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Thursday, July 30, 2020

Democrats Stand By China Spy Consulate

By On July 30, 2020
On Tuesday, Houston firefighters arrived at 3417 Montrose Boulevard. Neighbors had reported smoke and a burning smell at the Chinese consulate. The consulate, which had been given 72 hours to close by the State Department, did not let them in even as the smoke continued to waft into the summer air.

Video showed consulate employees throwing paper into burning bins.

“We have directed the closure of PRC Consulate General Houston, in order to protect American intellectual property and American’s private information," the State Department had warned.

The Houston consulate had become notorious for trying to intimidate American elected officials in Texas and nearby states, as well as American energy companies, especially those doing business in Asia. Some have also linked the Houston consulate to Chinese espionage against American tech and medical firms.

FBI investigations into the Houston consulate involved theft of medical research, recruiting researchers to get at scientific secrets, and forcing Chinese nationals to return to the People’s Republic of China.

Why would the People’s Republic of China have thought that Houston would be a safe base for spying on and intimidating Americans? Houston and Texas Democrats quickly rushed to provide the answer.



Rep. Al Green, who had hosted a luncheon at the spy consulate, accused President Trump of racism.

“Don’t give the impression, please Mr. President, that they are all spies,” Green whined. “My appeal is to the president to understand that his words take on a meaning that can be harmful to other people.”

Rep. Green then went on to suggest that Trump had endangered his constituents by referring to the pandemic as the 'China virus', and suggested that Trump's actions might be leading to "more anti-Asian American violence, or worse, internment.”

While shamelessly playing the race card, for a race he doesn’t belong to, the Democrat did not discuss his own collaboration with the spy consulate.

Rep. Green had co-hosted a Houston press conference with Consul General Cai Wei of the spy consulate, whom he described as a friend, with Chinese state media in attendance, at which the Democrat urged local residents not to worry about the virus, and described himself and Wei as a “committee of two”.

The Houston Democrat boasted that the enemy consulate was close enough for him to walk to.

That's the same Wei who had been accused of using fake identification to get Chinese nationals through the airport, with whom Rep. Green, an American official, had been meeting with on a regular basis.

Texas state representative Gene Wu, who had also been at the press conference, warned that, "in retaliation, China may basically stop all the investments and tell companies to pull out of here."

Green and Wu were far from the only Democrats playing defense for the Communist dictatorship.

Democrat sanctuary cities don’t just provide sanctuary for illegal aliens, but for enemy spies.

The Trump administration had already ordered the shutdown of the Russian consulate in San Francisco over its espionage. And the Chinese consulate appears as if it will be next. But if the Chinese consulate in Houston was able to garner the support of Democrats at the local and national level, the situation in San Francisco is expected to be much worse because of Chi-Com infiltration of California Democrats.

Chinese intelligence officials at the San Francisco consulate had successfully recruited a staffer at Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco office and the situation at the local level is much worse.

And Democrats, instead of supporting their country, are once again undermining it in favor of China.

The same Democrat officials who had castigated President Trump for not trusting the “intelligence community” are the ones rejecting intelligence findings about China’s spy networks.

Senator Angus King suggested that the move was a political stunt by President Trump. "Is it really about confronting China, or does it have something to do with an election in four months?"

Former Senator Max Baucus, Obama's ambassador to the Communist dictatorship, has falsely claimed that the closure was "electioneering".

“This is the wrong way to handle it," Baucus wheedled. "If Pompeo thinks he is going to quote ‘change Chinese behavior,’ he is gravely mistaken.”

Baucus' China rhetoric has, in recent months, tipped into blatant PRC propaganda, when he compared Trump to Hitler for opposing the brutal dictatorship in an interview with a Chinese propaganda outlet. Baucus has a consulting firm that works with Chinese businesses, and sits on the boards of several Chinese companies. The media outlets who have had Baucus on have not disclosed his ties to China.

"There are a lot of very responsible people in America who know this China-bashing is irresponsible and we will pay a price if it continues. That is all I am saying," he had warned.

The Democrat has claimed that relations with China will improve if Biden wins the presidency. That’s not surprising since Biden and Baucus are good friends, and Baucus got the ambassadorship due to Biden.

Biden’s China ties have made it impossible for Democrats to confront the Communist dictatorship. Instead they’ve decided to accuse President Trump of closing the consulate as an election stunt even though it’s only July and the closure it hardly likely to have any meaningful impact on the election.

Instead of standing with America, the Democrats are trying to shift the onus to President Trump.

“The White House must be transparent and show that it is taking smart and thoughtful action, rather than engaging in brash foreign policy," Rep. Lizzie Fletcher complained.

Meanwhile local Democrats like Rep. Al Green, and local Houston media, are treating the consulate closure as a hate crime perpetrated by President Trump in order to persecute Asian-Americans.

Gordon Quan, a former Houston City Councilman, contended that, "to have the consulate close, to have accusations being made that this is the hotspot for spying, just creates a further cast upon the loyalties of Chinese Americans.”

And the Chinese Communist propagandists have adopted the familiar playbook of the Left, complaining about racism, and whining that PRC embassies are facing bomb threats and angry messages. This propaganda is coming from a brutal regime which has engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the ruthless suppression of political dissent, ethnic and religious minorities, and anyone who gets in its way.

Chinese Communist consulates in America, including in Houston, have been used to intimidate Chinese residents in America, and to suppress political protests against China in this country. The Communist regime’s diplomatic corps has organized Chinese students to shout down, threaten, and even physically intimidate political opponents on campuses and even off them in San Francisco.

And yet, Democrats and the media insist on treating the Chinese Communist regime as the victim.

The Democrats are more loyal to their hatred for President Trump than they are to America. And even in the face of blatant enemy action, they choose the People’s Republic of China over the United States. A growing number of Democrats have also been directly or indirectly compromised by the enemy regime.

And that makes President Trump’s crackdown on spy consulates in Democrat cities all the more urgent.

When the State Department closed the spy consulate in Houston, Democrats had to choose between standing with Communist China or standing with America. They chose China and they chose treason.






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


Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Mostly Peaceful Protests

By On July 29, 2020
49 Chicago police officers were injured by rocks, pipes, and fireworks while trying to defend the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. Despite their valiant defense of the man who discovered America, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sided with the BLM mob and had the statue removed anyway.

3 law enforcement personnel with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service may face permanent eye injuries after having lasers shined in their eyes by Black Lives Matter rioters.

12 police officers were injured in Seattle by attackers throwing rocks, bottles, and fireworks.



These are some of the injuries suffered by large forces in a matter of days. By early June, I had tracked the cases of over 400 injured law enforcement officers in under two weeks of BLM riots. A month later, there are too many cases and too little reporting to even begin assembling any kind of complete picture.

A week after I complied my list, over 350 NYPD officers had been listed as injured in the BLM riots. By the middle of June, 75 law enforcement officers had been injured in the Denver Black Lives Matter riots.

Rifles, explosives, lasers, power tools, and firebombs are routinely used at the mostly peaceful protests.

Law enforcement officers have come away from what the media continues to falsely describe as "mostly peaceful protests" with fractured skulls, eye and ear injuries, and broken bones. Officers have been hit with bricks, baseball bats, and broken bottles. They've been shot, stabbed, and run over by vehicles.

The full total is not in the hundreds: it’s in the thousands. That’s a war zone.

And that’s just the law enforcement officers. No count has been kept of the civilians assaulted by the rioters. No one has assembled a list of store owners beaten and robbed by Black Lives Matter rioters.

Rough estimates place the scale of damage in the billions of dollars. Walgreens alone suffered $75 million in looting damage. Minnesota estimated damage to 1,500 businesses totaling $500 million.

This is wildly inconsistent with the media’s repeated false claims that the Black Lives Matter riots have been “peaceful”, “mostly peaceful”, “largely peaceful” or any other weasel words and modifiers.

Protests that injure thousands of police officers and cause billions in damage are not mostly peaceful.

They are mostly violent.

Carnage on this scale is not an accident or the work of a handful of unrelated people, as the media continues to falsely insist. When riots wound thousands and cost billions, the violence is not the aberration, it defines what the protests are and what they are intended to accomplish.

When marchers at a peaceful protest bring along crowbars, fireworks, and baseball bats, it’s not a peaceful protest. A genuinely peaceful protest would not allow marchers to bring weapons.

"The violence and pain and hurt that's experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence," is not what a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest organizer sounds like.

