values.
Polls show that most Americans still view anti-Semitism as disgusting. But that’s no longer the case among political activists and elites as anti-Semitism becomes embedded within political movements.
The anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times was not a sign that anti-Semitism had become normalized among Americans, but it had become so normalized in the media that it did not notice when its language of covert anti-Semitism slurred and crossed the red line into overt anti-Semitism.
America’s anti-Semitism problem is worst, not in small rural towns, but in urban media operations.
National politics was radicalized by media operations that took the marginal agendas of fringe groups and mainstreamed them. Anti-Semitism is just another one of those many radical agendas.
The media mainstreamed and normalized radicals like Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour while glossing over their hateful agendas. It celebrates and defends Rep. Omar’s bigotry. Rep. Omar is one of hundreds of members of the House. She’s a freshman with no notable accomplishments. The only reason that everyone in the country knows her name is because the media chose to turn her into a celebrity.
Rep. Omar’s displays of anti-Semitism aren’t surprising. The same ADL poll that found that only 14% of Americans held anti-Semitic beliefs, also found that 34% of Muslims in Americans held those beliefs.
Muslims make up around 1% of the country.
How did a woman who represents 34% of 1% of the country suddenly become the face of a political movement that claims to represent half the country?
And why did Democrats rally behind a bigot who represents a third of a percent of the country?
Most Democrats are not anti-Semitic. Even most of the radicals backing Rep. Omar are not explicitly anti-Semitic. But they’re willing to defend anti-Semitism as part of an alliance with that hateful third.
That’s also how the anti-Semitic cartoon showed up in the New York Times.
American politics isn’t anti-Semitic. But it’s full of politically active people who will defend anti-Semites against charges of anti-Semitism because they agree with them on the rest of their political agenda.
Anti-Semitism in American politics is a symptom of this mainstreaming of political radicals.
The media may not be trying to intentionally mainstream anti-Semitism. As in Omar’s case, it’s collateral damage from mainstreaming radicals. The New York Times editorial staff didn’t wake up one morning and decide on the best way to mainstream anti-Semitism by printing a cartoon of Trump in Jewish religious garb. The anti-Semitic cartoon was collateral damage from mainstreaming radicals like Rep. Omar and Linda Sarsour who blurred the line between hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews.
Once the media mainstreamed anti-Semitic radicals, it defended them against charges of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism may not be growing, but tolerance for it is. And that can be just as dangerous. The things that you justify, whitewash and minimize, can become the things that you eventually get on board with.
Racial supremacism and obsessive hatred of Israel are radical views shared by few Americans. But they are the feverish obsessions of small, determined groups of activists who are defining national politics. As their activists gain traction, anti-Semitism leaks from the fringes and into movement organizations.
Radicals make up an even tinier percentage of the country than the campus. But anyone who reads, listens to and watches the media would think that a minority of radicals have become the majority.
This isn’t the Corbynization, but the ‘Campusization’ of American politics.
American politics have come to resemble the college campus with a small group of radicals calling the shot and a media that hardly anyone pays attention to defending them, while the majority doesn’t care.
Campus radicals are no longer just allotting student funds. They’re trying to run the country.
The lessons of the battle against anti-Semitism on campuses will need to be applied to national politics. Jewish groups failed to fight the problem on college campuses. The graduates from many of these institutions went on to bigger and better things. And now the problem has gone nationwide.
Anti-Semitism isn’t an American problem. It’s a radical problem.
The Campusization’ of American politics is the challenge of fighting to prevent a tiny minority of extremists from doing to the country what they have already done to the college campus.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Thursday, May 16, 2019
Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It
“But, it’s a private company.”
It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.
In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue."
“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine."
The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.
But it overlooks two very simple facts.
The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation".
“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its ‘fact checks’.
All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.
Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?
What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?
It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?
Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.
The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.
The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA's Arpanet.
Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.
Where did Google come from? "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.
Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.
Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.
"A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right," Thomas Jefferson argued.
There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.
Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.
Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.
Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.
But there are two answers.
First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.
Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.
In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court's decision found that, "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen."
The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.
When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.
Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.
Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.
A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.
Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.
If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.
That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.
Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.
Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the ‘free market side of history’ will automatically fix the problem.
As the internet has devolved from its origins in academia to a set of handheld devices controlled by one of two companies, and then to a set of smart assistants controlled by one of two companies, it has become far less open. Even if Google were to lose its monopoly, Silicon Valley hosts a politicized workforce which allies with the media to compel any rising new company to toe the same line.
And if that fails, there are always House and Senate hearings and harder laws coming out of Europe.
We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet. Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.
In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue."
“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine."
The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.
But it overlooks two very simple facts.
The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation".
“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its ‘fact checks’.
All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.
Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.
Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?
What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?
It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?
Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.
The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.
The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA's Arpanet.
Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.
Where did Google come from? "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.
Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.
Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.
"A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right," Thomas Jefferson argued.
There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.
Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.
Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.
Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.
But there are two answers.
First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.
Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.
In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court's decision found that, "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen."
The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.
When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.
Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.
Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.
A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.
Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.
If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.
That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.
Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.
Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the ‘free market side of history’ will automatically fix the problem.
As the internet has devolved from its origins in academia to a set of handheld devices controlled by one of two companies, and then to a set of smart assistants controlled by one of two companies, it has become far less open. Even if Google were to lose its monopoly, Silicon Valley hosts a politicized workforce which allies with the media to compel any rising new company to toe the same line.
And if that fails, there are always House and Senate hearings and harder laws coming out of Europe.
We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet. Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
A Dozen People Were Shot in Buttigieg's City While He Ran for President
In early April, South Bend Police Chief Scott Ruszkowski had two concerns. His boss, Mayor Peter Buttigieg, was preparing to formally announce his presidential run.
The blighted Rust Belt city, riddled with gangs and bodies, was Buttigieg's platform.
The bodies were Chief Ruszkowski's other concern.
Another fatal shooting had happened a day earlier. A reporter asked him how many shootings had taken place in South Bend. The top cop's response was both bitter and evasive. “After one shooting, I stop counting because all of these shootings are frustrating and make me sick to my stomach."
There’s little doubt that Chief Ruszkowski knew the number. South Bend’s plan for fighting crime has run heavy on statistics and light on results. But he knew that the number would be inconvenient. Instead he touted the “special event” where his boss, after running the city into the ground, would announce, not a plan for dealing with the shootings, but a run for President of the United States.
By April, the politician whose supporters called him, “Mayor Pete” had been neglecting the city where 8,515 voters in an apathetic city of 102,245 had elected him mayor. While the bodies piled up, Buttigieg and his boyfriend were rushing between upscale fundraisers and media appearances.
On April 18th, Mayor Peter Buttigieg had been the guest of honor at a Manhattan fundraiser by the majority owner of the third largest theater chain on Broadway. His boyfriend had sat in the VIP section at one of the theater mogul’s productions. Meanwhile, a world away from the glamorous Chelsea scene, a vigil was being held in South Bend for Keyontae Jones, a 21-year-old man, who had been shot dead.
Myron Draine, 19, was also charged in a shooting that wounded two Indiana University South Bend baseball players, leaving one paralyzed from the neck down. Draine was a member of the G-Block gang and had been trying to avenge the shooting death of a fellow gang member in South Bend’s ganglands.
After posing for selfies with members of Manhattan’s elite, Buttigieg caught a flight to South Carolina. In South Bend, a wounded man walked into the hospital after someone opened fire on his car.
On January 23rd, Buttigieg had announced at a Washington D.C. press conference that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. He claimed that what qualified him was his "experience leading one of America's turnaround cities" which was now "on a terrific trajectory".
South Bend was rated one of the worst cities to live in the country. It’s been listed as one of the nation’s murder capitals where half the residents live in poverty. That’s a trajectory. But not a terrific one.
A day later, a South Bend man was arrested in a shooting and carjacking gone wrong.
A week before Buttigieg claimed that South Bend’s turnaround qualified him to run America, three people were arrested for shooting one woman in the chest and wounding another.
By the end of March, as Peter Buttigieg turned into the new Dem crush, 6 people had been shot in his city. A talented baseball player had been paralyzed and an 11-month old baby had been wounded.
"My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete," Buttigieg declared in the city he now occasionally visited. "I am a proud son of South Bend, Indiana.”
He was so proud that he would not be running for a third term in office.
After the latest brutal violence, he admitted that, “life here is far from perfect.” He claimed once again that, “we've changed our trajectory.” He didn’t show the press and his fans, the bodies. Instead he triumphantly touted the makeover of a Studebaker plant into a “tech startup incubator”. The makeover by a trendy Chicago architecture firm had been funded by a grant from the Pence administration.
The Studebaker plant had employed 23,000 workers. Buttigieg’s proposed new vision for South Bend, at a cost of $23 million, assuming it even goes anywhere, will employ few residents from the city.
Buttigieg’s vision for the Rust Belt was the same old failed Obama pitch of giving up on manufacturing jobs, and converting factories into tech incubators that will only employ workers with college degrees.
Meanwhile, in the week before the launch, a man was fatally shot, and two days beforehand another man showed up at the hospital with 4 gunshot wounds.
While Mayor Buttigieg touted the country touting his South Bend success, there had been a dozen shootings.
Two of them were fatal.
Despite claiming to be its proud son, Buttigieg doesn’t talk about South Bend that much. He would rather pick fights with Christian conservatives than have anyone look too closely at his record.
How is it possible that a dozen people can be shot in the city that a top presidential candidate is supposed to be running without the media ever reporting on it or asking Buttigieg about it?
Photos from the Chelsea fundraiser at an undisclosed location showed a sea of white, wealthy men. The men wounded and dying in South Bend have been mostly black men. They are not part of the world of Mayor Pete which is rooted in Notre Dame and in the area catering to its students and faculty.
Buttigieg represents the gown side of South Bend’s town and gown divide. He was never the mayor of South Bend. He is the mayor of Notre Dame U: the son of a Marxist professor on the faculty. Notre Dame’s student population of over 8,000 is about the same size as the 8,000+ voters who elected him.
