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Thursday, August 31, 2023

ADL Joins Sharpton for Crown Heights Pogrom Anniversary

By On August 31, 2023 In
In August 1991, racist mobs roamed the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, attacking anyone they thought might be Jewish. Black rioters stabbed, stoned and beat their victims. Community members huddled in their homes watching gangs smash their windows. Al Sharpton appeared to denounce the Jews at an event that included the banner, “Hitler did not do the job.”

In August 2023, the ADL ignored the anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom and instead joined Sharpton in Washington D.C. The ADL urged its members to take part in Sharpton’s ‘March on Washington’ headlined by his National Action Network and co-chaired by the ADL.

The ADL not only failed to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, it partnered with the hatemonger who was front and center at the pogrom. ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt issued a press release together with Al Sharpton about the recent murder of three people in Florida, while forgetting about the three people who died in Crown Heights.

They include Yankel Rosenbaum, a visiting Australian student, who was surrounded and stabbed to death, Anthony Graziosi, an Italian-American salesman, dragged from his car and murdered because his hat and beard make him look like an Orthodox Jew, and Bracha Estricher, a Holocaust survivor who seeing the thugs pounding on her door committed suicide rather than fall into their hands. Not to mention a woman who suffered a miscarriage after being chased by the mob.

“Hate still exists,” Greenblatt declared in D.C. at an event headlined by the most lucrative bigot who used the Crown Heights Pogrom as a springboard to running for president, becoming a Democratic Party kingmaker, and securing a role as Obama’s envoy. He implied that critics of the ADL’s relationship with Sharpton were practicing “cancel culture”, when what we really needed to do is “embrace them” and “educate them about our history.”

Like the time that Sharpton taunted, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”

The ‘March on Washington’ was not Greenblatt’s first collaboration with Sharpton. The two men have repeatedly worked together and participated in joint appearances, events and press releases on various leftist causes, often having nothing to do with either Jewish or black issues, such as condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to secure the border in 2018.

But co-chairing an event with Sharpton’s hate group on the 32nd anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom is an unforgivable expression of contempt for the victims of the violence. On another August after a mob shouting, “There’s a Jew! Get the Jew! Kill the Jew.”, chased down and killed Yankel Rosenbaum, the ADL boss is eager to dismiss this as a mere matter of “differences”.


While it’s entirely conceivable that Jonathan Greenblatt, an Obama administration veteran ignorant of Jewish issues who steered the ADL into intersectional wokeness, did not know what else Sharpton had done in August (the last time the ADL commemorated the worst antisemitic riot in America history was in 2021), this is not the first time that this has happened.

The ADL and Greenblatt had come under fire for taking part in Sharpton’s ‘March on Washington’ in 2020 some months after BLM riots had targeted Los Angeles synagogues. When the pogrom was first taking place, a rabbi had blasted the ADL for ignoring the violence and instead “issuing a press release about skinheads in Idaho”.

In 2016, Norman Rosenbaum, an Australian prosecutor who had come to America to fight for justice for his murdered brother, condemned the ADL and future New York City Mayor Eric Adams for marking the pogrom with a “community festival” offering fun for all.

After securing a federal civil rights trial for his brother’s killer, who had gotten a pass from a friendly local jury, Rosenbaum passionately held establishment groups like the ADL accountable. When Sharpton was invited to events, he would challenge those who did it, reminding them that, “it completely disregards the pivotal role that Al Sharpton played in inciting the riots which took my brother’s life.”

Norman Rosenbaum passed away in July 2020, freeing up the ADL to work on Sharpton’s March to Washington that year. With him gone, the ADL boss felt no shame in using the 32nd anniversary of the pogrom to party with Sharpton in Washington D.C.

In one of his last messages, Norman Rosenbaum wrote in 2019 that, “It was a mob of about 30 who attacked and murdered Yankel, of which 28 have never been brought to justice. And as he parades around as a supposed leader and champion of civil rights, Sharpton has never once called on his supporters to turn in to law enforcement the remaining 28 people. But that is not a priority in Al Sharpton’s world.”

Nor is it a priority for the ADL.

The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt claimed that he had come with Sharpton to Washington D.C. to stand up for justice. Sharpton has never faced justice, not for Crown Heights, for the Tawana Brawley hoax, or the Freddie’s massacre in Harlem which killed 7 people.

The last time the ADL commemorated the Crown Heights Pogrom was two years ago while refusing to use the correct term “pogrom”, instead choosing to use the media’s distorted politically term “riots” in order to evade the responsibility of the political establishment, including Mayor David Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor, in having the police stand down.

The ADL’s press release stated that “one of the enduring lessons of the Crown Heights Riots is in acknowledging the responsibility to confront antisemitism, no matter where it is and who is perpetrating it.” Two years later, the ADL is co-chairing an event with an antisemite who was at the epicenter of the worst antisemitic riot in the nation’s history.