The calls for violence and the acts of violence that define Black Lives Matter are not peaceful.

If Black Lives Matter were a peaceful organization, it would not draw its inspiration from Assata Shakur, who is wanted for murder by the FBI, and was the first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorist List.

Nationwide riots by a group that draws its inspiration from a domestic terrorist are not peaceful.

The media has covered this up by making a mockery of cause and effect and offering ridiculous euphemisms for violence that explain how mostly peaceful protests have ravaged entire cities.

“Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified,” ABC News offered. According to the media, when a peaceful demonstration “intensifies”, buildings start burning and police officers are assaulted.

But if violence is the result of a peaceful protest “intensifying” then it’s not a peaceful protest. Intensifying a thing brings out its true nature, rather than transforming it into something it’s not.

“Boston's Peaceful Protests Turn Violent at Night,” a Voice of America headline claims.

Are Black Lives Matter protests werewolves who turn violent when they see the full moon? Does the night have some magical power that turns formerly peaceful protests into violent assaults?

"What changes a protest from peaceful to violent? Aggressive law enforcement," CNN falsely claims.

If a protest is inherently peaceful, aggressive law enforcement won’t change that. Reopen protests by conservatives faced aggressive enforcement without resulting in rioting and looting.

Some of the worst Black Lives Matter riots have taken place in progressive cities like Portland, Minneapolis, and Seattle, under the watch of lefty politicians and black police bosses. If aggressive policing led to violent riots, the worst rioting should be in the least progressive cities, while progressive cities should be experiencing the least violent protests. Instead it’s the other way around.

The violence of the riots correlates with the left-wing politics of the elected officials in charge.

Cities with the most left-of-center politicians are likely to experience the worst riots. It’s not aggressive law enforcement that causes violent riots, but the lack of decisive intervention against the rioters.

The media has tried to blame the police and the time of day for the riots, instead of the rioters.

A peaceful protest is not defined by the absence of violence, but by the presence of peaceful intent. The repeated false claims that the protests are peaceful completely distort the basic meaning of the word.

The media continually claims that every riot is really a peaceful protest that unexpectedly turned violent. But a peaceful protest wouldn’t turn violent. Only violent protests turn violent. A peaceful protest aims at peaceful change. A violent protest begins with hateful rhetoric and ends with violence.

A Neo-Nazi rally doesn’t turn violent. A Communist march doesn’t turn violent. Black Lives Matter was founded by self-described Marxists. The movement is interlaced with ties to the Nation of Islam. The rhetoric of its marches is violent, punctuated with obscenities, false claims of genocide, and racist taunts aimed at white people. These are not the components of a peaceful, but of a violent racist movement.

Black Lives Matter marches are mostly peaceful in the way that KKK marches were mostly peaceful.

Violent movements are not violent all the time. Not even the most violent fanatic is always violent.

The false claim of “mostly peaceful protests” rests on that strawman. But Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer were mostly not killing people. That didn’t make them mostly peaceful. A murderer can spend 99.0% of his time not killing people, only to be deemed evil for the 0.1% of the time during which he happens to be killing people. Mostly not killing people isn’t peaceful.

Rioting, burning, looting and throwing explosives only at night or on the weekend is not peaceful.

Racial nationalist groups, whether it’s the KKK or BLM, have a First Amendment right to protest. They have a right to threaten violence in the abstract, to brandish weapons, and to otherwise engage in posturing. But once that posturing turns into real violence, they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

And they certainly don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt when their hate rallies repeatedly degenerate into violence in cities across the country leading to thousands of injuries and billions of dollars in losses.

The only people who think otherwise are their political allies among Democrats and the media.

Their mostly peaceful protests have devastated cities and they mostly won’t stop lying about them.







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

Monday, July 27, 2020

Foreign Companies are Interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election

By On July 27, 2020
If you have Dove soap or Axe deodorant in your bathroom, Lipton tea or Breyers in your kitchen, you're buying Unilever products. The huge British-Dutch multinational made $60 billion last year and is known for its leftist politics. But Unilever may have gone beyond virtue signaling to election interference.

Unilever is one of the biggest foreign companies to join the Facebook boycott by leftist pressure groups.

The boycott’s goal is to suppress conservative speech on social media, especially by President Trump, before a presidential election, by convincing advertisers to withhold ads from Facebook until it complies. While Facebook already censors conservatives, it isn’t enough to satisfy the radicals running the boycott.



Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, one of the leaders of the boycott made that clear in an editorial titled, "Will Zuckerberg dump Trump, or continue to serve him?"

"Facebook also loves its advertisers, and they are increasingly joining the boycott," he boasted. "So who will Zuckerberg choose?"

In an interview with the New York Times, Robinson emphasized that this was about the election.

"Honestly, there is an election and I need to get them to enforce the policies on the books before the fall. I need them to have some real rules around elections and voter suppression posts that actually will apply to Trump and other politicians so he doesn’t do anything dangerous on Election Day or before."

Robinson's examples of the kind of speech by President Trump that he wanted to pressure Facebook into censoring included, "claiming victory early".

The #StopHateForProfit campaign promoted by Color of Change, a radical leftist group, is blatant election interference. And it’s backed by huge foreign multinationals who are interfering in our election.

Unilever's own boycott post blatantly referenced the election, stating, "there is much more to be done, especially in the areas of divisiveness and hate speech during this polarized election period in the U.S".

A huge foreign company was pressuring Facebook to interfere in America's presidential election.

And it wasn't alone.

The Body Shop, a British company, also explicitly framed its boycott around the election, complaining that, "when we see the current dialogue in the US around anti-racism and equality, we continue to be concerned by the spread of hateful content and disinformation online, and the potential for this to affect the democratic right of Americans to have access to fair and balanced elections this fall."

Should foreign companies be allowed to intervene in an American election? Especially when that election has a potential impact on their bottom line?

Diageo, a British liquor company whose brands include Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Seagram’s, Captain Morgan, Smirnoff, and many others, announced that it would participate in the Facebook boycott while, continuing “to discuss with media partners how they will deal with unacceptable content."

The Trump administration has been considering new tariffs on European products from the UK, France, and Germany. The foreign firms joining the Facebook election interference boycott are primarily from these three countries. And, As Bloomberg noted, Diageo is one of the companies at risk if Trump strikes.

As is Pernod Ricard, the French company behind Absolut, Beefeater, Glenlivet, and Jameson, and which is also participating in the Facebook election interference boycott.

Some of the foreign companies that joined the #StopHateForProfit election interference campaign have direct or indirect financial interests that have been affected by Trump’s pro-American trade policies.

Honda had announced, “American Honda is withholding its advertising on Facebook and Instagram. We choose to stand with people united against hate and racism.” American Honda is just a subsidiary of the Japanese company. Its CEO, Shinji Aoyama, formerly headed the Asian Honda Motor Co.

The Japanese automaker has a direct financial stake in President Trump’s defeat.

The Trump administration had declared that car imports "threaten to impair the national security of the United States", and threatened to impose potential tariffs of 25%. After a trade deal, it appears that the Section 232 tariffs won't be imposed, but Honda's leadership is aware of the threat. And the Japanese company would be a lot safer if Trump were out of office. So would a lot of foreign companies.

Playstation, a Sony product, has announced its support for the #StopHateForProfit campaign. Another Japanese company, Konica Minolta, has also been listed as participating in the boycott.

Japanese companies should not be interfering in the next American presidential election.

Neither should German companies, especially those with a Nazi past, be lecturing Americans on racism.

Volkswagen, founded as a Nazi state-owned project dictated by Hitler which used slave labor during the war, issued an ultimatum, “Hate speech, discriminating comments and posts containing dangerous false information must not be published uncommented and must have consequences.”

That probably sounded a little less threatening and bellicose in the original German.

Much like Honda, Volkswagen has a stake in Trump’s defeat. President Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on European cars unless the EU drops its tariffs on American lobsters. A 25% tariff on European vehicles would add $10,000 to the cost of every car and hit German car companies really hard.

While VW is calling for “consequences”, the German company may be worrying about consequences.

Adidas and Puma, rival German companies founded by Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, members of the Nazi Party and suppliers to the Hitler Youth, who signed their letters Heil Hitler, joined the boycott.

Puma claimed to be, "part of an overall effort to create positive change and improvement in Facebook's platform by demanding the removal of inaccurate, hostile and harmful conversation," while Adidas called for, "a cosmopolitan and safe environment." VW and Puma had mentioned false or inaccurate comments which are euphemisms for censoring conservative political speech on social media.