The boy wonder hasn’t connected with a working-class Rust Belt electorate. There’s not that many of them left in South Bend. Nor has he clicked with the city’s sizable African-American population.
In the 2020 polls, he performs best with white lefties. He doesn’t even rank among black voters.
As Mayor Peter Buttigieg heads to Los Angeles for a fundraiser co-hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, the three thugs who murdered a man outside Frank’s Place are going through the legal system.
Frank’s Place is a long way from the glamorously Beverly Hills mansions where “Mayor Pete” will be pressing the flesh of the beautiful people. After the shooting, Frank’s manager urged the city to do something about the violence. But the guy whose job that is will be in California posing with celebrities.
In response to the latest murder, Buttigieg’s office issue a press release touting his failed Group Violence Intervention program and “strong partnerships” with “community leaders”.
A dozen people have been shot. And a dozen more will be and then a dozen more while he drinks champagne at fundraisers, pops up on talk shows, appears on Saturday Night Live, dines at nightclubs and restaurants from Brentwood to Brooklyn, and is feted, toasted and celebrated by the elite.
The lives of the fallen in the absentee politician’s city, unlike his political ambitions, don’t matter.
The poor black and occasionally white people being shot in South Bend don’t exist for the wealthy lefties swooning over Buttigieg’s class president routine that got him elected the Mayor of Notre Dame U.
The bodies in South Bend’s hospitals and morgues show that its mayor couldn’t run a city of a hundred thousand let alone a nation of over three hundred million. And the truly damning thing is not only that Buttigieg failed South Bend, but that the moment he sniffed out an opportunity, he abandoned his job.
Buttigieg opportunistically left his city in its hour of need. He parties while South Bend bleeds.
South Bend, like so many other failed cities, is the work of generations of Democrat politicians. Buttigieg is just the latest hack to pump and dump a city that has so little hope that it never even bothers to vote.
While the vigils, the murder trials and the shootings continue, Buttigieg is cashing in from San Diego to San Francisco with a busy schedule of fundraisers through May and June. For a thousand bucks you can meet with him in Palo Alto. For $2,800 you can get a picture taken with him in Los Angeles.
But if you live in South Bend and want to talk to “Mayor Pete” about the bullets flying through your windows, you’re going to need a plane ticket, a shiny new suit and a whole lot of money.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
The blighted Rust Belt city, riddled with gangs and bodies, was Buttigieg's platform.
The bodies were Chief Ruszkowski's other concern.
Another fatal shooting had happened a day earlier. A reporter asked him how many shootings had taken place in South Bend. The top cop's response was both bitter and evasive. “After one shooting, I stop counting because all of these shootings are frustrating and make me sick to my stomach."
There’s little doubt that Chief Ruszkowski knew the number. South Bend’s plan for fighting crime has run heavy on statistics and light on results. But he knew that the number would be inconvenient. Instead he touted the “special event” where his boss, after running the city into the ground, would announce, not a plan for dealing with the shootings, but a run for President of the United States.
By April, the politician whose supporters called him, “Mayor Pete” had been neglecting the city where 8,515 voters in an apathetic city of 102,245 had elected him mayor. While the bodies piled up, Buttigieg and his boyfriend were rushing between upscale fundraisers and media appearances.
On April 18th, Mayor Peter Buttigieg had been the guest of honor at a Manhattan fundraiser by the majority owner of the third largest theater chain on Broadway. His boyfriend had sat in the VIP section at one of the theater mogul’s productions. Meanwhile, a world away from the glamorous Chelsea scene, a vigil was being held in South Bend for Keyontae Jones, a 21-year-old man, who had been shot dead.
Myron Draine, 19, was also charged in a shooting that wounded two Indiana University South Bend baseball players, leaving one paralyzed from the neck down. Draine was a member of the G-Block gang and had been trying to avenge the shooting death of a fellow gang member in South Bend’s ganglands.
After posing for selfies with members of Manhattan’s elite, Buttigieg caught a flight to South Carolina. In South Bend, a wounded man walked into the hospital after someone opened fire on his car.
On January 23rd, Buttigieg had announced at a Washington D.C. press conference that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president. He claimed that what qualified him was his "experience leading one of America's turnaround cities" which was now "on a terrific trajectory".
South Bend was rated one of the worst cities to live in the country. It’s been listed as one of the nation’s murder capitals where half the residents live in poverty. That’s a trajectory. But not a terrific one.
A day later, a South Bend man was arrested in a shooting and carjacking gone wrong.
A week before Buttigieg claimed that South Bend’s turnaround qualified him to run America, three people were arrested for shooting one woman in the chest and wounding another.
By the end of March, as Peter Buttigieg turned into the new Dem crush, 6 people had been shot in his city. A talented baseball player had been paralyzed and an 11-month old baby had been wounded.
"My name is Pete Buttigieg. They call me Mayor Pete," Buttigieg declared in the city he now occasionally visited. "I am a proud son of South Bend, Indiana.”
He was so proud that he would not be running for a third term in office.
After the latest brutal violence, he admitted that, “life here is far from perfect.” He claimed once again that, “we've changed our trajectory.” He didn’t show the press and his fans, the bodies. Instead he triumphantly touted the makeover of a Studebaker plant into a “tech startup incubator”. The makeover by a trendy Chicago architecture firm had been funded by a grant from the Pence administration.
The Studebaker plant had employed 23,000 workers. Buttigieg’s proposed new vision for South Bend, at a cost of $23 million, assuming it even goes anywhere, will employ few residents from the city.
Buttigieg’s vision for the Rust Belt was the same old failed Obama pitch of giving up on manufacturing jobs, and converting factories into tech incubators that will only employ workers with college degrees.
Meanwhile, in the week before the launch, a man was fatally shot, and two days beforehand another man showed up at the hospital with 4 gunshot wounds.
While Mayor Buttigieg touted the country touting his South Bend success, there had been a dozen shootings.
Two of them were fatal.
Despite claiming to be its proud son, Buttigieg doesn’t talk about South Bend that much. He would rather pick fights with Christian conservatives than have anyone look too closely at his record.
How is it possible that a dozen people can be shot in the city that a top presidential candidate is supposed to be running without the media ever reporting on it or asking Buttigieg about it?
Photos from the Chelsea fundraiser at an undisclosed location showed a sea of white, wealthy men. The men wounded and dying in South Bend have been mostly black men. They are not part of the world of Mayor Pete which is rooted in Notre Dame and in the area catering to its students and faculty.
Buttigieg represents the gown side of South Bend’s town and gown divide. He was never the mayor of South Bend. He is the mayor of Notre Dame U: the son of a Marxist professor on the faculty. Notre Dame’s student population of over 8,000 is about the same size as the 8,000+ voters who elected him.
The boy wonder hasn’t connected with a working-class Rust Belt electorate. There’s not that many of them left in South Bend. Nor has he clicked with the city’s sizable African-American population.
In the 2020 polls, he performs best with white lefties. He doesn’t even rank among black voters.
As Mayor Peter Buttigieg heads to Los Angeles for a fundraiser co-hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow, the three thugs who murdered a man outside Frank’s Place are going through the legal system.
Frank’s Place is a long way from the glamorously Beverly Hills mansions where “Mayor Pete” will be pressing the flesh of the beautiful people. After the shooting, Frank’s manager urged the city to do something about the violence. But the guy whose job that is will be in California posing with celebrities.
In response to the latest murder, Buttigieg’s office issue a press release touting his failed Group Violence Intervention program and “strong partnerships” with “community leaders”.
A dozen people have been shot. And a dozen more will be and then a dozen more while he drinks champagne at fundraisers, pops up on talk shows, appears on Saturday Night Live, dines at nightclubs and restaurants from Brentwood to Brooklyn, and is feted, toasted and celebrated by the elite.
The lives of the fallen in the absentee politician’s city, unlike his political ambitions, don’t matter.
The poor black and occasionally white people being shot in South Bend don’t exist for the wealthy lefties swooning over Buttigieg’s class president routine that got him elected the Mayor of Notre Dame U.
The bodies in South Bend’s hospitals and morgues show that its mayor couldn’t run a city of a hundred thousand let alone a nation of over three hundred million. And the truly damning thing is not only that Buttigieg failed South Bend, but that the moment he sniffed out an opportunity, he abandoned his job.
Buttigieg opportunistically left his city in its hour of need. He parties while South Bend bleeds.
South Bend, like so many other failed cities, is the work of generations of Democrat politicians. Buttigieg is just the latest hack to pump and dump a city that has so little hope that it never even bothers to vote.
While the vigils, the murder trials and the shootings continue, Buttigieg is cashing in from San Diego to San Francisco with a busy schedule of fundraisers through May and June. For a thousand bucks you can meet with him in Palo Alto. For $2,800 you can get a picture taken with him in Los Angeles.
But if you live in South Bend and want to talk to “Mayor Pete” about the bullets flying through your windows, you’re going to need a plane ticket, a shiny new suit and a whole lot of money.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Latin America is Collapsing and Taking America With It
Long before the current scenes of thousands of migrants showing up in New Mexico or Arizona, the northward migration was fueled by a combination of Latin American instability and American greed for cheap labor going back over a century to the Mexican Revolution.
Venezuela’s spectacular collapse may be dominating the news cycle now, but a Latin American country usually implodes in a spectacular fashion every few years. Even now, there is political chaos in Nicaragua, with major protests demanding the ouster of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, and brewing scandals in Argentina, Brazil and Peru that could expand and tear any or all of the three countries apart.
Political instability, sharp swings from the far left to the far right, from Marxist terrorists to military warlords, are not a temporary aberration that can be fixed with our foreign aid or military intervention. They’re an enduring feature of political life that are as much a part of Latin America as the Declaration, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers are a part of the United States of America.