In Washington D.C., Sharpton began his speech with, “No justice, no peace”, the same slogan that he had brought to Crown Heights three decades ago and which Charles Price, who was convicted of inciting the Rosenbaum murder had shouted, along with, “Let’s get the Jews”.

The Jews were on the ground, courtesy of Greenblatt and fading actor Sacha Baron Cohen, most famous for singing “Throw the Jew down the well” in the persona of ‘Borat’. “Many of you are probably wondering what the hell is a white Jewish comedian from England doing here,” he asked, after first opening with a tiresome joke about performing at the Rosenberg bar mitzvah.

“I promise that this is not a prank on you,” he assured the crowd. “It might be one on me.”

That was an adequate summary of Jews showing up to Sharpton’s event.

“Today was a day to show our strength,” Sharpton boasted and vowed to fight for racial preferences in corporations. “We are not going to let you take affirmative action.”

While Sharpton and his allies show their strength, the ADL and the Jewish organizational establishment show their weakness. That is as true today as it was 32 years ago.

The ADL’s actions are not only a moral disgrace, they’re also a betrayal. Why is the ADL joining an antisemite’s campaign in support of racial preferences which primarily discriminate against Asians and Jews? (The successful campaign against affirmative action was waged by Edward Blum, a Jewish conservative, and Asian-American plaintiffs.) What interests are served here?

When the Crown Heights Pogrom took place, the ADL had waited a week and a half to condemn it. Abe Foxman, the ADL’s longtime leader, explained that the group had remained silent in the face of days of antisemitic violence, assault and murder out of “a quest for social justice”. Social justice, or more accurately, leftist politics, is still the priority for the ADL.

Jewish lives don’t matter, social justice does.






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

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Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Nothing Sacred

By On August 30, 2023 In
Since 2001, suicide rates increased by around 40% and religious identity fell by 25%. These seemingly random statistics are data points in a web defining America’s postmodern malaise.

Within a generation a nation that had been a global model of a modern society has imploded. Old demons like racism have come roaring back in a country that is more divided than ever. Another civil war, once a farfetched science fiction tale, now seems almost inevitable. In nearly every statistic that touches on our social bonds, America has become a disaster area.

From individuals to our families to our cities to our nation, we are coming apart. Suicide rates, drug overdoses, urban collapse, crime waves, hate, violence, fear and economic decline are everywhere. The majority of Americans don’t believe that the future holds anything better.

There are many explanations for what is happening, but a basic one is that we are the plane plummeting from the sky after all the rivets holding it together had come out. The rivets were those things which politicians blather about, the ones that hold us together, and without them we are defined only by those things which divide us. We’re separate parts falling down to earth.

Religion was a fundamental unity. Commonalities of faith allowed America to weather crises like the civil war or the civil rights struggles because underlying the anger were shared values. We no longer have shared values and while religion is not the only issue, it is a major indicator.

The deconstruction of country and faith left us with little more than accidents of geography, social class, race, tastes, politics, and the other things which divide us as our defining identities.

The moral motive force of a deconstructionist society in which nothing is sacred is to be defined by what we are against. Negative outrage, rather than any drive for the good, came to be the highest value. After the fall of Communism, the leftist ideology that transformed the country lacks any credible vision of a better world. The feeble gesturing toward Europe’s health care or China’s rapid trains quickly give way to a movement that is defined by its hatred of what is.

The class warfare conspiracy theories, tales of oppressed workers, strikers battling with the bosses, bomb throwers sabotaging capitalism, revolutionary vanguards overthrowing kings is where the moral passion of leftists always lay, but in the past this had been dismissed as a temporary stage. Now the violence and hate have become not the journey, but the destination.

Anti-racism contends that racism will exist as long as whiteness does. Wokeness holds out no hope of a better world, only a resistance that destroys the old but, even if it eliminates all the white people or heterosexual males, will likely never be freed of the intellectual residue of whiteness, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cisness and other thought crimes yet to be revealed.

Wokeness is an admission inherent in the long failed drives toward ‘True Communism’ in Russia, China and other totalitarian red states that utopia will never arrive. All leftists can do is sign up for an Orwellian perpetual cycle of purges against the enemies of their ideals.

That sort of ‘Oppositionism’ was the inevitable consequence of trying to actively realize an impossible ideal and then, out of the throes of its failure, defining the movement around a perpetual hostility to conservatives and traditionalists with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Oppositionism is what remains in a society where nothing is sacred and all that’s left is hatred of the other. If nothing is truly sacred and there is nothing higher to aspire to, then what defines us is what divides us, and we no longer need to know who we are, only what it is we hate.

The madness of oppositionism leads Democrat moms to take their toddlers to drag shows and buy them copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Anti-Racist Baby’ board book because these are the things that the people they hate now hate and so it’s incumbent on ‘progressives’ to embrace them.