Adidas and Puma neglected to sign off with the traditional “Heil Hitler” signature of their founders.

Foreign companies should not be joining a call by American leftist organizations to censor speech.

Henkel, the German company behind Persil, Dial, and Loctite, another former Nazi company that used slave labor, declared that it, "stands for tolerance, diversity and respect", and that it also expects "this attitude from all of our business partners around the world” as its reason for joining the boycott.

Next time you buy some Dial soap, think about where the German company really wants to stick it.

But it’s not just German companies.

The Lego Group, the Danish politically correct toy corporation, jumped on board the boycott, calling for an, "inclusive digital environment free from hate speech, discrimination and misinformation."

Lululemon, a Canadian company which got its name because its founder thought it would be funny to have Japanese people try to say it, and who endorsed child labor, claimed that it was, "actively engaging with Facebook to seek meaningful change." Perhaps it should start engaging with itself instead.

The Facebook ad boycott is election interference and while it’s bad enough that major American companies like Verizon, Best Buy, Target, and Starbucks are participating in this effort to silence their political opponents, foreign companies joining the election interference boycott is unacceptable.

While Democrats have been clamoring about foreign election interference, the participation of foreign companies in a boycott meant to silence Republicans, has their universal approval and support.

"We share the concerns of companies who are speaking up about Facebook's inaction around making meaningful changes that protects our democracy," Biden's spokesman said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went further, boosting the boycott even before it was officially announced.

“Advertisers have tremendous leverage,” she sneered. “I would say to them, know your power.”

Her comments, which came a day before the official election interference boycott, strongly suggest that she had early knowledge and may have been coordinating with the activists involved. The big question was whether Pelosi knew that the activists intended to involve foreign companies in their campaign.

If Pelosi knew, then the highest-ranking elected Democrat official was encouraging foreign election interference. And she should be held accountable for it just the way she wanted Trump to be.

It’s time for Republicans to start asking questions about the foreign election interference campaign.

Whatever Pelosi knew or didn’t know then, everyone now knows that foreign companies are participating in a campaign to shut down President Trump and his political supporters. This disturbing campaign of election interference has not been condemned by Democrats, only praised by them.

A foreign oligarchy has intervened in the 2020 election. The security of our political system must be protected by taking on this foreign election interference by foreign companies, some of whom may hope to profit from President Trump’s defeat, by sanctioning them for their attack on our system.

Any Democrats, who have demanded action against foreign election interference, but block sanctions on those companies should be held accountable for their complicity in foreign election interference.






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

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Minneapolis Residents Agreed Not to Call the Cops, Then the Rapes Began

By On July 26, 2020
Last month, the New York Times brought its readers the heartwarming story of the Powderhorn neighborhood in Minneapolis whose residents had decided not to call the police.

"If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it?" Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender had demanded. "Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?"

Powderhorn residents had taken that message to heart and refused to call the police.

A few days later, a “juvenile” girl was assaulted. The Associated Press reported that, “the people who took the victim to the hospital did not call police.”

By July, the encampment had grown to 800 people and 3 sexual assaults.

The oppressive system of “white supremacy” was being dismantled one rape at a time.



The Powderhorn Park encampment really took off when the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board of Commissioners declared that the city's parks were now "sanctuaries" for anyone who wanted to live in them. The resolution cited Governor Walz's declaration of a "peacetime emergency" which banned removing homeless people from anywhere they wanted to be.

Since then, 38 more Minneapolis parks have been turned into tent cities, and of these, Powderhorn Park is the worst. The park version of CHAZ began with the Black Lives Matter riots after George Floyd’s death when the Sheraton Minneapolis Midtown Hotel was taken over, renamed the Sanctuary Hotel, and filled with homeless vagrants by lefty activists.

"This is a means of land repatriation. This is a means of addressing historic deep disparities," one of the lefty activists declared.

The Sheraton was being repatriated from its Indian-American owner by indigenous white lefties and the minority hotel owner had been “confronted with the alternative of evacuating his hotel and having it possibly burned down.”

The lefties quickly grew bored or frightened as the former Sheraton was overrun with “rampant drug use and sales”, piles of garbage and overdoses. There were fights, drug deals, and even a fire in one room. The hotel was cleared and the encampments headed to Powderhorn.

So did the drug dealing, the overdoses, the violence, and the sexual assaults.

Two girls and one woman have been assaulted. But an activist insisted that rapes, “can happen in any park."

And two underage girls being assaulted in a park can happen at any time. So can a man tracking down a woman, after previously assaulting her because he thought she was hiding heroin from him, and groping her while pointing a knife at her. And fights with crowbars and hatchets can break out at any time, in any park, once you get rid of the police.

But, even though it reinforced white supremacy, someone called 911. This wasn’t that unusual, because 911 calls had tripled.

Despite Lisa Bender, some people weren’t checking their privilege and were calling the cops. And the park police were dealing with "assaults with blunt objects, a fentanyl overdose, and someone being chased by others with guns and baseball bats."

Those are the sorts of things that could happen in any park… occupied by junkies.

Minneapolis officials have been steadily denying that dumping hundreds of vagrants in the park could possibly lead to crime.

“When we talk about crimes that happen here, these are not new crimes,” Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner AK Hassan insisted. As a Somali immigrant, he claimed that he won't vote to evict anyone. “Let’s not find excuses.”

Hassan, a Rep. Ilhan Omar ally, had praised the vote to defund the police as an "opportunity to reimagine how we approach public safety, not only for our city but the entire country."

The reimagining is underway in Powderhorn Park.

"It feels like something really bad is about to happen every second of the day. And you don't know what it is. And so every explosion, whether it's a firework or a gunshot or someone screaming or whatever, you just - I feel chest pain constantly now," Angelina Roslik, a local resident who works as a waitress, told NPR.

Minneapolis’ Democrat leaders have reimagined public safety as utter terror.

“When you have two juvenile females raped, an adult female raped, domestic violence with a knife and the suspect has an arrest warrant for sexual assault, you have a problem in that park," a former Minneapolis police officer noted.

In response to the spiraling violence at Powderhorn Park, Commissioner Londel French urged people to get to know the vagrants and junkies. “There are some real issues about sanctuary, and I think the way we fix those issues are by having conversations with not only the neighbors and homeowners who live around Powderhorn, but some of the residents of the sanctuary and come up with some solutions to some of the issues that we’re having.”

These hypothetical conversations could involve the drug dealing, prostitution, needles, stolen cars, bodily fluids, and other benefits of having a homeless encampment next door.

French, a Bernie Sanders supporter, had run for office, vowing that he would use the Park Police to test out “new ideas for how policing can engage our communities. Specifically, I will work to ensure that the Minneapolis Park Police to use methods of restorative justice.”

It’s unclear how much the two raped girls are benefiting from French’s restorative justice.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board had voted to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department, and banned Park Police from responding to non-violent police calls. It began designing a new green uniform for park cops even as it turned the parks into violent hellholes.

And the 33 officers of the Park Police, who don't have their new green uniforms yet, are in charge of the crisis. But 33 officers are no match for hundreds of junkies and criminals.

In one day, the Park Police dealt with a sexual assault and a fight over a stolen bicycle that was nearly settled with a hatchet. Another day saw a fight with a crowbar over a tent.

“The Park Board has a small enough police force that we can actually make some real change,” French had vowed. “If we don’t do it the right way, our communities burn.”

The change is here.

A park bench in Powderhorn Park had already been set on fire. Twice.

A Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board report noted that that, "MPRB staff are encountering unsafe situations in the evening with locking up the bathrooms" and the portable restroom provider announced that it wants police to be there when its employees service the bathrooms because "encampment residents are going through their vehicles."

If the lefty activists want to defund the police, they’ll have to be the ones fixing the toilets.

Not that it matters because the reports also mentioned high concentrations of “biohazards”.

You too can experience the brave new future of public safety. Just stop by Powderhorn Park. Try not to step on the needles, don’t make eye contact with the junkies, and be ready to run.

And remember, it’s not just public safety in Minneapolis that the Democrats are reimagining.

As Hassan said, it’s public safety in America.






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

Thursday, July 23, 2020

Democrats Destroyed New York Once. They’re Doing It Again.

By On July 23, 2020
During the 1980s, the place where George Washington stood with his men as the Declaration of Independence was read out loud, had become a grimy hellhole full of junkies, crazies, and muggers.