Political and civic institutions in Latin America are sources of instability. What little stability there is comes from the legal economy of oligarchs and the shadow economy of organized crime. The oligarchs work national economies and provide opportunities for educated professionals and trained workers. The crime lords, cartels and gangs offer security and economic opportunity for those nearer to the bottom.
America is not going to Americanize the countries south of the border. Instead America is being remade along a more Latin American model with radical politics, gang violence and a loss of civic confidence.
Latin American revolutions delivering cheap labor to America is not a new phenomenon. The real life Joads of Grapes of Wrath wouldn’t have been able to find agricultural work because the jobs were filled by Mexicans. The Cristero War’s Mexican migrants had been protected from the Immigration Act’s quotas because then, as now, agribusiness insisted that they couldn’t run farms without them.
Even in the Dust Bowl era, the same old interests insisted that there were jobs Americans wouldn’t do.
A century later the same Mexican workers that helped build California agriculture, decimated it by voting in Democrats whose environmental policies starved farms of water and strangled them with countless regulations. The workers have moved on to water-hungry cities where they don’t pick fruit, they provide services to a wealthy population of professionals, and then pass the bill to social services.
American taxpayers are being taxed to death so that blue state urban professionals can have cheap nannies, housekeepers and gardeners working off the books and making their lifestyles possible. The hospital visits, prison terms and welfare of that shadow population is financed by onerous taxes.
Despite the partisan tilt of migration, it took a revolution in the GOP to try and do something about it.
The wall is an important symbol not only of American sovereignty, but of the recognition that we are not going to fix the rest of the continent. When President Trump pulled foreign aid from migrant countries, he was not only sending them a message, but tossing out the swamp talking point that the best way to stop migration wasn’t a wall, but nation building in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
No amount of foreign aid is going to change the reality on the ground in the homeland of MS-13.
The impact of southern migration on America isn’t just about the charged demographic debates or the shift of red states to blue states. Demographic change is not going to eliminate Republicans. There are plenty of right-wing parties south of the border. The nature of what being on the right means will change in a majority-minority country. The end result won’t be conservative: it will be fascist.
Mass migration won’t end the GOP or the right. It will however eliminate American conservatism.
Leftists accuse Republicans of being fascists for opposing open borders. But open borders are the surest formula for fascism. Conservatism with its constitutional foundation of individual rights, limited government, and separation of powers will become a historical footnote. Instead, America will ricochet between socialists and national socialists, the way that some of our southern neighbors already do.
The crisis is already upon us.
A Democrat movement untethered from the middle class has come to be defined by the Obama alliance of radical white lefties and minority voters. With no further reason to be moderate, it is rapidly embracing any political extreme that is put forward, from packing the Supreme Court to letting the Boston Bomber vote to slavery reparations. Political stability requires respect for civic institutions and a secure middle class. America used to have those. Latin America never did. Now we’re losing them too.
The media has made much of the alt-right. While it describes this as a white nationalist problem, many prominent members of the alt-right are second generation Latin American immigrants. Nazism was never popular in America. Fascism and Nazism have more significant followings south of the border. The rise of the alt-right is not a reaction to a more diverse country. It is a product of that very diversity.
Gun violence is another major lefty talking point. But most of the gun violence in this country is gang-related. The problem isn’t the guns. It’s that gangs are flooding into this country and fighting over territory. We don’t have a Second Amendment problem. We have a border security crisis.
The pro-crime movement disempowers police so that ordinary people turn to criminal organizations for protection, replicating the existing model in many of the countries the migrants are coming from. As political radicals destroy civic institutions in their battle for power, gang leaders emerge as rivals to elected officials. That’s already the case in Chicago. It will become the norm in cities across the country.
Most of the vices controlled by organized crime, from gambling to drugs to prostitution to illegal migration, have already been legalized or are on the way to being legalized. This will not, contrary to some optimistic libertarian predictions, result in the destruction of organized crime. Instead, organized crime will thrive in the social chaos of the broken families, shattered communities and lost values.
The Prohibition analogy was wrong. Legalizing crimes doesn’t get rid of organized crime. Men with guns and no morals can always find ways to make money. Especially in a society losing its own morals.
Policies don’t stop crime. Social cohesion does. As a society breaks down, it tries to fight the most obvious symptoms of social breakdown with violence, before embracing the breakdown until there is no longer a distinction between law and criminality, between cops and gangs, and politicians and bosses.
Mass migration breaks down social cohesion. Immigration transformed major cities a hundred years ago, and then took a breather, allowing them to develop their own culture and identity. The organized crime that they brought with them faded as the next generation assimilated and became Americans.
That’s where the New York City, Boston or Philly we know came from. But there are no more geographic restrictions and no breathers. Not when hordes of Somalis are crossing the border on the way to Maine.
America can absorb new immigrants. But it needs time, space and control over the process. And, most of all, it needs to have a culture to absorb them into. Constant mass migration deprives us of the time, space and control. And the Left has deprived us of a culture, leaving nothing but vapidity and guilt.
The collapse of social cohesion wrecks the middle class leading to political radicalism and gang power. Political instability and social instability form a violent cycle which drive each other. The migrants heading north carry their radical politics with them. And the organized criminals who accompany them set up shop and quickly transform political instability into social instability.
That is what is tearing apart America.
Mexico began the great tradition of dumping its social problems in America over a century ago. These days it’s become an extremely profitable endeavor with billions in remittances pouring back in. Latin American countries export unskilled labor and gang members, and get back billions of dollars.
It’s a great deal for them. And a terrible deal for us.
Honduras and El Salvador don’t care if Trump cuts off its foreign aid. Not when remittances make up a fifth of their GDPs. The more of their citizens they get across the border and onto our social services, the more money their countries have. It’s not just the migrants who are exploiting the United States to avoid the social collapse of their countries. Latin American countries are exploiting America wholesale.
And, like a drowning swimmer, they are dragging us down with them even while we try to rescue them.
Latin America is collapsing. But, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it’s always collapsing. Its people have learned to live like that. If we don’t secure our borders, we’ll have to learn to live that way too.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Venezuela’s spectacular collapse may be dominating the news cycle now, but a Latin American country usually implodes in a spectacular fashion every few years. Even now, there is political chaos in Nicaragua, with major protests demanding the ouster of Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, and brewing scandals in Argentina, Brazil and Peru that could expand and tear any or all of the three countries apart.
Political instability, sharp swings from the far left to the far right, from Marxist terrorists to military warlords, are not a temporary aberration that can be fixed with our foreign aid or military intervention. They’re an enduring feature of political life that are as much a part of Latin America as the Declaration, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers are a part of the United States of America.
Political and civic institutions in Latin America are sources of instability. What little stability there is comes from the legal economy of oligarchs and the shadow economy of organized crime. The oligarchs work national economies and provide opportunities for educated professionals and trained workers. The crime lords, cartels and gangs offer security and economic opportunity for those nearer to the bottom.
America is not going to Americanize the countries south of the border. Instead America is being remade along a more Latin American model with radical politics, gang violence and a loss of civic confidence.
Latin American revolutions delivering cheap labor to America is not a new phenomenon. The real life Joads of Grapes of Wrath wouldn’t have been able to find agricultural work because the jobs were filled by Mexicans. The Cristero War’s Mexican migrants had been protected from the Immigration Act’s quotas because then, as now, agribusiness insisted that they couldn’t run farms without them.
Even in the Dust Bowl era, the same old interests insisted that there were jobs Americans wouldn’t do.
A century later the same Mexican workers that helped build California agriculture, decimated it by voting in Democrats whose environmental policies starved farms of water and strangled them with countless regulations. The workers have moved on to water-hungry cities where they don’t pick fruit, they provide services to a wealthy population of professionals, and then pass the bill to social services.
American taxpayers are being taxed to death so that blue state urban professionals can have cheap nannies, housekeepers and gardeners working off the books and making their lifestyles possible. The hospital visits, prison terms and welfare of that shadow population is financed by onerous taxes.
Despite the partisan tilt of migration, it took a revolution in the GOP to try and do something about it.
The wall is an important symbol not only of American sovereignty, but of the recognition that we are not going to fix the rest of the continent. When President Trump pulled foreign aid from migrant countries, he was not only sending them a message, but tossing out the swamp talking point that the best way to stop migration wasn’t a wall, but nation building in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
No amount of foreign aid is going to change the reality on the ground in the homeland of MS-13.
The impact of southern migration on America isn’t just about the charged demographic debates or the shift of red states to blue states. Demographic change is not going to eliminate Republicans. There are plenty of right-wing parties south of the border. The nature of what being on the right means will change in a majority-minority country. The end result won’t be conservative: it will be fascist.
Mass migration won’t end the GOP or the right. It will however eliminate American conservatism.
Leftists accuse Republicans of being fascists for opposing open borders. But open borders are the surest formula for fascism. Conservatism with its constitutional foundation of individual rights, limited government, and separation of powers will become a historical footnote. Instead, America will ricochet between socialists and national socialists, the way that some of our southern neighbors already do.
The crisis is already upon us.
A Democrat movement untethered from the middle class has come to be defined by the Obama alliance of radical white lefties and minority voters. With no further reason to be moderate, it is rapidly embracing any political extreme that is put forward, from packing the Supreme Court to letting the Boston Bomber vote to slavery reparations. Political stability requires respect for civic institutions and a secure middle class. America used to have those. Latin America never did. Now we’re losing them too.
The media has made much of the alt-right. While it describes this as a white nationalist problem, many prominent members of the alt-right are second generation Latin American immigrants. Nazism was never popular in America. Fascism and Nazism have more significant followings south of the border. The rise of the alt-right is not a reaction to a more diverse country. It is a product of that very diversity.
Gun violence is another major lefty talking point. But most of the gun violence in this country is gang-related. The problem isn’t the guns. It’s that gangs are flooding into this country and fighting over territory. We don’t have a Second Amendment problem. We have a border security crisis.