At the rate we are going, if conservatives came out against child sacrifice, there would be a line all through wealthy woke suburbs to deliver their children to Moloch. In a society where things like human life and the innocence of children are sacred, such things would be inconceivable, but in a ‘nothing sacred’ society, what appears sacred must give way to what we hate.

Nothing sacred, certainly not religion, but not even that which even the most primitive barbaric tribes value, like the protection of women and children, can stand up to the power of hate.

And the need to destroy what we are to differentiate ourselves from that which we hate.

A generation ago, few college women would have been willing to throw away the hardwon feminist privilege of female sports to cater to a handful of mentally ill men. But the combined forces of woke identity politics and, almost as importantly, conservative opposition made it a tenet of faith that men who say they’re women have transcended biology and questioning that is a hate crime.

The postmodern moloch of wokeness asks of its followers that they sacrifice what is most precious to them, children, born and unborn, masculinity, femininity, athletic opportunity, honor and morality, in order to not only signal their virtue, but to differentiate themselves from the hated other tribe that they have been cursed to temporarily share parts of the country with.

The ancient pagans castrated themselves to worship the ‘goddess’ while the new pagans castrate themselves to reject toxic masculinity, traditional gender roles and everything that they have been taught is evil. The end result of people who define themselves by the rejection of what they hate is that they lose themselves and destroy their bodies and their souls.

That is what is happening to America.

The idea that some positive unifying vision would emerge in the twilight of religion was always a delusional fantasy. Religion was replaced by cults of personality, like that of Hitler and Stalin, and more contemporary examples, by a cannibalistic consumerism, and by a politics that pervaded everything.

Leftists promised that their politics could realize what religion only promised in exchange for total commitment and submission. Their failures cost a hundred million lives as a down payment. With the theoretical underpinnings in ruins, the politics is still everywhere, its promise is the destruction of everything else. Only when everything is gone, something better might emerge in some undefined fashion. But no one holds out any real expectation that it will.

This is oppositionism at its starkest, with no hope and no future, only the ruins of victory.

A sacred society is working toward something while an oppositionist society is nihilistic, existing for the destruction of its enemies, hoping and dreaming for nothing except death. Oppositionism cannot win because it has no concept of what victory even looks like. It barely bothers to dwell on the subject because deep down it has despaired of man and doesn’t believe that it can win.

The decline of religion, of the conviction that there is a ‘sacred’ worth building and protecting, has left behind passing emotions, mob movements, and outbursts, but nothing that endures. The sacred conviction of one moment, as in the aftermath of 9/11, is discarded when a new outrage comes along. And in oppositionism, there are always new outrages and convictions.

A sacred society is not a call for a theocracy, the coming together of the church and state is unhealthy for both, but for the importance of what we believe in. Movements, like wokeness, that cannot even summon up a plausible conception of the positive tend to form in societies that have lost the knowledge that life matters and that there is a higher purpose to our existence.

The sacred imagination looks in awe beyond the horizon in search of what moves us to be more than we are, while the oppositionist imagination is bent on dividing us to justify its cynical view of human nature. To the sacred, we are children of a higher power, while to the oppositionist we are biological meat machines driven by genetic predestination and crude impulses that are easily manipulable to those with the cleverness and the daring to impose their will on us.

That is the unexpected but fundamental breach between the sacred and the radical: is man free or a slave, was he made for better things or to be part of a mob, can we rise above ourselves?

Answer the question and you understand the movement, its nature and its misery.

Why shouldn’t biological slaves denied the hope of sacredness or transcendence destroy themselves? Why should they believe that tomorrow holds anything better than today? The icebergs are melting, capitalism is collapsing, extinction is coming and mankind will vanish. What’s there to really stay around except spite and violence against the other tribe?

Religion, true ideals, redeem us from this barbaric despair. Oppositionism, when its grandiose promises have failed, plunges societies back into that despair, and offers nothing more than the opportunity to burn it all down in a final funeral pyre in the ultimate act of social suicide.

This is the final end, individual and communal, of a society in which nothing is sacred.

The outcomes of civil wars are measured not only by what is destroyed, but by what is built. Out of a civil war between loyalists and rebels, came the United States of America. As we approach the precipice of a civil war, we may wish to consider what construction would arise from 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.

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Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Biden’s Terror Funding Killed an Israeli Preschool Teacher

By On August 29, 2023 In
Last year, Biden met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.”

Batsheva Nigri, a preschool teacher, was riding in a car with her six-year-old daughter when Islamic terrorists from the Palestinian Authority’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cut them off and riddled the car with 22 bullets. Batsheva’s six-year-old daughter watched her mother die.