City Hall Park, nestled between the Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in the world, and the modest capital building of what had been the greatest city in the world, had become the tragic symbol of its decline. Under Democrats, the park was dirty and unsafe during the day, and even worse at night. Tourists couldn’t believe that junkies and muggers prowled right outside the halls of city government.

"When I was United States Attorney from 1983 to 1989, almost every day I would look out my window and see City Hall Park. And I would see a park that looked terrible. And it seemed to me that people say something about themselves when they let the most important area of their city look bad and deteriorated," Mayor Giuliani said at the park's rededication.

The renovation put up a replica of the 1820s fence, brought in a Victorian fountain, and restored the statue of Nathan Hale, the patriot who was hung elsewhere in Manhattan, though many other patriots were executed by the British on a gallows a few hundred feet away. The renovation remade City Hall Park from a symbol of despair to hope and symbolized the rebirth of New York City.

Now, garbage and filth are spread out everywhere, along with posters of George Floyd and BLM graffiti.



"I promised then that we would restore City Hall Park to the beauty that it had in the 19th century, so that it could symbolize the regeneration, the rebirth, the reinvention of the city of New York," Giuliani said in his speech, calling it a “a final gift from the 20th century to New Yorkers of the 21st.”

The gift has been rejected by the radicals and racists who have taken over New York and hate beauty.

The sidewalks have been defaced, everything is covered in graffiti, and the sacred ground over which the grass lies is littered with tents, sleeping bags, and soiled with worse things by Occupy City Hall.

The walls of the beautiful Surrogate's Courthouse's building, a Beaux Arts confection inspired by the Paris Opera, have been covered in hateful Black Lives Matter slogans, including "Kill Pigs", and if you stop by at the right time, you can see a dummy in a police uniform and a pig mask being hung.

The occupiers renamed the historic park, Abolition Park, demanding the abolition of the NYPD, while behind them are the ghosts of two fallen towers where so many of New York’s Finest gave their lives.

Instead, great buildings are scrawled with the names of criminals who died in confrontations with police.

The resurrection of City Hall Park was a symbol of hope, its transformation into Abolition Park by its new occupiers is a symbol of darkness and despair. While the Democrats and their media allies cheered the defilement of the park, the consequences of turning back the clock on New York City quickly kicked in.

One of the occupiers went after a camera crew and a reporter was hit in the face with a 2-by-4.

That was one of a number of violent encounters between the occupiers and the media. City Hall Park has become so dangerous that government employees and local residents who had paid top dollar to live in some of the area’s new luxury skyscrapers avoid it. And the occupiers, many of whom are vagrants and junkies, have taken to staging violent battles with each other in full view of the police.

The occupiers claim that the problems are the result of "unlearning and relearning” things like ownership and safety. What they’re actually relearning is the same thing that their nearby Occupy Wall Street predecessors had learned about what happens when you set up an illegal encampment.

Get rid of the police, and the junkies, the pushers, and the crazies come back.

In the City Hall Park area, the police have been defunded, and are referring all complaints to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office. Local residents claim that the NYPD has been told by De Blasio not to interfere.

City Hall Park has a long history of violent unrest by Democrat thugs.

During the Civil War, a mob of Democrats had descended on the New York Tribune building, currently the site of the Pace University tower on the other side of City Hall Park. Horace Greeley, whose statue is one of those still standing in the park, had run the preeminent Republican newspaper of the day.

Democrat thugs had attacked police precincts and were coming for the Republicans in the Tribune.

Henry Jarvis Raymond, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, and co-founder of the New York Times, set up Gatling guns to take on the Democrat mob.

The rioting and looting tore apart the city because New York's Democrat leaders, like their successors today, had made common cause with the mob and were hoping that the unrest would contribute to Lincoln's defeat. While the Democrats were willing to let the city burn, President Lincoln acted.

The military set up artillery at City Hall Park, business owners armed their workers to protect their stores, and forty-pound bombshells from the Navy were even set up to be launched. Soldiers used bayonets and howitzers and broke the Democrat mob rioting and looting across New York City.

Governor Seymour, the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the party’s future presidential candidate, who had called the rioters, “my friends”, went down to defeat next year.

That is how Republicans used to deal with Democrat riots.

“I stood on the steps of City Hall and I looked out at this park, as I had done many, many times, and what I saw was not the kind of park that New York City should have,” Giuliani said at the rededication. “That day I led everyone in reciting the Athenian Oath of Fealty, to the city of Athens,” And the final words of that oath are, ‘To pledge to transmit this city, not only not less, but far greater and more beautiful, than it was transmitted to us.’”

Bill de Blasio, a crony of Dinkins, whose support for rioters and criminals had brought the city to its knees, came to office with a very different message that declared that New York City was racist.

The era of New York City’s rebirth, of public safety, of clean streets and nice parks, was over.

Giuliani had left City Hall Park as a legacy of what he had stood for. De Blasio is leaving City Hall Park, with its needles and human waste, its hateful Black Lives Matter graffiti and violent fights, as his legacy. While City Hall Park was finally cleared out by the NYPD, it's only a temporary move.

It's not just Bill de Blasio’s legacy. It’s the legacy that the Democrats have always left. Whether it was in 1863 or 1963, the urban legacy of the Democrats is crime, riots, and blight. And if you doubt that New York City is a Democrat hellhole once more, look at a photo of City Hall Park now and then.

That’s not just what the Democrats have done to the place where George Washington once stood.

It’s what they’ve done to the great cities of this nation. And it’s what they intend to do to America.

Once again, just as in 1863, Republicans are the only thing standing between the Democrats and the utter ruin of a great city and a great nation at the hands of violent mobs and its Democrat leaders.






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


Tuesday, July 21, 2020

The Minority Victims of Whitenessphobia

By On July 21, 2020
African albinos, Hindu gods, and Chinese architects.

These three things and about three million others have been accused of suffering from a plague of whiteness. The colonists of Salem saw witches everywhere and the modern racist witch hunters see ‘whiteness’ everywhere they look. Whitenessphobia may be the great mental illness of our time.

To Whitenessphobes, everything has a “whiteness” problem.

Headlines like, "Climate Activists Confront the Movement's Whiteness Problem," "The Enduring Whiteness of the Fed", and "Commercial Real Estate has a Whiteness Problem" show the sheer scale of Whitenessphobia which is triggered by everything from the Federal Reserve to Greta Thunberg

But you don’t have to actually be white to fall victim to “Whitenessphobia”.



In Africa, people with albinism are being blamed for the coronavirus pandemic.

"It is the perceived whiteness of people with albinism. It is being interpreted that they are carriers of what is seen as a white man's disease. It comes from China where people have fair skin in the African mindset," Dr. Charlotte Baker, the head of the Albinism in Africa Network, explained.

Whiteness can mean Africans being blamed for a Chinese disease because pigmentation is relative.

Harvard's Graduate School of Design was accused of "institutionalized whiteness" because Mark Lee, the chair of the Architecture Department, had stirred outrage by saying, said, “I see the GSD as the most Eurocentric school in America, and that is really our strength."

Lee is Chinese. GSD’s previous dean was Persian. But you can be Chinese or Persian and still spread “institutionalized whiteness”. Or you can be a Hindu deity and be accused of excessive whiteness.

After Shaun King, who really is too white, accused depictions of Jesus of being too white, the Hindu gods also came under fire for their whiteness. "We must also ask why Hindu deities are so light skinned," Rupa Subramanya, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, demanded.



And, in the era of Black Lives Matter, it doesn’t matter how black you are, you can still be accused of whiteness. Terry Crews, who grew up in Flint, Michigan, and made it big in the NFL, is being accused of centering and upholding "whiteness". A Los Angeles Times column claims that Aunt Jemima was "selling whiteness". The brand can be accused of many things, but selling “whiteness” isn’t one of them.

A Psychology Today article claims, “the concept of Whiteness was imported from Spain and Portugal.”

White people, it seems, didn’t exist until they were invented in the 16th century by Latinos, who are considered a minority. And if Latinos are the original white people, then aren’t white people minorities?

The Atlantic even worries that, “Asians and Latinos could begin to vanish into whiteness.”

And then we’ll never get them back.

But if it can happen to Terry Crews and Hindu deities, it can happen to anyone. Whitenessphobia has become an extended Eddie Murphy routine, but there’s no joke and no one is laughing.