The pro-crime movement disempowers police so that ordinary people turn to criminal organizations for protection, replicating the existing model in many of the countries the migrants are coming from. As political radicals destroy civic institutions in their battle for power, gang leaders emerge as rivals to elected officials. That’s already the case in Chicago. It will become the norm in cities across the country.
Most of the vices controlled by organized crime, from gambling to drugs to prostitution to illegal migration, have already been legalized or are on the way to being legalized. This will not, contrary to some optimistic libertarian predictions, result in the destruction of organized crime. Instead, organized crime will thrive in the social chaos of the broken families, shattered communities and lost values.
The Prohibition analogy was wrong. Legalizing crimes doesn’t get rid of organized crime. Men with guns and no morals can always find ways to make money. Especially in a society losing its own morals.
Policies don’t stop crime. Social cohesion does. As a society breaks down, it tries to fight the most obvious symptoms of social breakdown with violence, before embracing the breakdown until there is no longer a distinction between law and criminality, between cops and gangs, and politicians and bosses.
Mass migration breaks down social cohesion. Immigration transformed major cities a hundred years ago, and then took a breather, allowing them to develop their own culture and identity. The organized crime that they brought with them faded as the next generation assimilated and became Americans.
That’s where the New York City, Boston or Philly we know came from. But there are no more geographic restrictions and no breathers. Not when hordes of Somalis are crossing the border on the way to Maine.
America can absorb new immigrants. But it needs time, space and control over the process. And, most of all, it needs to have a culture to absorb them into. Constant mass migration deprives us of the time, space and control. And the Left has deprived us of a culture, leaving nothing but vapidity and guilt.
The collapse of social cohesion wrecks the middle class leading to political radicalism and gang power. Political instability and social instability form a violent cycle which drive each other. The migrants heading north carry their radical politics with them. And the organized criminals who accompany them set up shop and quickly transform political instability into social instability.
That is what is tearing apart America.
Mexico began the great tradition of dumping its social problems in America over a century ago. These days it’s become an extremely profitable endeavor with billions in remittances pouring back in. Latin American countries export unskilled labor and gang members, and get back billions of dollars.
It’s a great deal for them. And a terrible deal for us.
Honduras and El Salvador don’t care if Trump cuts off its foreign aid. Not when remittances make up a fifth of their GDPs. The more of their citizens they get across the border and onto our social services, the more money their countries have. It’s not just the migrants who are exploiting the United States to avoid the social collapse of their countries. Latin American countries are exploiting America wholesale.
And, like a drowning swimmer, they are dragging us down with them even while we try to rescue them.
Latin America is collapsing. But, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it’s always collapsing. Its people have learned to live like that. If we don’t secure our borders, we’ll have to learn to live that way too.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Sunday, May 12, 2019
The Brainwashing of a Nation
Brainwashing isn’t a secretive event that takes place in hidden rooms. No hypnotists or vials full of chemicals are required. It takes place every day on a massive scale across the United States.
Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead, it transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons.
The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and violence.
Brainwashing isn’t magic, but it can look like magic. The sleight of hand that causes us to think so is our firm belief in our reason and free will. It’s easier to believe in changing minds through hypnotism and drugs, than to understand, what the successful practitioners of brainwashing do, that the human mind is more malleable than we like to think, and that the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious.
The art and science of brainwashing is well known. We don’t know it because we choose not to.
Brainwashing happens every day. It doesn’t have to mean a complete transformation of identity. On the simplest level, it means compelling someone to believe something that isn’t true.
It’s as simple as two cops browbeating an innocent suspect into believing that he’s guilty. The officers and the suspect won’t see their interaction as brainwashing. The officers can honestly believe in his guilt. And, at the end of the process, the suspect will also believe that he committed the crime. He will even be able to describe in great detail how he committed it. That’s common, everyday brainwashing.
The key elements of brainwashing are present in that cold room with the peeling paint on the walls. Those three elements are control, crisis and emotional resonance. To successfully brainwash someone, you have to control their environment, force a crisis on them, and then tap into core emotions, fear, love, guilt, hate, shame, and guide them through the crisis by accepting and internalizing a new belief.
The belief can be anything, but the pseudo-religious ritual taps into an emotional core requiring them to believe that they were bad people, and that by accepting this new belief, they are now good people.
This false conversion is the essence of brainwashing and of leftist political awakening narratives.
The human mind, like the human body, adapts to a crisis with a fight-or-flight response. Brainwashing forces the mind into a flight response. Once in flight mode, the mind can rationalize a new belief as a protective behavior that will keep it safe. Even when, as in the case of the suspect, the new belief will actually destroy his life. Fight or flight mode inhibits long term thinking. In panic mode, destructive and suicidal behaviors seem like solutions because they offer an escape from unbearable chemical stresses.
There’s a good biological reason for that. Our minds stop us from thinking too much in a crisis so that we can take urgent action, like running into a fire or at a gunman, that our rational minds might not allow us to do. But that same function can be ‘hacked’ by artificially putting people into fight-or-flight mode to break them down and shortcut their higher reasoning functions. Decisions reached subconsciously in fight-or-flight mode will then be rationalized and internalized after the initial crisis has passed.
When that internalization happens, then the brainwashing is real.
Almost anyone can be compelled to say anything under enough stress. Many can be forced to believe it. The acid test of brainwashing is whether they will retain that belief once fight-or-flight mode passes.
Cults, abusive relationships and totalitarian movements maintain ‘total crisis’, shutting down higher reasoning, creating a permanent state of stress by triggering fight-or-flight responses unpredictably. This leads to Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive tries to control their fate through total emotional identification with their captor, pack behavior, loss of identity and will, and eventually suicide or death.
Total crisis leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, detachment from friends and family, and violence.
How do you brainwash a nation?
Control the national environment, force a crisis on the country, and tap into their fear and guilt. And then you can outlaw planes, cows, skyscrapers, straws, plastic bags and the rest of the Green New Deal.
The environmental crisis is just one example of how leftist movements can brainwash a nation.
The growing number of millennials who say that they will not have children because of environmental panic is an example of how brainwashing can make suicidal behavior seem like self-preservation.
Since the Left still lacks total control over the United States, it relies on repetition, itself a form of control and stress, to create fear and panic. It makes up for its lack of physical control by bombarding Americans with messages meant to inspire fear, love, hate and guilt through the media, through the educational system, through entertainment and through every possible messaging channel.
Global Warming panic is one of a succession of manufactured leftist crises in America that began with a class crisis. transitioned to a racial crisis, and then to an environmental crisis.
Each of the crises claimed that society was on track to an inevitable apocalypse, that the nature of the crisis, economic, racial or environmental, had been verified by experts, that we were all complicit in the crisis, and that the only solution was radical change administered by the crisis experts.
The panic over Trump is a micro-crisis of the sort that leftists detonate in the political opposition, but the fear, anger, terror, stress and violence on display are typical of the crisis mode of fight-or-flight.
The “Resistance” isn’t a political movement. It’s a political cult whose crisis was the 2016 election. Its irrational belief that Trump is a Russian agent is typical of the conspiratorial mindset of cults. Its inability to understand that its convictions are completely irrational show how brainwashing works.
The 2016 election inflicted on its members a loss of control. Trump became the crisis embodying their loss of control. Their fear, guilt and anger induced stress that altered their behavior and beliefs.
And, within the very recent past, millions came to believe that Trump was really working for Moscow.
This is brainwashing on a timescale so immediate that we can easily recall it. Yet most of us have trouble understanding how it works and why it works. And that lack of understanding is holding us back.
How can smart people fall for minor variations of the same lie in generation after generation?
Smart people make the best brainwashing targets. Cults recruit bright students on college campuses, they target aspiring executives looking for leadership training, and dissatisfied professionals searching for meaning. Cults are rarely made up of stupid people. They’re made up of smart, vulnerable people.
Human beings don’t behave rationally. We rationalize our behavior.
The more people rationalize, the more they can be brainwashed. Your old Casio digital watch can’t be hacked. Even if it were hacked, there’s not much it could be made to do. Your smartphone can be hacked and made to do more. Your desktop can be hacked and made to do even more. Intelligence doesn’t make us less vulnerable to being manipulated, it leaves us much more vulnerable.
The political brainwashing campaign in this country targets the upper class and the middle class. The best subjects for brainwashing are intelligent and emotionally vulnerable. They’re easier to manipulate by using the gap between their emotions and their reason, and their emotional instability makes it easier to force them into crisis mode. The ideal subjects are in their teens and their early twenties. In modern times, that’s a period in which identity is still developing, and can be fractured and remade.
That’s why the Left aims most of its brainwashing efforts at high school and college students. It’s why it prioritized control of the educational system and the entertainment industry above all else.
Both of these have become highly profitable brainwashing industries: one sugar-coated, and one bitter.
Classrooms and campuses provide physical control over students for nearly two decades of their lives. That control was initially used for simple dogmatic preaching. Then it escalated to cult behavior with classroom role-playing rituals encouraging mass expressions of love and hate, transformations of sexual and gender identity, detachment from friends and family, and violent displays of pain and rage.
The modern American identity politics campus looks a whole lot like Jonestown or a Hitler Youth rally.
Exploiting sexuality, triggering guilt and shame in children, to transform their identity was usually the work of the lowest savage tribes and the vilest cults. It’s now the American education system.
The techniques aren’t new. They’re as evil and old as time itself.
Like every cult, the modern campus claims to serve an educational purpose, helping students find meaning and purpose, but insisting that they must first be cured of the subconscious evils such as white privilege and toxic masculinity that are holding them back through a process that deconstructs their barriers, encourages confession, expressions of trauma, shame and guilt, to create new identities.
This isn’t education. It’s not even dogmatic lecturing. It’s the same basic set of techniques used by any major cult in the country. Once colleges began trying to cure their students of subconscious evils at closed sessions, under the guidance of unlicensed therapists associated with a movement, there was no longer any difference between them and that of any cult, except billions in taxpayer dollars.