The Palestinian Authority’s terror group hailed the murder of a 42-year-old preschool teacher as a “natural response to the crimes of the occupation” and as revenge for Denis Michael Rohan, a non-Jewish Australian tourist, starting a fire in the Al Aqsa occupation mosque in 1969.

Those who knew the preschool teacher described her as a woman with a “heart of gold” to whom “all the children were like her children.” Hamas and Islamic Jihad however claimed that her murder glorifies Allah.

Monday’s murder comes after an Israeli father and son were shot to death on the Sabbath. They’re among a growing list of terror victims this year ranging in age from a 6-year-old boy run down on a Jerusalem street to an 82-year-old woman who was killed while trying to get her disabled husband to safety when a rocket hit their building.

The twenty-six terror victims are a sharp increase from the only 3 deaths in 2020 when the Trump administration’s cutoff of aid to the terrorists occupying parts of Israel took effect.

The number of terror victims fell every year Trump was in office, from 15 in 2017, to 12 in 2018, 10 in 2019 and then only 3 in 2020. And the number of terror victims shot up every year Biden was in office from 17 in 2021, to 31 in 2022, and there is every sign that 2023 will top that.

Twice as many Israelis were killed in one month of Biden than in one year of Trump.

It’s only August and already 26 Israelis have been killed by Islamic terrorists. Last year at this time 18 Israelis had been killed by terrorists making for a 40% increase in 2023.

What made all the difference? As Rep. Ilhan Omar once said, “It’s all about the ‘benjamins’”.

In 2018, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act, named after an Iraq War veteran who was stabbed to death by a terrorist in Jerusalem, which cut off most aid to the Palestinian Authority. In 2019, President Trump went even further with a nearly total cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority. Biden not only restored aid, he sharply increased the flow of cash to the terrorists.

Biden’s half a billion dollars helped fuel a massive surge in Islamic terrorism. While the money is officially listed as humanitarian aid, injecting money into terror zones funds terrorism.

The Palestinian Authority maintains a ‘pay-to-slay’ program which pays salaries to terrorists based on the lengths of their prison sentences. That means successful killers can earn $3,000 a month in a part of the world where the average salary is around $700 a month. It’s five times more profitable to be a terrorist than a teacher.

That’s the price of Batsheva’s life and that is what the Biden administration has been paying for.

The Biden administration is well aware that the Palestinian Authority funds terrorism. While Biden and Secretary of State Blinken refused to raise the issue with terror leader Mahmoud Abbas, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf claimed, “we are working to bring pay-to-slay to an end.” Instead the United States is funding pay-to-slay.

And worse.

Recent documents reveal that the State Department applied for an OFAC license which exempts it from Global Terrorist Sanctions Regulations in order to provide foreign aid.

A government sanctions exemption document warned that, “we assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza. There is less but still some risk U.S. assistance would benefit other designated groups.”

The Biden administration knows that it’s funding terrorism. It is not only aware of it but it actually applied for an exemption in order to be able to continue funding terrorists… including Hamas.

Batsheva’s murder, like that of the 74 terror victims killed under Biden, was paid for directly and indirectly through foreign aid to terrorists and sanctions relief on Iran’s terror regime. These policies were not undertaken in ignorance, the OFAC documents provide clear evidence that the Biden administration had been warned that it was funding terrorism and that people would die.

That’s why the number of Israelis continues to climb every year that Biden has been in office.

After 7 Israelis, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in a Sabbath terrorist attack outside a synagogue in January 2023, Secretary of State Blinken met with Mahmoud Abbas and promised another $50 million to UNRWA which acts as the employment agency for Hamas. Earlier that same month, the Biden administration warned Israel to turn over $39 million in tax revenues to terrorists rather than providing that money to help terror victims rebuild their lives.

In August, with 4 Israelis already murdered, the Biden administration demanded that Republicans stop blocking $75 million in “humanitarian aid” to the UN agency. Sen. Jim Risch and Rep. Michael McCaul are determined to block that aid until Secretary of State Blinken certifies that UNRWA “is not affiliated with U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations”. And yet the Biden administration can’t seem to even manage to clear that lowest of legal bars.

In Batsheva’s hometown of Efrat, which the Biden administration considers an “illegal settlement” despite being referenced numerous times in the bible, the children have lost a teacher and a friend.

The murdered preschool teacher had been on the way to “prepare the kindergarten for the start of the year.” A woman who worked with her described how “every time I entered the kindergarten, she welcomed me with a beaming smile that always accompanied her. The children were everything to her, she always hugged them and gave what she could to the children, the staff, the parents.”

Batsheva did not have to die. None of the 26 already killed this year did. The 3 dead in 2020 show what’s possible. The Biden administration is knowingly funding the murder of the innocent.