Any random thing can be accused of whiteness at any given time for not being diverse enough.

The London Olympics have been accused of a “velodrome of whiteness” for not attracting black cyclists and Harper’s Wine and Spirit was indicted for its “silence on race and diversity in the UK wine industry in light of the global Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd.”

After all, if there’s anything that George Floyd’s death ought to wake us up to, it’s the lack of diversity in the UK wine industry. And in the London Olympics. Not to mention commercial real estate and curling.

Curling, a sport that even most sports fans can’t grasp, and which seems to exists just to punish casual viewers of the Winter Olympics, is fighting to eliminate its “whiteness” problem. The problem, lies with bagpipes and "Scottish paraphernalia hanging in curling clubs" reinforcing the "dominant whiteness.”

But having a diverse organization or even being a minority is no defense against Whitenessphobia.

What is "whiteness". A better question is what isn't whiteness. Like a Rorschach inkblot, it’s anything and everything because Whitenessphobia is about the mental state of the ‘phobe’, not his target.

"Whiteness is severely under theorized," an NBC News Big Think piece worried, "leaving millions unaware of a history whose constant characteristic is change."

Believing that the thing you hate is constantly changing, that it is both evil and amorphous, pervading everything and yet almost impossible to pin down, is a core element of conspiratorial bigotry.

Whiteness is white people even if they “think of themselves as individuals without a meaningful racial identity”. It’s also Chinese architects, Hindu gods, and black people who don’t want to hate white people. It’s Japanese consumers who purchase skin whitening products and African-American intellectuals who believe in free speech. Whiteness can sneak up on you when you aren’t hating.

Or at least hating enough.

To be free of whiteness, if you’re a minority means hating white people. And if you’re white, you can only hope to escape whiteness by hating yourself. Like all conspiratorial bigotries, Whitenessphobia demands a constant vigil against the evil influence of that intangible thing which is always changing.

Sometimes it’s Eurocentric architecture, other times Freedom of Speech, or Canadian curling.

The victims of Whitenessphobia aren’t just white people. Learning to hate is bad for the bigots and the culture of Whitenessphobia embodied in racist texts like Between the World and Me or White Fragility, the endless hysterical invocations of resentment, victimhood and guilt, is poisoning a generation’s soul.

But conspiratorial bigotry is also bad for everyone else.



If Whitenessphobes limited their hatred to white people, based on a genetic test or some other racialist nonsense, their racism could at least be contained. Instead, Whitenessphobia can lash out at anyone.

By transforming their idea of whiteness from a race to a set of attitudes, Whitenessphobes have created a racist ideology that also ideologizes racism, attacking people of any race, including black people, for ideological offenses in racist terms. Ideological racism uses the familiar tropes of racial hatred, but its targets are chosen ideologically, rather than racially, even as it harnesses racial resentments.

"Parents have to parent, that children have to achieve unless we raise their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white," Barack Obama declared at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. A few years later, Jesse Jackson would accuse Obama of acting white.

As John McWhorter noted, "black nerds get called 'white' when white kids are around to furnish a basis for the comparison; the problem arises amidst integration."

Whiteness Studies is ultimately an academic way of accusing minorities of acting white.

Whitenessphobia deconstructs the original charge of acting white and rebuilds it as a massive conspiracy by 16th century Latinos, then by America’s Founding Fathers, Canadian curling and the British wine world to keep black people out, but also as a conspiracy to get minorities involved in their whiteness.

While Black Lives Matter and its allies put their Whitenessphobia forward as a desegregating impulse, its real purpose is segregation, refusing to take part in anything, including America and its anthem, until they are torn down and rebuilt absent of what the conspiratorial bigots deem to be its whiteness.

Whitenessphobia punishes any impulse toward unification. Colorblindness is one of its greatest sins, integration is a conspiracy to bring minorities into whiteness, and those minorities who don’t hate are accused of centering whiteness, institutionalizing whiteness, or other synonyms for acting white.






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




Monday, July 20, 2020

Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name

By On July 20, 2020
The Washington Redskins agreed to change a name that offended no one except white leftists, but the media, which always speaks with forked tongue, is demanding more sports scalps.

The Cleveland Indians have issued a statement whining that "the recent social unrest... has only underscored the need for us to keep improving as an organization on issues of social justice."

Remember when the Indians were just known for being cursed with the second-longest championship drought in sports, now they can be cursed for their commitment to social justice.

The curse used to be known as the Curse of Chief Wahoo, but he's already been purged for political incorrectness. And now the Indians announced that they're "committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name.” Those stakeholders won't be their fans or anyone who knows what baseball is.



But the purge of Indian names from sports is just getting started.

The Kansas City Star ran a piece declaring that, “It’s time for the Chiefs to defuse the cultural offenses they enable and reflect”. The editorial though quickly goes beyond blasting the Chiefs, to declaring that America is genocidal and that the Declaration of Independence is racist.

Spoiler alert. They’re not just coming for the Kansas City Chiefs, they’re coming for America.

Remember when American newspapers didn’t entirely consist of headlines that looked like they were badly translated from Chinese Marxist rants? Maybe it would be easier to rename the Chiefs, the Kansas City Marxists. We could call them the Reds, but that name is taken.

The Atlanta Braves have said that they aren't changing the name, but will consider getting rid of the tomahawk chop. But the only thing appeasement half-measures accomplish is putting blood in the water. And once social media piranhas smell blood, they’ll never stop until they drink it.

The Black Hawks are currently refusing to change their name, but are promising to, “expand awareness of Black Hawk and the important contributions of all Native American people.”

As if that will protect them from a mob of angry white leftists who couldn’t care less.

The culture war isn’t hitting sports because white lefties, some of whom claim to be Native American activists even though they have the blood quantum level of Elizabeth Warren, care about the feelings of American Indians, but because it gives them the power to terrorize people.

The movement has already moved north of the border to Canadian football where the Edmonton Eskimos announced that, after "an extensive year-long formal research and engagement program with Inuit leaders”, they’re currently keeping the name.

Boston Pizza, among other sponsors, is pulling out because a Canadian pizza chain founded by a Greek immigrant named after something it’s not, doesn’t want to be associated with Eskimos.

The lefty media has already moved beyond Indian names, sensing that well might soon run dry.

The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah, best known for helping turn Osama bin Laden’s old pal, Jamal Khashoggi, into a martyr, quickly put out a piece demanding that the Texas Rangers change their name because they’re symbols of white supremacy and law enforcement.

They’re “not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen”, Attiah huffed.

That’s big coming from a Jeff Bezos employee who had tweeted that, "White women are lucky that we are just calling them 'Karen's' and not calling for revenge."

Maybe the team can move to D.C. and change its name to the Washington Post Racists.

"While we may have originally taken our name from the law enforcement agency, since 1971 the Texas Rangers Baseball Club has forged its own, independent identity," the Texas Rangers responded. As if anyone had confused the team with the law enforcement agency.



Not that it’s going to stop there.

Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Columbus are under attack. CNN is denouncing Mount Rushmore as a symbol of white supremacy. It’s only a matter of time until the Patriots, the Cowboys, the 76ers, 49ers, the Trailblazers, Nuggets, Spurs, and any names that reference American history, settlement and westward expansion, will also be banned.

That includes the Yankees and the Knicks, whose names are already forgotten national slurs.

The two New York City teams got their names from the slurs that the English settlers used to hurl at the Dutch settlers who wore short pants, or knickerbockers, and the slur John Cheese or Yan Kees, that the Dutch hurled back at the English usurpers. That won’t be the issue for the culture war mob, which doesn’t care about the slurs that different groups of white people called each other, but they both ‘problematically’ reference the European settlement of New York.

Both teams could change their names to those of local Indian tribes, but that’s already off limits.

Some media editorialist will, eventually, link the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Southern cavalier mythos and accuse them of white supremacy. The English Civil War would seem to have little to do with a Cleveland team, but King Charles I was involved in the African slave trade.

“The name Cleveland Cavaliers represents a group of daring fearless men, whose life's pact was never surrender, no matter what the odds,” the fan who won a contest to name the team wrote.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will come under fire once someone realizes that their namesakes were involved in the slave trade in ways that were far more brutal than anything in Virginia.

And if you’re going to get rid of them, the Pittsburgh Pirates will probably have to go too.

The Minnesota Vikings might seem safe, since the Vikings largely focused on European slaves, but they did deal in at least some African slaves, which would also put them off limits.