The sessions at which white privilege or toxic masculinity can be cured, or at which students are put in touch with the trauma of their oppression as minorities, duplicate cult indoctrination in every regard.
They’re the successors of consciousness raising groups whose name even signaled their cultish nature.
Despite attempts to wrap leftist politics in the objective garb of the expert, the scientist, the scholar and the bureaucrat, its heart lay in its spiritual narrative of a struggle between an altruistic good and a materialistic evil, the inevitable historical triumph of progress over reaction, and the pseudo-religious induction of new recruits into the gnostic revelation of our oppressive world with its layered conspiracies of capitalism, sexism and racism. The original ‘red pill’. Or, ‘little red book’.
To non-cult members, it’s brainwashing. To cult members, it’s revelation. The distinction may seem like a matter of perspective between believers and non-believers, but it lies in the question of consent. Brainwashing always relies on removing control from the victim. The control may be taken openly, by force. It can be taken covertly through manipulation and deceit. But there is always a loss of control.
The victim does not understand the process by which they are being taken apart and put back together until much later. And if the process works as intended, he or she may never realize it happened at all. Brainwashing’s cruelest trick lies in using the intelligence of its victim as its greatest ally in building a trap for its own ego and its consciousness that it cannot escape from without a great deal of determination.
Like drug addiction, the aftermath of brainwashing transforms the mind into a convoluted maze of rationalizations for self-destructive behavior that are guarded by biology and the subconscious. It cannot be escaped without breaking down the defense mechanisms that were put into place to avoid re-experiencing the original trauma, and without examining the emotions behind the mechanisms.
Brainwashing can create new ideas and realities, but it can’t create new emotions. All it can do is amplify them and use them to induce in its subject a new belief in an altered reality. It doesn’t create guilt, shame, fear, love or hate. It amplifies, exploits them and uses them as tools to create stress, force a crisis, and then transform a single belief or an entire identity.
That is why the Left cannot be defeated through policy debates and intellectual abstractions. It is a belief system. Though it traffics in seeming abstractions, these are a language, but not the meaning. The esoteric languages of policy and pop culture in which it speaks are vehicles for a deeper language of primal emotions. Behind the theories and manifestos is a great darkness of fear and terror, of love and hate, of emotional instability and vulnerability on which its lies and propaganda are built.
And it is within that primal darkness out of which all evil is born that the brainwashing does its work.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead, it transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons.
The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and violence.
Brainwashing isn’t magic, but it can look like magic. The sleight of hand that causes us to think so is our firm belief in our reason and free will. It’s easier to believe in changing minds through hypnotism and drugs, than to understand, what the successful practitioners of brainwashing do, that the human mind is more malleable than we like to think, and that the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious.
The art and science of brainwashing is well known. We don’t know it because we choose not to.
Brainwashing happens every day. It doesn’t have to mean a complete transformation of identity. On the simplest level, it means compelling someone to believe something that isn’t true.
It’s as simple as two cops browbeating an innocent suspect into believing that he’s guilty. The officers and the suspect won’t see their interaction as brainwashing. The officers can honestly believe in his guilt. And, at the end of the process, the suspect will also believe that he committed the crime. He will even be able to describe in great detail how he committed it. That’s common, everyday brainwashing.
The key elements of brainwashing are present in that cold room with the peeling paint on the walls. Those three elements are control, crisis and emotional resonance. To successfully brainwash someone, you have to control their environment, force a crisis on them, and then tap into core emotions, fear, love, guilt, hate, shame, and guide them through the crisis by accepting and internalizing a new belief.
The belief can be anything, but the pseudo-religious ritual taps into an emotional core requiring them to believe that they were bad people, and that by accepting this new belief, they are now good people.
This false conversion is the essence of brainwashing and of leftist political awakening narratives.
The human mind, like the human body, adapts to a crisis with a fight-or-flight response. Brainwashing forces the mind into a flight response. Once in flight mode, the mind can rationalize a new belief as a protective behavior that will keep it safe. Even when, as in the case of the suspect, the new belief will actually destroy his life. Fight or flight mode inhibits long term thinking. In panic mode, destructive and suicidal behaviors seem like solutions because they offer an escape from unbearable chemical stresses.
There’s a good biological reason for that. Our minds stop us from thinking too much in a crisis so that we can take urgent action, like running into a fire or at a gunman, that our rational minds might not allow us to do. But that same function can be ‘hacked’ by artificially putting people into fight-or-flight mode to break them down and shortcut their higher reasoning functions. Decisions reached subconsciously in fight-or-flight mode will then be rationalized and internalized after the initial crisis has passed.
When that internalization happens, then the brainwashing is real.
Almost anyone can be compelled to say anything under enough stress. Many can be forced to believe it. The acid test of brainwashing is whether they will retain that belief once fight-or-flight mode passes.
Cults, abusive relationships and totalitarian movements maintain ‘total crisis’, shutting down higher reasoning, creating a permanent state of stress by triggering fight-or-flight responses unpredictably. This leads to Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive tries to control their fate through total emotional identification with their captor, pack behavior, loss of identity and will, and eventually suicide or death.
Total crisis leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, detachment from friends and family, and violence.
How do you brainwash a nation?
Control the national environment, force a crisis on the country, and tap into their fear and guilt. And then you can outlaw planes, cows, skyscrapers, straws, plastic bags and the rest of the Green New Deal.
The environmental crisis is just one example of how leftist movements can brainwash a nation.
The growing number of millennials who say that they will not have children because of environmental panic is an example of how brainwashing can make suicidal behavior seem like self-preservation.
Since the Left still lacks total control over the United States, it relies on repetition, itself a form of control and stress, to create fear and panic. It makes up for its lack of physical control by bombarding Americans with messages meant to inspire fear, love, hate and guilt through the media, through the educational system, through entertainment and through every possible messaging channel.
Global Warming panic is one of a succession of manufactured leftist crises in America that began with a class crisis. transitioned to a racial crisis, and then to an environmental crisis.
Each of the crises claimed that society was on track to an inevitable apocalypse, that the nature of the crisis, economic, racial or environmental, had been verified by experts, that we were all complicit in the crisis, and that the only solution was radical change administered by the crisis experts.
The panic over Trump is a micro-crisis of the sort that leftists detonate in the political opposition, but the fear, anger, terror, stress and violence on display are typical of the crisis mode of fight-or-flight.
The “Resistance” isn’t a political movement. It’s a political cult whose crisis was the 2016 election. Its irrational belief that Trump is a Russian agent is typical of the conspiratorial mindset of cults. Its inability to understand that its convictions are completely irrational show how brainwashing works.
The 2016 election inflicted on its members a loss of control. Trump became the crisis embodying their loss of control. Their fear, guilt and anger induced stress that altered their behavior and beliefs.
And, within the very recent past, millions came to believe that Trump was really working for Moscow.
This is brainwashing on a timescale so immediate that we can easily recall it. Yet most of us have trouble understanding how it works and why it works. And that lack of understanding is holding us back.
How can smart people fall for minor variations of the same lie in generation after generation?
Smart people make the best brainwashing targets. Cults recruit bright students on college campuses, they target aspiring executives looking for leadership training, and dissatisfied professionals searching for meaning. Cults are rarely made up of stupid people. They’re made up of smart, vulnerable people.
Human beings don’t behave rationally. We rationalize our behavior.
The more people rationalize, the more they can be brainwashed. Your old Casio digital watch can’t be hacked. Even if it were hacked, there’s not much it could be made to do. Your smartphone can be hacked and made to do more. Your desktop can be hacked and made to do even more. Intelligence doesn’t make us less vulnerable to being manipulated, it leaves us much more vulnerable.
The political brainwashing campaign in this country targets the upper class and the middle class. The best subjects for brainwashing are intelligent and emotionally vulnerable. They’re easier to manipulate by using the gap between their emotions and their reason, and their emotional instability makes it easier to force them into crisis mode. The ideal subjects are in their teens and their early twenties. In modern times, that’s a period in which identity is still developing, and can be fractured and remade.
That’s why the Left aims most of its brainwashing efforts at high school and college students. It’s why it prioritized control of the educational system and the entertainment industry above all else.
Both of these have become highly profitable brainwashing industries: one sugar-coated, and one bitter.
Classrooms and campuses provide physical control over students for nearly two decades of their lives. That control was initially used for simple dogmatic preaching. Then it escalated to cult behavior with classroom role-playing rituals encouraging mass expressions of love and hate, transformations of sexual and gender identity, detachment from friends and family, and violent displays of pain and rage.
The modern American identity politics campus looks a whole lot like Jonestown or a Hitler Youth rally.
Exploiting sexuality, triggering guilt and shame in children, to transform their identity was usually the work of the lowest savage tribes and the vilest cults. It’s now the American education system.
The techniques aren’t new. They’re as evil and old as time itself.
Like every cult, the modern campus claims to serve an educational purpose, helping students find meaning and purpose, but insisting that they must first be cured of the subconscious evils such as white privilege and toxic masculinity that are holding them back through a process that deconstructs their barriers, encourages confession, expressions of trauma, shame and guilt, to create new identities.
This isn’t education. It’s not even dogmatic lecturing. It’s the same basic set of techniques used by any major cult in the country. Once colleges began trying to cure their students of subconscious evils at closed sessions, under the guidance of unlicensed therapists associated with a movement, there was no longer any difference between them and that of any cult, except billions in taxpayer dollars.
The sessions at which white privilege or toxic masculinity can be cured, or at which students are put in touch with the trauma of their oppression as minorities, duplicate cult indoctrination in every regard.
They’re the successors of consciousness raising groups whose name even signaled their cultish nature.
Despite attempts to wrap leftist politics in the objective garb of the expert, the scientist, the scholar and the bureaucrat, its heart lay in its spiritual narrative of a struggle between an altruistic good and a materialistic evil, the inevitable historical triumph of progress over reaction, and the pseudo-religious induction of new recruits into the gnostic revelation of our oppressive world with its layered conspiracies of capitalism, sexism and racism. The original ‘red pill’. Or, ‘little red book’.