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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Sunday, August 27, 2023

Biden Allowed Major Donor to Hand Advanced Military Tech to China

By On August 27, 2023 In
“When I was in another State they would slip and say ‘now I want to introduce the Senator from DuPont–I mean Delaware’”, Joe Biden had joked at a Senate Subcommittee on Crime session.

There’s a certain truth to the joke. DuPont is the corporation that defines Biden’s career. His first Senate bid was staffed with DuPont employees, including future chief-of-staff and senator Ted Kaufman, who was conveniently allowed to take a “leave of absence” from DuPont to help elect Biden. Biden celebrated his victory at the Hotel DuPont and bought a former DuPont mansion.

DuPont figures in a lot of Biden’s stories. He even claims to have gotten on board with gay marriage when his father showed him a gay couple kissing at DuPont. And Biden figures in the latest DuPont story which involves handing over advanced military technology to China.

Last year, DuPont sold off its biomaterials unit to the Huafon Group of China. Huafon, a massive chemical and finance organization,

Biden’s own defense secretary warned that the sale would put technology that could be used for advanced explosives in China’s hands. Those concerns were not unreasonable. DuPont had been born as a gunpowder firm that came to dominate the American defense industry in the 19th century. DuPont was there handling plutonium on the ground floor of the Manhattan Project even though its former president, Irénée du Pont, had admired Hitler. DuPont has since tried to avoid associations with weapons, but its biomaterials had potential military applications.

Houfan, a massive Chinese chemical and finance organization, which dominates the spandex market (spandex was originally developed by DuPont), boasts in its own spandex division that its commitment to “social responsibility” derives from Communist leadership within the company.

The deputy secretary of the Communist Party branch within Houfan was quoted as emphasizing the role of “Communist Party members and youth league members”.

America has been falling behind Communist China in the explosives race. The Ukraine war had demonstrated all too clearly the limitations of our military production capabilities and our reliance on outdated technologies. In 2021, a factory in Louisiana responsible for making all the Pentagon’s black powder blew up. The factory was originally part of DuPont.

China dominates mass production of CL-20, the deadliest non-nuclear explosive, and America has struggled to catch up. A report during the Trump administration had warned that, “China is also the sole source or a primary supplier for a number of critical energetic materials used in munitions and missiles.” Austin and the Pentagon warned about the deadly consequences of handing over DuPont’s technology which, like CL-20, was developed in America, but would be appropriated by China leading to a grave risk of American deaths in possible future conflicts.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has generally been a loyal political soldier. He had previously toed the line on nearly every Biden initiative. But on DuPont, he broke ranks. National security officials tried to meet with Biden to warn him that the DuPont deal might be good for the Delaware company, but was bad for America. Biden however refused to meet with them.

And the deal went through. Despite the supposed safeguards which were supposed to prevent Covation Biomaterials, the name of the new Chinese-controlled company, from getting its hands on the production process, it happened anyway. And the FBI launched an investigation.

Nothing is expected to come of that.

This is far from the first time that advanced American technology has fallen into the hands of our enemies in China, but it’s particularly outrageous because top defense officials, including the secretary of defense, had warned of the consequences, and it happened anyway.

And because there is no company closer to Joe Biden than DuPont.

The Biden family had already been involved in the intersection of China and DuPont when Hunter Biden introduced George Duko, a DuPont executive, to a Chinese businessman who had founded a Communist linked firm. While Hunter has been sidelined, there’s a history there.

DuPont has been kind to Biden, donating $250,000 to his inauguration committee alone, and the Biden family has been kind to DuPont. When Robert H. Richards IV, a DuPont heir, admitted to raping his 3-year-old daughter, Attorney General Beau Biden defended the judge who refused to lock him up because he has “strong family support” and “will not fare well in prison.”

Beau Biden went on to die (of cancer in the United States, not in Iraq, as Joe Biden has repeatedly lied) and the Biden clan decided that the best way to memorialize the man who let a child rapist walk was to set up the Beau Biden Foundation for the Protection of Children. The foundation, currently holding its ‘Child Protection Classic’ at the DuPont Country Club, became famous when laptops bearing its sticker turned up filled with pornographic materials featuring its chairman, Hunter, including allegations of supposed inappropriate behavior with underage girls.

There is no understanding the Bidens without understanding Delaware and DuPont. The decline of DuPont was a pivotal moment for Joe Biden’s political career. The Bidens have never been national figures and though Joe, his brother, and his son crisscrossed the world, they were always local grifters. DuPont’s troubles caused them to turn to China.

Joe and Hunter Biden are far more interested in what’s good for DuPont than what’s good for America. Biden’s decision is likely to increase China’s military edge and weaken our own.

China didn’t have to buy the President of the United States, just the “Senator from DuPont”.






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

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Thursday, August 24, 2023

Ilhan Omar Met With Al Qaeda Allies on Trip Funded by Islamic Terror States

By On August 24, 2023 In
“It’s all about the benjamins,” Rep. Ilhan Omar had explained America’s support for Israel.