What names would still be safe? Birds, animals, colors, and the climate. Just avoid history.

And the safest names will be corporate brands. The Washington Redskins are trying to figure out what to rename their team because FedEx gave the Redskins an ultimatum. They might as well just call them the Washington FedExes to celebrate the new politically correct corporate oligarchy which enforces political discipline through firings, indoctrination, and ad campaigns.

A nation with no history, no mythos, and nothing to take pride in except for the million dollar losers at the local stadium is a lot easier for all sorts of people and organizations to rule over.

The simplest solution might be for every team to change its name to Black Lives Matter.

And when the Pittsburgh Heinz Black Lives Matters play the New York MetLife Black Lives Matters, it’ll be a little bit confusing, but that’s okay because no one will be watching.






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



Sunday, July 19, 2020

Liberal Jewish Leaders Accuse Jews of Racism, Cover Up Anti-Semitism

By On July 19, 2020
After Black Lives Matter - Los Angeles, a hate group which has partnered with the Nation of Islam and whose lead organizer praised Farrakhan, led a protest that resulted in mass attacks on Jewish schools, stores and synagogues, the leaders of 22 left-wing Jewish organizations signed letters condemning not the attacks, but the Jewish leader who spoke out against the antisemitism of the racist hate group. They made no reference to the BLM attacks on Jews.

The letters singled out Mort Klein, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, for describing Black Lives Matter as, among other things, "antisemitic," "Israel hating", and "extremist". They did not offer a rebuttal to this accurate description because none is possible.

Instead, a letter signed by 16 members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, accused Klein of hate and divisiveness. The letter's signatories, including HIAS and Americans for Peace Now, included groups notorious for their hostility toward Israel.



A separate letter by a slate of militantly anti-Israel groups, including J Street, The New Israel Fund, which sponsors BDS hate groups, and T'ruah, which has led a soft BDS campaign against Israel, demanded Klein's expulsion from the Conference. That aligns with their previous calls for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from historic parts of Israel.

The signatories to the letters by Conference members included the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, whose previous CEO had signed a letter in defense of Linda Sarsour and agreed to work with antisemitic and anti-Israel groups, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Women of Reform Judaism, and Rick Jacobs, the anti-Israel head of the Union of Reform Judaism.

Jacobs had previously welcomed Ayman Odeh who heads Hadash, a merger of the local Communist Party, and whose current Joint List coalition includes a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, and praised his, “inspiring vision”. But Jacobs doesn’t think that Klein has an inspiring vision, protesting that, “Black Lives Matter is at the center of one of the most critical fights for justice in our country”, while accusing Klein of “Islamophobia” and “racism”.

The Union of Reform Judaism has been a reliably anti-Israel voice in the Jacobs era.

Jacobs opposed moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and whined that, “Israel’s decision to bar U.S. Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering the country is wrong”.

Last year, Jacobs attacked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for stating that Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria were "not inconsistent with international law". These rants, like so many others by Jacobs, were all issued in the name of the Union of Reform Judaism.

While the Union of Reform Judaism found time to issue multiple press releases in support of Black Lives Matter, against the Jewish State, on the vital Jewish issue of withdrawing US troops from the Turkish-Syrian border, and in defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar, Jacobs and the URJ failed to acknowledge or offer solidarity to the victims of black nationalist terrorist attacks against a synagogue in New York and a Kosher grocery in New Jersey.

The URJ and Jacobs did manage to issue a press release over the shooting in a Texas Walmart and will respond to bomb threats and synagogue shootings, as long as they're carried out by white nationalists. If your synagogue is attacked by a Neo-Nazi gunman, Jacobs and the URJ will acknowledge it, but if a Black Hebrew Israelite swinging a machete attacks your synagogue on Chanukah, Rick and the URJ will rush out a press release blasting Israel over something.

That’s the fundamental problem that Mort Klein was getting at. Jewish lives don’t matter to the URJ. Not in Israel and not in America. The only thing that matters is its left-wing politics.

While the Jewish community of Los Angeles witnessed its synagogues and schools vandalized and stores looted over Shavuot, Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, was praising the "national rage" which saw bigots chanting "F____ Jews" and defacing the statue commemorating the Holocaust heroism of Raoul Wallenberg.

A URJ statement declaring that Black Lives Matter is a “Jewish value”, falsely accuses "white Jews" of perpetuating "the systemic racial injustices on which the nation was founded."

That’s a line that could have come from Farrakhan.

Even as Jacobs complains about divisiveness, the URJ is dividing Reform Jews by race.

The URJ's embrace of Black Lives Matter includes the worst elements of its philosophy, including mandated intersectionality for Reform congregations, dismissal of colorblindness, and black supremacist resource texts that include Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, as well as James Baldwin's 70s essay, Negroes are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White.

There's even a White-Ashkenazi Awareness Checklist.

The racist movement here isn’t the ZOA. It’s the signatories to the anti-Klein letter.

When Jacobs and 15 other Conference members sign on to a letter urging Jews to stand up "against senseless hatred and divisive bigotry" and "not to search for ways to keep us apart", they might start by looking at their own embrace of divisive bigotry meant to keep us apart.

Mort Klein and the Zionist Organization of America are willing to address the everyday antisemitism that Jews in places like New York and Los Angeles have been experiencing. And they’re willing to do it even when the bigots aren’t members of a safely discredited ideology.

There’s no great courage in taking on Third Reich supporters in 2020. The time to do it was during the Holocaust while the FDR administration and Joseph Kennedy were warning American Jewish leaders to keep quiet about the mass murder of millions of Jews. Where were URJ’s marches, protests, and sit-ins while Jews were being shot and gassed?

Reform Jewish leaders had gone to Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, asking them to issue a joint statement condemning the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

The Republican agreed and the Democrat didn’t.

Or take it from Morris Waldman, the former rabbinic leader of the prominent Temple Anshe Emeth, and the long deceased executive vice-president of the American Jewish Committee.

"Some Jewish groups have some too many times protested against Hitlerism," Waldman complained.

Waldman is fondly remembered, within liberal Jewish organizational circles, as the "the first proponent of putting the human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter."

There can hardly be a better summary of the utter moral bankruptcy of the same folks now accusing Jews of racism and white supremacy for fighting against antisemitism.

The Zionist Organization of America is part of the proud tradition of Jewish groups that refused to kneel to political correctness when Jews were being attacked by politically correct mobs.

Black Lives Matter is antisemitic. Its leaders declare that they’re Marxists. Portions of the movement are openly aligned with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Synagogues and schools have been defaced and a Holocaust memorial was vandalized. But the organized kneelers are trying to silence any members of the Jewish community who speak out against antisemitism.

As the main targets of antisemitic violence, by either black or white nationalists, Jews and their synagogues need the police. By endorsing Black Lives Matter, the Union for Reform Judaism is undermining the safety and security of synagogues and worshipers across the country.

It’s time for URJ members to speak up and ask Rick Jacobs some hard questions.

Jewish history tells us that the real threat doesn’t come from those who speak too loudly about popular antisemitism, but those who remain too silent. There are far too many memorials and attacks on targets that carry no risk within their political cohort, and too little real resistance.

By speaking out, Morton Klein and the ZOA have offered real resistance to antisemitism.

Meanwhile, the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, National Council of Jewish Women, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Jewish Women International, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Women of Reform Judaism, and the Union of Reform Judaism are complicit in covering up antisemitism and silencing those Jews who dare stand up to the vandalism of synagogues, schools, and Holocaust memorials by smearing them as racists.

Organizations that claim to speak for the Jewish community have sold it out instead.

The Jewish community does not need leaders who will accuse it of racism to score points at their Manhattan cocktail parties for the Public Art Fund, but real leaders who will stand up for it.

In an article accusing the Jewish community of racism, Rick Jacobs claimed that, “fighting racism and fighting antisemitism go hand in hand”.

We’ve seen a whole lot of the former and very little of the latter.

Fighting racism and antisemitism doesn’t go hand in hand when synagogues and schools are attacked, and Jews are shot, slashed and beaten.

The ugly truth is that Jacobs and other leaders of leftist groups would much rather fight Jews, whether in Israel or in America, than get up off his knees and fight for them. Fighting Jews is safe. Rehashing the rantings of Ibram X. Kendi and other fashionable black nationalists won’t get leftist leaders in trouble. Standing up to them over black nationalist antisemitism will.