To non-cult members, it’s brainwashing. To cult members, it’s revelation. The distinction may seem like a matter of perspective between believers and non-believers, but it lies in the question of consent. Brainwashing always relies on removing control from the victim. The control may be taken openly, by force. It can be taken covertly through manipulation and deceit. But there is always a loss of control.
The victim does not understand the process by which they are being taken apart and put back together until much later. And if the process works as intended, he or she may never realize it happened at all. Brainwashing’s cruelest trick lies in using the intelligence of its victim as its greatest ally in building a trap for its own ego and its consciousness that it cannot escape from without a great deal of determination.
Like drug addiction, the aftermath of brainwashing transforms the mind into a convoluted maze of rationalizations for self-destructive behavior that are guarded by biology and the subconscious. It cannot be escaped without breaking down the defense mechanisms that were put into place to avoid re-experiencing the original trauma, and without examining the emotions behind the mechanisms.
Brainwashing can create new ideas and realities, but it can’t create new emotions. All it can do is amplify them and use them to induce in its subject a new belief in an altered reality. It doesn’t create guilt, shame, fear, love or hate. It amplifies, exploits them and uses them as tools to create stress, force a crisis, and then transform a single belief or an entire identity.
That is why the Left cannot be defeated through policy debates and intellectual abstractions. It is a belief system. Though it traffics in seeming abstractions, these are a language, but not the meaning. The esoteric languages of policy and pop culture in which it speaks are vehicles for a deeper language of primal emotions. Behind the theories and manifestos is a great darkness of fear and terror, of love and hate, of emotional instability and vulnerability on which its lies and propaganda are built.
And it is within that primal darkness out of which all evil is born that the brainwashing does its work.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Who Can Count the Dust of Jacob?
"Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel." Numbers 23:10
The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country.
Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day.
What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year's dead and wounded to the scales of history? A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To stand watch or run away. It is not so much the past that is remembered on this day, but the present and the future. The stillness, a breath in the warm air, before setting out to climb the slopes of tomorrow.
Who can count the dust of Jacob.
And yet each memorial day we count the dust. The dust that is a fraction of those who have fallen defending the land for thousands of years. Flesh wears out, blood falls to the earth where the red daisies grow, and bone turns to dust. The dust blows across the graves of soldiers and prophets, the tombs of priests hidden behind brush, the caverns where forefathers rest in sacred silence, laid to rest by their sons, who were laid to rest by their own sons, generations burying the past, standing guard over it, being driven away and returning each time.
On Memorial Day, the hands of memory are dipped in the dust raising it to the blue sky. A prayer, a whisper, a dream of peace. And the wind blows the candles out. War follows. And once again blood flows into the dust. A young lieutenant shading his eyes against the sun. An old man resting with his family on the beach. Children climbing into bed in a village on a hilltop. And more bodies are laid to rest in the dust. Until dust they become.
In this land, the Maker of Stars and Dust vowed to Abraham that his children would be as many as the dust of the earth and the stars of heaven. In their darkest days, they would be as the dust. But there is mercy in the numberless count of the dust. Mercy in not being able to make a full count of the fallen and remaining ignorant of that full measure of woe. Modern technologies permit us terrible estimates. Databanks store the names of millions; digital cemeteries of ghosts. But there is no counting the dust. And when we walk the length and breadth of the land, as the Maker told Abraham to do, it the dust that supports our feet, we walk in the dust of our ancestors.
Some new countries are built to escape from the past, but there is no escaping it in these ancient hills. IDF soldiers patrol over ground once contested by empires, tread over spearheads and the wheels of chariots buried deep in the earth. The Assyrians and the Babylonians came through here in all their glory. Greek and Roman soldiers and mercenaries pitted themselves against the handful of Judeans who came out of the Babylonian exile. The Ottoman and the Arab raged here, and Crusader battering rams and British Enfield rifles still echo in the quiet hills.
Here in the silence of remembrance the present is always the past and the sky hangs like a thin veil fluttering against the future. The believers cast their prayers out of their mouths against the veil. The soldiers cast their lives and their hearts. And still the future flutters above, like the sky near enough to touch, but out of reach. Beneath it, the sky-blue flag, the stripe of the believer's shawls adorned with the interlocked star of the House of David.
Can these bones live, the Lord asks Ezekiel. And generations, after each slaughter, they come again, the descendants of the dead to reclaim the hills of their ancestors. Rising like the red flowers out of the soil. Like the bones out of the earth. They come up as slaves out of Egypt and out of the captivity of empires, their tongues as numberless as the earth. Here they come again to set up kingdoms and nations. And there in shadows on the dust, a handful of men fight off a legion; swords, spears and rifles in hand they face down impossible odds. They fight and die, but they go on.
The calendar itself is a memorial. Israel's Memorial Day, Independence Day and Lag BaOmer; the commemoration of the original Yom Yerushalayim, the brief liberation of Jerusalem from the Romans, still covertly remembered in bonfires and bows shot into the air, all in a season that begins with Passover, the exodus that set over a million people off on a forty-year journey to return to the homeland of their forefathers.
The battles today are new, but they are also very old. The weapons are new, but the struggle is the same. Who will remain and who will be swept away. Some 3,000 years ago, Judge Jephthah and the King of Ammon were exchanging messages not too different from those being passed around as diplomatic communiques today. The King of Ammon demanding land for peace and the Judge laying out the Israeli case for the land in a message that the enemy would hardly trouble to read before going to war.
Take a stray path in these hills and you may find a grinning terrorist with a knife, or the young David pitting his slingshot against a lion or bear. This way the Maccabees rush ahead against the armies of a slave empire and this way a helicopter passes low overhead on the way to Gaza. Time is a fluid thing here. And what you remember; you shall find.
The soldier is not so sacred as he once was. The journalist and the judge have taken his place. The actors sneer from their theaters. The politicians gobble their free food and babble of peace. Musicians sing shrilly of flowers in gun barrels and doves everywhere. But the soldier still stands where he must. The borders have shrunk. The old victories have been exchanged for diplomatic defeats. From the old strongholds come missiles and rockets. And children hide in bomb shelters waiting for the worst to pass. This is the doing of the journalist and the judge, the politician and the actor, the lions of literature who send autographed copies of their books to imprisoned terrorists and the grandchildren of great men who hire themselves on in service to the enemy.
The man who serves is still sacred, but the temple of duty is desecrated more and more each year. Leftist academics dismiss the heroes of the past as myths or murderers. Their wives dress in black and harass soldiers at checkpoints, their children wrap their faces in Keffiyas and throw stones at them. Draft dodging, once a black mark of shame, has become a mark of pride among the left. Some boast about how easy it is, others enlist only to then refuse to serve. They call themselves Refusniks , accepting the Soviet view of Israel as an illegitimate warmongering state, but laying claim to the name of the Zionists who fought to escape the Soviet Union.
Some are only afraid, but some are filled with hate. They have looked into a twisted mirror and drunk of the poisoned wine. They have found their Inner Cain and go now to slay their brothers with words.
How shall I curse whom G-d has not cursed, asks Balaam. But the King of Moab is determined to have his curses anyway. And today it is to the UN that they come for curses. The Arab lands boil with blood, but resolution after resolution follows damning Israel. China squats on the mountains of Tibet, Russian government thugs throw dissidents out of windows and Iranian thugs assault girls for removing their hijabs. And still the resolutions come like curses.
In a land built on memory, it is possible not to remember, but it is impossible to entirely forget. A war of memories comes. A war for the dust. Is this a day of remembrance or a day of shame. Were those men who fought and died for Judea and Samaria, for the Golan and Jerusalem, for every square inch of land when the armies of Arab dictators came to push them into the sea, heroes or villains. Were Nasser, Hussein, Saddam, Arafat, Gaddafi, Assad and the House of Saud the real heroes all along. The tiny minority of 360 million pitted against the overwhelming majority of 6 million.
Yet though men may forget, the dust remembers. And the men return to it. For some four thousand years they have done it. And they shall do it again. For He who has made men of the dust and made worlds of the dust of stars does not forget. As the stars turn in whirling galaxies and the dust flies across the land, so the people return to the land. And though they forget, they remember again. For the dust is the memory of ages and the children shall always return to the dust of their ancestors.
In the cities, towns and villages-- the dead are remembered. Those who died with weapons in their hands and those who just died. Men, women and children. Drops of blood cast to the dust, reborn as flowers on lapels. Reborn as memory.
All go to one place, said King Solomon, all that lives is of the dust, and all returns to the dust. There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his works. And so memorial day precedes the day of independence. That we rejoice in that which those who sleep in the dust have died to protect. The skyscrapers and the orchards, the sheep ranches and the highways, the schools and the synagogues. For they who drained the swamps and built the roads, who held guard over the air and built the cities, may not have lived to see their works. But we rejoice in their works for them. And a new generation rises to watch over their dust and tend the works that they have built. Until the day when He that counts the dust of Jacob shall count them all, and the land shall stir, and in the words of Daniel, they that sleep in dust shall arise, and then rejoice with us.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country.
Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day.
Who can count the dust of Jacob.
And yet each memorial day we count the dust. The dust that is a fraction of those who have fallen defending the land for thousands of years. Flesh wears out, blood falls to the earth where the red daisies grow, and bone turns to dust. The dust blows across the graves of soldiers and prophets, the tombs of priests hidden behind brush, the caverns where forefathers rest in sacred silence, laid to rest by their sons, who were laid to rest by their own sons, generations burying the past, standing guard over it, being driven away and returning each time.
On Memorial Day, the hands of memory are dipped in the dust raising it to the blue sky. A prayer, a whisper, a dream of peace. And the wind blows the candles out. War follows. And once again blood flows into the dust. A young lieutenant shading his eyes against the sun. An old man resting with his family on the beach. Children climbing into bed in a village on a hilltop. And more bodies are laid to rest in the dust. Until dust they become.