What’s the explanation for Omar’s support for Islamic terrorists? Considering her alleged adulterous affair with her non-Muslim chief fundraiser that broke up her marriage (he has since married her and converted to Islam) that led her father to ban her from his deathbed, it’s not as if the Somali Muslim politician from Minnesota is, despite her ritual hijab, all that devout.

Rep. Omar’s hatred for America and Jews is no doubt sincere and commonplace in her part of the world, but recent revelations have raised questions about whether ‘benjamins’ are involved.

Last year the terrorist sympathizer and her new husband jetted off to Doha for the World Cup games where she shared pictures of them posing with soccer star David Beckham and an unknown man in a burnoose. Omar offered scant further details on the trip where she was seen in the stadium with a good view of the games, but in her financial disclosure she was forced to reveal that the Qatari regime paid for her meals and hotel room.

And that a trip to Pakistan had been paid for by the Pakistani government.

Both Qatar and Pakistan are state sponsors of Islamic terrorism. Both had ties to Al Qaeda and the attacks of 9/11 which Rep. Omar had dismissed as “some people did something”.

The Pakistani government had harbored Osama bin Laden in one of its military towns and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, had been a Qatari government employee.

During her visit, Omar met with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif who had initiated negotiations with Al Qaeda and offered to “reestablish normal relations as long as they do not conduct operations in Punjab”. Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United States had claimed that Osama bin Laden had backed Sharif’s brother. Rep. Omar also met with former Prime Minister Imran Khan, nicknamed ‘Taliban Khan’, who had referred to Bin Laden as a “martyr”.

Omar’s Qatari trip also took her into the heartland of Islamic terrorism.

The 9/11 Commission Report revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had evaded capture after the World Trade Center bombing due to the intervention of a prominent Qatari official allowing him to continue the terror plots that led to the September 11 attacks. A Times story claimed the “government of Qatar is paying millions of pounds a year to Al-Qaeda”.

Qatar hosts the Muslim Brotherhood, along with the Taliban negotiations that convinced the United States to allow the Jihadists to take over Afghanistan, and is allied with Iran. It’s also a backer of Hamas: the Muslim Brotherhood terror group responsible for the murder of Israelis.

Rep. Omar had previously been accused of serving as a Qatari asset in a Florida court case against a member of Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family who had, according to a lawsuit, ordered murders on American soil. During the case a Kuwait-born businessman had submitted a deposition claiming that Qatari officials “recruited Ilhan Omar from even way before she thought about becoming a government official… They groomed her and arranged the foundation, the grounds, for her to get into politics way before she even showed interest.”

The politician’s office had denied the reports claiming that the “only people Rep. Omar represents in Washington are the people of Minnesota’s 5th District”.

But Minnesota’s 5th District is a long way from Qatar or Pakistan.

While Omar’s trip to Qatar was controversial because the World Cup depended on slave labor, her visit to Pakistan was even more disturbing and was condemned by India’s government.

During Rep. Omar’s trip funded by the Pakistani terrorist state, she visited parts of India’s Kashmir territory illegally occupied by the Islamic nation. India’s foreign ministry responded by accusing the radical congresswoman of “violating our territorial integrity and sovereignty.” Omar would later announce a boycott of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s speech to Congress while claiming that the leader was cracking down on the Muslims occupying India’s Kashmir area.

She met with Taliban and Al Qaeda allies in Pakistan’s political establishment and took the terror state’s side in its demands on Kashmir. According to official reports, she described her fight against “Islamophobia” with former Prime Minister Imran Khan who had utilized blasphemy laws to persecute Christians. Prime Minister Sharif, who had sought to negotiate with Al Qaeda, celebrated Omar’s “courage of convictions and her political struggle.”

Omar traveled with Tahir Javed, a Pakistani Democrat donor and deputy finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who is closely involved in both American and Pakistani politics, and has met with politicians from both countries including Joe Biden.

Javed, who at one point explored a congressional bid, is a supporter of Imran Khan, who had hailed Osama bin Laden as a martyr. The Pakistani businessman had hosted a fundraiser for Omar and donated to her campaign. One photo shows Javed meeting with Rep. Omar, Rep. Maxine Waters and Senator Chris Van Hollen to lobby for more aid money for Pakistan.

The DNC deputy finance chair had also hosted Hamza Yusuf, an Islamist who had defended the blind terror sheikh linked to the World Trade Center bombing. “I am a citizen of this country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in this country,” Yusuf had previously declared.

Rep. Omar is not an outlier, she’s a symptom of the subversion of her political party.

The revelation that the Pakistani government had funded Omar’s anti-India trip to a terror state and that she had been accompanied by a major donor has more than a whiff of ‘the benjamins’.