Like their counterparts in the FDR era, they’re cowards and traitors, and they know it.

That’s why they’re going after the ZOA. There’s nothing that cowards hate more than brave men who stand up for the truth. The only thing more humiliating than selling out is knowing that there was another way. Rick Jacobs and the organizations targeting the ZOA want everyone in the Jewish community to kneel before the pogromists, the bigots, and the supremacist racists.

Their message is that if you don’t kneel, they will destroy you.

Over 2,300 years ago, there was a Jewish leader named Mordechai who would not kneel. For thousands of years, on the holiday of Purim, Jewish children have sung the name of a man who would not kneel to an antisemite. Kneeling is not extraordinary, refusing to do so is.

Many other Jewish leaders no doubt knelt. Their names have been lost to history.

Those Jewish leaders with weak knees today might ponder how they will be remembered.




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



Thursday, July 16, 2020

If Liberals Don’t Take on Identity Politics, They’ll Lose

By On July 16, 2020
The Harper's letter protesting cancel culture, while being too afraid to even put the name of the beast on paper, was doomed even before it hit the social media grinder.

After over two centuries of liberals being guillotined by leftists, it would be nice if they had learned something. Unfortunately American liberals have learned nothing from France in the 18th century, and Russia in the 20th century, as they set themselves up for a beating in 2020.

It doesn’t help that less than half of the Harper’s letter signatories are even liberals. Instead of making a case for liberal values, the letter is reduced to arguing that fellow allies shouldn’t be lynched for questioning dogma or accidentally falling out of step with the movement.

That’s not a defense of liberal values, but a plea to Stalin not to shoot quite so many socialists.



The Harper’s letter never names the ideas driving cancel culture, such as intersectionality and critical race theory, because its members are either too afraid to offer an ideological critique or because many of them agree with those ideas. Their dissent isn’t a liberal disagreement with the ends, but with the extremism of some of the means, and that’s why they’re losing.

The opposition to cancel culture is a mixed bag of actual liberals, traditional lefties who reject identity politics in favor of old-fashioned class warfare, and a cocktail party set that’s fine with the purges as long as they don’t go overboard and affect their friends and allies. This latter group is the first one to self-cancel and defect, followed by the liberals, and then the lefties.

Once upon a time, Bernie Sanders opposed identity politics.

Membership in the Democrat Party and in its allied post-liberal culture establishments of the media, academia, and the smart set requires getting on board with identity politics. The few liberal holdouts are becoming the Mensheviks and the lefty holdouts are the Trotskyists. Neither seem likely to enjoy a happy future under the spiked bootheels of intersectional Bolsheviks.

And an alliance between the two is difficult because they operate under very different premises.

Lefty holdouts argue, correctly, that identity politics is a convenient means for the existing establishment to hold on to power by substituting racial conflict for economic conflict. Put in a few minority CEOs, have Nike run ads about racism, and nothing really has to change.

The Trots have no problem with cancel culture. What they dislike is its trajectory and direction. They want to see capitalists hanging from lampposts, not white women lynched for dialing 911.

And the liberals don’t want to hang anyone from anything because it just isn’t very nice.

American liberalism began its slow death when it embraced identity politics. When liberals began validating tribalism, they dismantled the moral and intellectual premise of liberalism.

Black Lives Matter is just the idiot Marxist grandchild of the Black Panthers partying with upper crust Manhattanites two generations ago. The liberals who embraced radical chic, as long as it was wrapped in racial packaging, disavowed their movement and the rest is history. Now their children and grandchildren are being cancelled as the revolution catches up with them.

Identity politics created an exception to liberalism. And what was meant to be an exception is now swallowing up everything. The identity politics exception to liberalism is why free speech is vital until it offends someone, a free press is important until it prints something politically incorrect, and mob violence is to be deplored unless it’s the outcry of the racially oppressed.

When liberals create exceptions to liberalism, then liberalism disappears. That’s what actual liberals like Alan Dershowitz understand. Exceptions to a principle eventually become the principle. And the principle that compromised liberalism was that it didn’t apply to the oppressed. The radical leftist idea that liberals had rejected when it came to violent class revolution became acceptable when it came to race and then the rest of identity politics.

The essential radical idea is that a crisis cannot be met with anything short of radical change.

Liberals can only win a debate against radicals when they don’t just dissent from the means, but also from the ends. Those liberals who decided to support a dictatorship of the proletariat became Communist sympathizers and ceased to be liberals. Their occasional critiques of the mass executions and the gulags were as weak and ineffective as the Harper’s letter.

Mostly they carried the bloody water of the Marxist regimes that reflected their aspirations.

Those liberals who dissented, not just from Soviet repression, but from its totalitarian ends, who understood that the atrocities were not an occasional aberration, but the nature of the beast, carried the torch of liberalism during the dark days of the Cold War alongside conservatives.

The Communist pitch to liberals was that radicalism was needed because a liberal society would not work in Russia. Not with all those oppressed peasants and workers.

The fundamental premise of Black Lives Matter is that liberalism doesn’t work because it’s an invention of powerful white people. Equality, due process and open debate are invalidated by white people and institutionalized whiteness. A free society inherently privileges white people over oppressed minorities. And so a free society will oppress and enslave black people.

This isn’t an original argument.

The Communists made the same argument about free societies and workers. A free society would inherently privilege those who had wealth over those who did not. Free speech and a free press would mean very different things for a factory owner and for his workers. The only answer was to first forcibly equalize society by using the power of the state to purge the bourgeois and then, in time, a truly equal Communist society would emerge from the mass graves and gulags.

True liberals understood that this was a hypocritical argument for an endless totalitarian state.

And yet, a generation later, many liberals failed to rebut the same argument being made in racial terms. Now, Black Lives Matter’s “trained” Marxist leaders have gotten the leadership of what used to be the liberal establishment to accept that liberalism is systemically racist.

The defenses of cancel culture all come down to the argument that liberalism is racist.

Free speech privileges white people. So does a free press, intellectual inquiry, open debate, or not destroying people’s lives because they disagree with you. The oppressed, we are told, don’t have the physical endurance or the emotional energy to tolerate the trauma of disagreement.

Any liberal campaign against cancel culture has to challenge this exception to liberalism.

Cancel culture asserts that any disagreement, dissent, or even mistake, from Trump down to a liberal professor arguing in favor of free speech, is a traumatic form of oppression that is literally killing trans people of color, and must be immediately stopped by any means necessary.

This is the crisis at the center of the movement. And liberals have failed to meet it.

Cancel culture weaponizes rage, performative pain, outrage, and trauma. Its liberal critics resort to abstractions without ever mounting a serious effort to close the old loophole of liberalism.

Identity politics is killing liberalism because liberals have failed to shut down identity politics.

A real defense of liberalism must be that a free society is for everyone. The only people who find a free society oppressive are totalitarians. Cancel culture and its vanguard of Marxists, black nationalists, and assorted radicals find a free society oppressive because it restricts their freedom to destroy some people and force everyone else to conform to their ideology.

A free society isn’t racially oppressive, but it can be ideologically oppressive for totalitarians.

If the few remaining liberals want a free society, they will have to defend its moral legitimacy, not just through abstract principles, but by exposing the totalitarianism of the radicals warring on it.

Communists, Nazis, Islamists, and BLMers find a free society oppressive for the same reasons.

A liberal society requires people to choose freedom over power. Those who would rather have power than freedom will always find such a society oppressive and conspire to destroy it.





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

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Leftist Slavery Was Worse Than Southern Slavery

By On July 14, 2020
Under 400,000 slaves were brought to America. Those enslaved African people represented only 3.6% of the transatlantic slave trade. By the Civil War, there were under 4 million black slaves in America.

Over 20 million people were imprisoned by Soviet leftists in the gulag system.

While the peak slave labor population in the leftist slave camps was less than the peak slave population in the South, the death rate ranged from 5 percent to 25 percent depending on the period.

Under 2 million people died as a result of the brutal leftist system of slave labor camps and that was a fraction of the full number of people killed through various means by the Socialist system.

Gulag labor was murderous with prisoners sent to work in uranium mines or to labor outdoors chopping trees and digging canals in subzero weather with little food and less protection. At one gulag, prisoners labored in uranium mines, breathing in radioactive dust, and dying within two years of cancer and leukemia. The sick were then used for medical experiments by Socialist medicine before they died.

These horrors were not some relic of the Stalin era, but were being carried out as recently as the 1970s.