In this land, the Maker of Stars and Dust vowed to Abraham that his children would be as many as the dust of the earth and the stars of heaven. In their darkest days, they would be as the dust. But there is mercy in the numberless count of the dust. Mercy in not being able to make a full count of the fallen and remaining ignorant of that full measure of woe. Modern technologies permit us terrible estimates. Databanks store the names of millions; digital cemeteries of ghosts. But there is no counting the dust. And when we walk the length and breadth of the land, as the Maker told Abraham to do, it the dust that supports our feet, we walk in the dust of our ancestors.
Some new countries are built to escape from the past, but there is no escaping it in these ancient hills. IDF soldiers patrol over ground once contested by empires, tread over spearheads and the wheels of chariots buried deep in the earth. The Assyrians and the Babylonians came through here in all their glory. Greek and Roman soldiers and mercenaries pitted themselves against the handful of Judeans who came out of the Babylonian exile. The Ottoman and the Arab raged here, and Crusader battering rams and British Enfield rifles still echo in the quiet hills.
Here in the silence of remembrance the present is always the past and the sky hangs like a thin veil fluttering against the future. The believers cast their prayers out of their mouths against the veil. The soldiers cast their lives and their hearts. And still the future flutters above, like the sky near enough to touch, but out of reach. Beneath it, the sky-blue flag, the stripe of the believer's shawls adorned with the interlocked star of the House of David.
Can these bones live, the Lord asks Ezekiel. And generations, after each slaughter, they come again, the descendants of the dead to reclaim the hills of their ancestors. Rising like the red flowers out of the soil. Like the bones out of the earth. They come up as slaves out of Egypt and out of the captivity of empires, their tongues as numberless as the earth. Here they come again to set up kingdoms and nations. And there in shadows on the dust, a handful of men fight off a legion; swords, spears and rifles in hand they face down impossible odds. They fight and die, but they go on.
The calendar itself is a memorial. Israel's Memorial Day, Independence Day and Lag BaOmer; the commemoration of the original Yom Yerushalayim, the brief liberation of Jerusalem from the Romans, still covertly remembered in bonfires and bows shot into the air, all in a season that begins with Passover, the exodus that set over a million people off on a forty-year journey to return to the homeland of their forefathers.
The battles today are new, but they are also very old. The weapons are new, but the struggle is the same. Who will remain and who will be swept away. Some 3,000 years ago, Judge Jephthah and the King of Ammon were exchanging messages not too different from those being passed around as diplomatic communiques today. The King of Ammon demanding land for peace and the Judge laying out the Israeli case for the land in a message that the enemy would hardly trouble to read before going to war.Take a stray path in these hills and you may find a grinning terrorist with a knife, or the young David pitting his slingshot against a lion or bear. This way the Maccabees rush ahead against the armies of a slave empire and this way a helicopter passes low overhead on the way to Gaza. Time is a fluid thing here. And what you remember; you shall find.
The soldier is not so sacred as he once was. The journalist and the judge have taken his place. The actors sneer from their theaters. The politicians gobble their free food and babble of peace. Musicians sing shrilly of flowers in gun barrels and doves everywhere. But the soldier still stands where he must. The borders have shrunk. The old victories have been exchanged for diplomatic defeats. From the old strongholds come missiles and rockets. And children hide in bomb shelters waiting for the worst to pass. This is the doing of the journalist and the judge, the politician and the actor, the lions of literature who send autographed copies of their books to imprisoned terrorists and the grandchildren of great men who hire themselves on in service to the enemy.
The man who serves is still sacred, but the temple of duty is desecrated more and more each year. Leftist academics dismiss the heroes of the past as myths or murderers. Their wives dress in black and harass soldiers at checkpoints, their children wrap their faces in Keffiyas and throw stones at them. Draft dodging, once a black mark of shame, has become a mark of pride among the left. Some boast about how easy it is, others enlist only to then refuse to serve. They call themselves Refusniks , accepting the Soviet view of Israel as an illegitimate warmongering state, but laying claim to the name of the Zionists who fought to escape the Soviet Union.
Some are only afraid, but some are filled with hate. They have looked into a twisted mirror and drunk of the poisoned wine. They have found their Inner Cain and go now to slay their brothers with words.
How shall I curse whom G-d has not cursed, asks Balaam. But the King of Moab is determined to have his curses anyway. And today it is to the UN that they come for curses. The Arab lands boil with blood, but resolution after resolution follows damning Israel. China squats on the mountains of Tibet, Russian government thugs throw dissidents out of windows and Iranian thugs assault girls for removing their hijabs. And still the resolutions come like curses.
In a land built on memory, it is possible not to remember, but it is impossible to entirely forget. A war of memories comes. A war for the dust. Is this a day of remembrance or a day of shame. Were those men who fought and died for Judea and Samaria, for the Golan and Jerusalem, for every square inch of land when the armies of Arab dictators came to push them into the sea, heroes or villains. Were Nasser, Hussein, Saddam, Arafat, Gaddafi, Assad and the House of Saud the real heroes all along. The tiny minority of 360 million pitted against the overwhelming majority of 6 million.
In the cities, towns and villages-- the dead are remembered. Those who died with weapons in their hands and those who just died. Men, women and children. Drops of blood cast to the dust, reborn as flowers on lapels. Reborn as memory.
All go to one place, said King Solomon, all that lives is of the dust, and all returns to the dust. There is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his works. And so memorial day precedes the day of independence. That we rejoice in that which those who sleep in the dust have died to protect. The skyscrapers and the orchards, the sheep ranches and the highways, the schools and the synagogues. For they who drained the swamps and built the roads, who held guard over the air and built the cities, may not have lived to see their works. But we rejoice in their works for them. And a new generation rises to watch over their dust and tend the works that they have built. Until the day when He that counts the dust of Jacob shall count them all, and the land shall stir, and in the words of Daniel, they that sleep in dust shall arise, and then rejoice with us.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
8 Years of Media Lies About the Syrian Civil War Exposed
The end of the big lie about the origins of the Syrian Civil War began on the Arizona border.
Claas Relotius, a German reporter for Der Spiegel, had written a piece about being embedded with a
militia patrolling the Arizona border for illegal migrants. Gullible German leftist readers were regaled with tales of the militia, whose leader called Mexicans "bean eaters" and, at the end of the article, opened fire into the night. It was one of a series of Relotius articles delving into Trump country with novelistic accounts of pro-Trump Americans that confirmed all the stereotypes of Der Spiegel’s readers.
But the residents depicted in the Minnesota town in which ‘Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays’ is set quickly pointed out that much of the article was factually wrong and that Relotius had never even bothered talking to the people he claimed to have been writing about. And a woman doing media relations for the militia contacted Der Spiegel and informed the magazine that he had never been there.
That was the beginning of the end.
But Relotius had not confined his creative journalism to depictions of Trump’s America. He was better known for his writing about the Middle East. As the scandal that was about to demolish his reputation was breaking, Relotius was receiving a Journalist of the Year award for a very different kind of story. (That award and a number of others, including two from CNN, would soon be returned or withdrawn.)
But the exposure of the particular story that Relotius was receiving an award for on that day has been slow in coming because its roots go deep into a fake news matrix that predates the fraud of one German reporter. It’s the story of an eight-year fake news scam used to mythologize the Syrian Civil War.
Relotius was honored with the ‘Journalist of the Year’ award for the story of one of the ‘boys’ who had started the Syrian Civil War by spraying graffiti on a wall. The story has since been withdrawn, but the case of Relotius impelled one German media site to take a closer look at its larger contradictions.
The Arab Spring regime change operations coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, the Obama administration, and some of its European allies began with propagandistic origin stories to justify the violence and the overthrow of the targeted governments. In Tunisia, it was a street vendor who had been slapped by a policewoman. The story of the slap turned out to be fake and his family blames his bizarre reaction, setting himself on fire, on a sexist reaction to being humiliated by a woman.
The Syrian Civil War’s origin story was of a group of boys who were detained and tortured after one of them spray-painted anti-government graffiti. In Child’s Play, Relotius became one of the final journalists to go back for a drink of dirty water from a tainted well that had trickled into international media outlets from CNN to Qatar’s Al Jazeera, from Vice to Time Magazine, from the Globe and Mail to NPR.
There’s usually a boy at the center of the story. The one boy who scrawled “It’s Your Turn, Doctor” and started the cycle of violence that led to the fighting in Daraa and then across Syria.
But his name and identity keep changing all the time.
On March 2017, almost exactly six years after the original story broke out, the Daily Mail ran a story headlined, The Boy Whose Graffiti Changed the World. The boy in question is named NaiefAbazid, who claims to have been 14-years-old when he scrawled the graffiti that started the war.
Four years earlier, in 2013, the UK’s Daily Mail ran another story, Revealed: The Boy Prankster Who Triggered Syria's Bloody Genocide with Slogans Sprayed in His Schoolyard.
His name is Bashir Abazed and he was 15-years-old.
Both stories from the same media outlet claim that the two different boys were both the ones who started the Syrian civil war by scrawling the same phrase, “It’s Your Turn, Doctor” on the wall.
In 2017, the Globe and Mail featured its boy in a headline titled, How I Found the Teenager Who Inadvertently Sparked the Syrian War. His name is also Naief Abazid.
In 2018, Qatar’s Al Jazeera Islamist news network claimed thatthe "boy credited with prompting Syria’s uprising" was a 14-year-old named Mouawiya Syasneh.
In 2016, Canada’s Reuters reported that the boy who wrote the slogan that started it all was actually a 16-year-old named Mohammed.
Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran its own 2016 article, The Boy and his Graffiti that Started the War in Syria. In the Zeitung’s version, his name is Abdulrahman al-Krad and he was only 10-years old. Even though al-Krad is also in Jordan, his name doesn’t appear to be mentioned by non-German media.