As does her glamorous trip to what critics had called the ‘World Cup of Shame’.

Supporting Islamic terrorism and undermining America comes with hotels and meals included.

Rep. Omar had dismissed the 9/11 Islamic attacks on America as “some people did something.” As revelations about terror state funding of her foreign trips continue to emerge, it seems that some people not only did something… they also paid for someone.






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

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Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Hunter Biden’s Broken Car Cost Taxpayers $139 Million

By On August 23, 2023 In
When Hunter Biden was driving 172 miles an hour while smoking crack on the way to meet prostitutes in Las Vegas, the son of a future president was driving a Porsche 911.

Devon Archer, Hunter’s closest partner, told the House Oversight Committee that the car had been paid for by an oligarch from Kazakhstan. “I believe it was a Fisker first and then a Porsche.”

Kenes Rakishev, the banker for Kazakhstan’s dictator and a close associate of Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s ruthless Chechen warlord, had allegedly bought Hunter the sports car after a meeting with Joe and Hunter at Cafe Milano: an exclusive D.C. eatery that the Washington Post had described as “Washington’s ultimate place to see and be seen.”

The Fisker Karma was more than just another sports car. The electric luxury vehicle was a social statement that had been backed by a $529 million loan to the Europeans behind it.

Vice President Joe Biden, told local politicians, union members, and Fisker executives in Wilmington, Delaware in 2009 that Fisker would be bringing green jobs for everyone..

Joe Biden cited “a real commitment by this Administration” and “loans from the Department of Energy” that would help “America’s auto industry reclaim its top position in the global market. Of the total loan, $359 million is going to revive manufacturing at the Boxwood Plant.”



The then vice president made no mention of Hunter’s business interests, Fisker’s backing by Al Gore’s venture capital fund or that the $170 million remainder of the loan would be going to build Fisker’s ‘Karma’ cars in Finland.

“We’re not in the business of failing; we’re in the business of winning. So we make the right decision for the business,” Fisker said. “That’s why we went to Finland.”

Hunter Biden was not in the business of failing either: it just seemed to happen anyway. Armed with his father’s backing and that of local Delaware officials, he was working to transform the state’s rust belt infrastructure, like the old GM plant that Fisker was promising to take over, into green energy ventures that would cash in on the massive redistribution of taxpayer money through the $90 billion allocated for green energy companies in Obama’s ‘Recovery Act’.

Emails went back and forth between Hunter Biden, Delaware’s governor and the head of the state’s office of economic development who described a green energy project touted by Hunter as coming from the “vice president’s office”. The line between Joe Biden and his son’s business ventures, which is at the heart of the House Oversight Committee, seemed barely there.

After Fisker’s loan had been secured, Wayne Kimmel, Hunter’s childhood friend and a venture capitalist, who along with Hunter had cosponsored an inaugural breakfast to celebrate his dad’s new job, emailed Hunter to ask for an introduction to Chris Heinz, John Kerry’s stepson and a co-founder of Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca firm, to discuss Fisker.

“Its our fund that’s in the deal,” Hunter replied.

And what made the deal work was $529 million in taxpayer money. The Delaware launch, attended by Joe Biden, was ultimately going to benefit Hunter Biden’s company.

“Hunter… sincere thanks for any and all help provided concerning Fisker, particularly intro to Wayne. Also, congrats to all on the finalization of the Boxwood Plant transfer, announced on Monday,” Barry Yerger, a financial mover and shaker recently appointed by Joe Biden to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, wrote.

While the Fisker disaster unfolded, there was no mention of the Biden role in the company.

Fisker was supposed to build “affordable” electric cars in Delaware that would cost $40,000. Instead it built the ‘Karmas’ in Finland. They cost six figures, were too heavy, the hybrid’s gas mileage was no better than some regular cars and the tires wore out in a year.

But Hunter wanted one anyway, perhaps to drive or to show off to prospective investors.

By 2012, the target date, $193 million of the loan had been spent on the ‘Karma’ and other projects, and nothing was happening in Delaware. In 2013, the only option, the local media warned was “Chinese billionaires” preparing for Fisker’s bankruptcy auction. One of those Chinese billionaires would win the auction despite his company, which promised to make the electric cars, being created a few months beforehand with no office address or phone number, after rigging the auction and “cheating taxpayers out of millions of dollars”.

A few months after a Kazakh oligarch allegedly bought Hunter a Fisker Karma, it was already breaking down. Meanwhile Joe Biden was meeting with a different set of foreign executives.

Joe Biden invited two executives from Wanxiang, a Chinese automotive company that would gobble up Fisker, to the White House. A few days later one of the executives promised to help get Hunter’s Fisker Karma fixed.

“Last Friday when we visited D.C., I heard that your Fisker is out of order and could not get serviced. Sorry,” the Chinese executive wrote. “It would be our honor to get your Fisker fixed… I would like to give you a call to see what we could do as next step.”