The 1619 Project of the New York Times falsely claimed that America was built on slave labor, but before that revisionist history project, the paper had run a Red Century project defending Communism when Soviet Socialism was, from Moscow University to the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built on slave labor.

At its peak, as many as 1 in 5 Soviet construction workers were convict laborers and massive slave labor projects like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, hailed as triumphs of socialism, killed tens of thousands.

When Senator Bernie Sanders visited the USSR, he gushed over its socialist achievements, such as the Moscow Metro. The massive system had been built by Stalin to showcase the achievements of socialism and the Putin regime restored the old plaque reading, “Stalin raised us to be loyal to the nation, inspired us to labor and great deeds”. But it wasn’t inspiration that built the Moscow Metro: it was slave labor.

"There's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags," Kyle Jurek, a Bernie Sanders field organizer had argued, calling it a model for breaking Americans of their “privilege” by sending them to “go break rocks.”

Nobody would propose a return to the plantations, but forced labor is still popular with some socialists.

The Soviet Socialist system was built on forced labor, from the collective farms that peasants were not allowed to leave, to mandatory ‘volunteer’ brigades like those that helped build the Moscow Metro or harvested crops, to a massive slave trade in convict labor which built roads, tunnels, and canals, mined and did every form of dirty work, and was traded back and forth to Socialist civilian organizations.

The Soviet Socialist achievements that American leftists praised were the product of slavery.

While the Left demands that America make a reckoning for 19th century slavery, its leading figures, from Bernie Sanders to Noam Chomsky, were apologists for socialist slavery, and its leading institutions, from the New York Times to the Pulitzer Institute, both promoters of the 1619 Project, were complicit in covering up slavery and mass murder by their socialist allies in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Today’s ‘woke’ corporations, like Nike and Coca-Cola, benefit from slave labor in Communist China’s systems of labor camps, state-run and civilian factories, which encompass over 1 million people.

The brands telling Americans that they need a reckoning with slavery have their own reckoning.

Slavery has been a fundamental feature of the socialist regimes admired by American leftists expressed in murderous abbreviations from the Soviet GULAG to Cuba’s UMAP camps for Christians, to China’s RTL. The Khmer Rogue in Cambodia turned forced labor into genocide and this was not all that unusual.

Southern slave owners, especially once shipping in new slaves was banned, wanted to profit from selling slaves and this resulted in a high population growth among enslaved African people, while the Soviet Socialist gulags, like their National Socialist counterparts, extracted maximum labor from their prisoners with no interest in their physical survival. They knew where they could easily get more slaves.

The Nazis and the Communists operated unsustainable slave economies that always needed more bodies. National Socialist and Communist slave labor served a dual purpose, obtaining free labor for state industries (and in Germany, politically connected industries), and disposing of unwanted people.

The National Socialists used slave labor to clear away unwanted conquered populations, Jews, and others who were not official members of the Herrenvolk, while building up the industries of conquest. The Soviet Socialists also used the gulag system, along with mass starvation and executions, to clear away unwanted ethnic and national minorities, including again Jews, but also to purge their system.

The Soviet Socialists used slave labor to eliminate potential dissent and terrorize the population on a much larger scale because while the National Socialists had used mass murder to achieve racial homogeneity, they used it to obtain political homogeneity as the basis for their system.

Both the National Socialists and Soviet Socialists envisioned an endless supply of slave labor that could be obtained through conquest. The South had internalized slavery, while the Socialists externalized it.

Socialist slavery was not an aberration: it was the essential idea of Marxism and of Socialism.

Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution stated that, "in the USSR, work is a duty" and that the "principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."

That was based on an idea from Karl Marx, who had had described the ideal Communist society as a place where, "labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want." The message echoed the one placed over the gates of National Socialist concentration camps, "Arbeit Macht Frei" or "Work makes you free."

The Soviet Union, like other socialist regimes, had defined itself as a worker state. But the nature of work, where and how one worked, was defined by the institutions of the state. Slavery was the founding principle of socialism which defined life around labor, not for the self, but for the collective good.

“Socialism is the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism," Adolf Hitler had articulated in a Munich speech titled, Why We Are Anti-Semites.

Parasitism was the basis for forced labor in the Soviet Union and other Socialist regimes where the state defined who workers were and what legitimate work was. Citizenship in a workers’ state meant a willingness to labor on those terms. A failure to do so was parasitism which would be punished with redemption through labor. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” message of National Socialist concentration camps, derived from a 19th century novel about the moral redemption of forced labor, and the celebratory Soviet songs and poems of forced labor celebrated work as the true religion of a socialist state.

Southern slave owners justified the subjugation of human beings by asserting that forced labor gave meaning to inferior people, uplifting them from a degraded condition, and taking care of them.

Socialist slavery was based on the same premise and provided justification for Southern slavery.

"The dissociation of labor and disintegration of society, which liberty and free competition occasion, is especially injurious to the poorer class; for besides the labor necessary to support the family, the poor man is burdened with the care of finding a home, and procuring employment," George Fitzhugh, one of the most vocal advocates for the Southern plantation, had argued. "Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form of socialism."

Fitzhugh believed that not only black people, but that most people should be slaves to protect them from the fierce competition of a capitalist society.

"With negro slaves, their wages invariably increase with their wants. The master increases the provision for the family as the family increases in number and helplessness. It is a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants," he wrote.

The doctrines of Socialism helped inspire Southern slave owners to defend the plantation.

"Every plantation is an organized community," Rep. William Grayson had mused. "A phalanstery, as Fourier, would call it, where all work, where each member gets sustenance and a home."

Fitzhugh had also argued that, "a well-conducted farm in the South is a model of associated labor that Fourier might envy."

Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist who coined the term 'feminism', had wanted to wipe out the Jews by sending them to labor in his phalansteries, massive utopian communes, as his original vision of utopian socialist communes had given way to labor camps that would break the enemies of socialism.

Socialism is less efficient and produces less value, therefore it demands more cheap labor. Or slaves.

Socialist slavery begins with idealistic visions, but all the schemes based on willing cooperation fall through. The peasants cling to their land and have to be forced into communes. The workers don’t want to work and have to be compelled. The volunteers don’t show up and volunteering becomes mandatory.

The idealism turns into ossified academic jargon disguising the brutal reality of mass slavery.

America has spent centuries making a difficult and bloody reckoning with slavery. Its leftist enemies have rarely bothered to even make the effort, blaming crimes on individual leaders, on poor conditions, and on interference by America in hellholes like Cambodia that would otherwise have been utopias.

And, no matter how much we learn about the Socialist mass killings, rehabilitation is always waiting.

The Left has failed to make a reckoning with slavery. That’s why the media nods sympathetically at old Communists, and clucks over McCarthyism even as it cancels random people over minor missteps. Its preeminent revisionist historian, Howard Zinn, was a Stalinist, its preeminent thinker, Noam Chomsky, defended the Khmer Rouge, and Bernie Sanders, its presidential candidate, praised the products of Soviet slave labor. These are the crimes of apologists for a contemporary Confederacy: a slave empire that spread around the world, killing millions, and enslaving countless millions more in systems of labor camps that dwarf anything that any Southern plantation owner could have imagined.

Statues of Columbus and Jefferson are under attack, but a statue of the greatest socialist slave owner of modern times still stands in Seattle.

Vladimir Lenin had set up the system of gulags that eventually enslaved and killed millions. Lenin's plans had begun with "obligatory work duty" for class enemies, then evolved to the "most unpleasant forced labor" for members of the "propertied classes", and then to camps full of slaves laboring to build socialism who had been sent there for even the most minor of offenses.

As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the architect of the Red Terror and the secret police put it, "Even now the labor of prisoners is far from being utilized on public works, and I propose to retain these concentration camps to use the labor of prisoners, gentlemen who live without occupation, those who cannot work without a certain compulsion, or, if we talk of Soviet institutions, then here one should apply this measure of punishment for unscrupulous attitude to work, for negligence, for lateness.”

The purpose of the concentration camp was no longer to punish class enemies, but to find slaves.

That Lenin’s statue still stands in Seattle is a testament to the reality that the Left has made no reckoning with its history of slavery. It has not repented of its crimes against millions of people.

The greatest slave empires of the modern era were not Southern, they were Socialist.

Conservatives have spent enough time defending the Founding Fathers. It is time to stop being on the defensive and attack the leftist proponents of modern slavery who propose to tear down their statues.






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



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