Germany’s Die Welt, in its 2013 article, The Civil War in Syria Began With This Boy, claimed that the boy was actually 15-year-old Bashir Abazed.
In 2012, NPR published an interview with an anonymous man in Jordan who, “at 19 years old, he has the face of a 40-year-old.” That would have made him an adult at the time of the graffiti incident.
In 2013, the New York Times published an interview with a“faceless” 17-year-old in Jordan, wearing a Syrian flag over his face, who claimed it had been his cousin. The man in the photo does not look like a teenager. The reason for the anonymity is given as a need to protect relatives back in Syria, but if he had actually been detained and tortured by the regime, wouldn’t the authorities already know who he was?
The New York Times article furthermore claimed that the boy who wrote the graffiti was dead. How then could Al Jazeera, and so many other media outlets spend years claiming to have talked to him?
Even the most hardened media apologist would have to admit that there is a fundamental contradiction.
There are at least 6 boys who started the war. Some of them are actually men. They all have different names. Some have different ages. Even the accounts of the ages of their friends who were also there, ranging from 9-year-olds to adults, vary wildly between different stories from major media outlets.
As in Mark Twain’s The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, they declare that they were the ones who wrote, “It’s your turn, Doctor” -- the Syrian equivalent of Twain’s: “You are far from being a bad man.”
Reporting on a war in another country is tricky, but none of the stories attempt to reconcile or recognize their basic contradictions. The media insists on the right to fact check conservatives and erase them from social media, but fails at the most elementary fact checking when it comes to its own stories.
In their sensationalist stories about how the Syrian Civil War began, media outlets failed to even acknowledge that other outlets had published claims that fundamentally contradicted their own.
If they really believed their own reporting, they would have defended it.
Instead, Mohamed, Naief, Bashir, Mouawiya, and Abdulrahmanall got their 15 minutes of fame. And the journalists who claimed to have interviewed them in cafes, safe houses, or ruined cities, posing smilingly for photos or hiding their faces, were celebrated and even honored for their contradictory stories.
Why did Claas Relotius believe he could get away with it? The same reason that most criminals commit crimes. They’re socialized by their surroundings to believe that crime is normal and laws don’t matter.
Claas Relotius was only the latest media journalist to wade into the story of the boy who started the war. And, looking over the previous accounts, the contradictory media stories all listing different boys as the one who started the war, he would have seen no reason not to add his own boy to the mix.
Relotius was lying. But it was a lie so commonplace in his industry that it was normative behavior.
The story of the boy who started the war demonstrates that the term ‘Fake News’ is not an insult, but an accurate description of the media’s preference for narratives over truth. Relotius’ only mistake was making up stories about pro-Trump Americans whom he assumed wouldn’t be able to read German.
The 6 boys’ story is undeniable proof that the media cannot be trusted to police its own facts, let alone those of its political opponents. That it is not an industry of facts, but an assembly line of propaganda. And that its reporting on major issues, including wars in other countries, is quite often fake news.
If you don’t believe that, ask the media how the Syrian Civil War started. Then ask if his name was Mohamed, Naief, Bashir, Mouawiya, or Abdulrahman.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.
Claas Relotius, a German reporter for Der Spiegel, had written a piece about being embedded with a
militia patrolling the Arizona border for illegal migrants. Gullible German leftist readers were regaled with tales of the militia, whose leader called Mexicans "bean eaters" and, at the end of the article, opened fire into the night. It was one of a series of Relotius articles delving into Trump country with novelistic accounts of pro-Trump Americans that confirmed all the stereotypes of Der Spiegel’s readers.
But the residents depicted in the Minnesota town in which ‘Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays’ is set quickly pointed out that much of the article was factually wrong and that Relotius had never even bothered talking to the people he claimed to have been writing about. And a woman doing media relations for the militia contacted Der Spiegel and informed the magazine that he had never been there.
That was the beginning of the end.
But Relotius had not confined his creative journalism to depictions of Trump’s America. He was better known for his writing about the Middle East. As the scandal that was about to demolish his reputation was breaking, Relotius was receiving a Journalist of the Year award for a very different kind of story. (That award and a number of others, including two from CNN, would soon be returned or withdrawn.)
But the exposure of the particular story that Relotius was receiving an award for on that day has been slow in coming because its roots go deep into a fake news matrix that predates the fraud of one German reporter. It’s the story of an eight-year fake news scam used to mythologize the Syrian Civil War.
Relotius was honored with the ‘Journalist of the Year’ award for the story of one of the ‘boys’ who had started the Syrian Civil War by spraying graffiti on a wall. The story has since been withdrawn, but the case of Relotius impelled one German media site to take a closer look at its larger contradictions.
The Arab Spring regime change operations coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, the Obama administration, and some of its European allies began with propagandistic origin stories to justify the violence and the overthrow of the targeted governments. In Tunisia, it was a street vendor who had been slapped by a policewoman. The story of the slap turned out to be fake and his family blames his bizarre reaction, setting himself on fire, on a sexist reaction to being humiliated by a woman.
The Syrian Civil War’s origin story was of a group of boys who were detained and tortured after one of them spray-painted anti-government graffiti. In Child’s Play, Relotius became one of the final journalists to go back for a drink of dirty water from a tainted well that had trickled into international media outlets from CNN to Qatar’s Al Jazeera, from Vice to Time Magazine, from the Globe and Mail to NPR.
There’s usually a boy at the center of the story. The one boy who scrawled “It’s Your Turn, Doctor” and started the cycle of violence that led to the fighting in Daraa and then across Syria.
But his name and identity keep changing all the time.
On March 2017, almost exactly six years after the original story broke out, the Daily Mail ran a story headlined, The Boy Whose Graffiti Changed the World. The boy in question is named NaiefAbazid, who claims to have been 14-years-old when he scrawled the graffiti that started the war.
Four years earlier, in 2013, the UK’s Daily Mail ran another story, Revealed: The Boy Prankster Who Triggered Syria's Bloody Genocide with Slogans Sprayed in His Schoolyard.
His name is Bashir Abazed and he was 15-years-old.
Both stories from the same media outlet claim that the two different boys were both the ones who started the Syrian civil war by scrawling the same phrase, “It’s Your Turn, Doctor” on the wall.
In 2017, the Globe and Mail featured its boy in a headline titled, How I Found the Teenager Who Inadvertently Sparked the Syrian War. His name is also Naief Abazid.
In 2018, Qatar’s Al Jazeera Islamist news network claimed thatthe "boy credited with prompting Syria’s uprising" was a 14-year-old named Mouawiya Syasneh.
In 2016, Canada’s Reuters reported that the boy who wrote the slogan that started it all was actually a 16-year-old named Mohammed.
Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung ran its own 2016 article, The Boy and his Graffiti that Started the War in Syria. In the Zeitung’s version, his name is Abdulrahman al-Krad and he was only 10-years old. Even though al-Krad is also in Jordan, his name doesn’t appear to be mentioned by non-German media.
Germany’s Die Welt, in its 2013 article, The Civil War in Syria Began With This Boy, claimed that the boy was actually 15-year-old Bashir Abazed.
In 2012, NPR published an interview with an anonymous man in Jordan who, “at 19 years old, he has the face of a 40-year-old.” That would have made him an adult at the time of the graffiti incident.
In 2013, the New York Times published an interview with a“faceless” 17-year-old in Jordan, wearing a Syrian flag over his face, who claimed it had been his cousin. The man in the photo does not look like a teenager. The reason for the anonymity is given as a need to protect relatives back in Syria, but if he had actually been detained and tortured by the regime, wouldn’t the authorities already know who he was?
The New York Times article furthermore claimed that the boy who wrote the graffiti was dead. How then could Al Jazeera, and so many other media outlets spend years claiming to have talked to him?
Even the most hardened media apologist would have to admit that there is a fundamental contradiction.
There are at least 6 boys who started the war. Some of them are actually men. They all have different names. Some have different ages. Even the accounts of the ages of their friends who were also there, ranging from 9-year-olds to adults, vary wildly between different stories from major media outlets.
As in Mark Twain’s The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, they declare that they were the ones who wrote, “It’s your turn, Doctor” -- the Syrian equivalent of Twain’s: “You are far from being a bad man.”
Reporting on a war in another country is tricky, but none of the stories attempt to reconcile or recognize their basic contradictions. The media insists on the right to fact check conservatives and erase them from social media, but fails at the most elementary fact checking when it comes to its own stories.
In their sensationalist stories about how the Syrian Civil War began, media outlets failed to even acknowledge that other outlets had published claims that fundamentally contradicted their own.
If they really believed their own reporting, they would have defended it.
Instead, Mohamed, Naief, Bashir, Mouawiya, and Abdulrahmanall got their 15 minutes of fame. And the journalists who claimed to have interviewed them in cafes, safe houses, or ruined cities, posing smilingly for photos or hiding their faces, were celebrated and even honored for their contradictory stories.
Why did Claas Relotius believe he could get away with it? The same reason that most criminals commit crimes. They’re socialized by their surroundings to believe that crime is normal and laws don’t matter.
Claas Relotius was only the latest media journalist to wade into the story of the boy who started the war. And, looking over the previous accounts, the contradictory media stories all listing different boys as the one who started the war, he would have seen no reason not to add his own boy to the mix.
Relotius was lying. But it was a lie so commonplace in his industry that it was normative behavior.
The story of the boy who started the war demonstrates that the term ‘Fake News’ is not an insult, but an accurate description of the media’s preference for narratives over truth. Relotius’ only mistake was making up stories about pro-Trump Americans whom he assumed wouldn’t be able to read German.
The 6 boys’ story is undeniable proof that the media cannot be trusted to police its own facts, let alone those of its political opponents. That it is not an industry of facts, but an assembly line of propaganda. And that its reporting on major issues, including wars in other countries, is quite often fake news.
If you don’t believe that, ask the media how the Syrian Civil War started. Then ask if his name was Mohamed, Naief, Bashir, Mouawiya, or Abdulrahman.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And thank you for reading.