The Chinese executive mentioned, “It would be our great honor to welcome you to visit Fisker or Wanxiang at any time.”

Did the Chinese executive hear about Fisker and the state of Hunter’s car from him or his dad? The executive’s phrasing suggests that he had heard about it from someone other than Hunter.

The head of Delaware’s economic development office claimed that Hunter Biden had offered to “to link the governor with Chinese investors interested in acquiring the auto plant.” But nothing happened. Wanxiang never built any cars there, but instead sold it off to a private developer.

No cars would be built on the auto plant. Instead taxpayers were left not only with over $100 million in losses, but local taxpayers were also on the hook for its $400,000 power bill.

The green energy disaster was not the only one that came from Obama’s corrupt Recovery Act.

Sun Edison, a solar panel company, became the biggest green energy bankruptcy, benefiting from as much as $1.5 billion in government grants and subsidies. In an email, Devon Archer mentioned to Hunter that he was planning to meet with Sun Edison “in the next few weeks and qualify if there’s opportunity”. The Biden administration appointed Jigar Shah, Sun Edison’s founder, to head the loan office at the Department of Energy distributing green energy grants.

There is no shortage of opportunities and expenses. The story of Fisker suggests that Joe Biden’s abuse of his office to help Hunter’s economic interests may go as far back as 2009. Not long after Joe became vice president, Hunter was benefiting from the connection.

Americans lost over $100 million on Fisker, but thanks to the services of a Kazakh oligarch and some Chinese automotive executives, Hunter Biden got a $142,000 lemon.

Until he traded it in for a Porsche.





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

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Monday, August 21, 2023

Radicals Want to Keep Porn, Ban PragerU, in Schools

By On August 21, 2023 In
Florida has been falsely accused of “book bans” for pulling graphic pornography and racism from schools. A Florida school district was sued for keeping, “All Boys Aren’t Blue”, which features lines such as “he reached his hand down and pulled out my d____”, away from kids.

The Biden administration claimed that it was “incomprehensible” that the DeSantis administration had rejected a black history AP course featuring the works of Amiri Baraka whose poems included lines such as “we are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of s__t)” and “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.”

But now the Left has discovered educational materials in Florida schools that it wants to ban.

Outrage, condemnations, petitions and threats greeted the revelation that Florida had allowed schools to use PragerU materials if they wanted to. After months of accusing Florida of banning books, the media and leftist activists mounted a crusade to ban PragerU from schools.

NPR, which had attacked Florida for keeping graphic pornography and racism away from kids, breathlessly condemned the state’s educational system for potentially allowing videos which correctly state that “slavery was part of life all over the world” and that “the planet has been warming and cooling since prehistoric times”.

The show quoted a PTA president blustering, “I do not want my kids exposed to this – absolutely not.” while its reporter worried that “no Florida school district has yet announced plans to use PragerU Kids videos, but they can’t stop teachers from showing them, either.”

The leftists were for book bans before they were against them, and now are for them again.

After insisting that teachers should not be prevented from discussing their sex lives with kids or secretly transitioning them to the opposite sex, NPR is worried that there’s nothing to stop Florida educators from showing a video about American history.

Among those condemning the PragerU curriculum was the vice president of the Florida Freedom to Read project which had attacked schools for jettisoning ‘Lawn Boy’ which included lines such as, “I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s d___ in my mouth.”

Freedom to read means teaching kids about 10-year-old boys performing sex acts, but not that slavery was commonplace in the 19th century or that the climate has always been changing.

“Of all the PragerU propaganda you’ve seen, this might be the worst. Frederick Douglass takes a dig at BLM while praising the founding fathers as abolitionists and calling the Constitution a ‘glorious liberty document,”’ David Heath, a white former CNN reporter, agonized. “Florida is letting schools play this stuff.”

Florida is letting schools teach that the constitution is a “glorious liberty document”, but not provide 10-year-olds with sex manuals. What’s happening to our educational system?

In Tallahassee, black church leaders who, despite their alleged religiosity, are fine with pushing LGBTQ sex on kids, protested outside the state’s Department of Education.

The pastors accused Gov. DeSantis of “wickedness” and “dark work”, and complained that PragerU videos (correctly) “depicts the Founding Fathers as abolitionists” and “states white people led the effort to abolish slavery.”

The Rev. Dr. Joe Parramore (He/Him), who runs a “safe, LGBT welcoming and affirming ministry”, suggested that PragerU videos could lead to a cutoff in federal funding. “We cannot stand idly by and continue to allow the atrocities of a dictatorial leadership of a scared white nationalist DeSantis to inflict harm on the citizens and students of our state,” he ranted.

CAIR joined the attack by accusing PragerU of “Islamophobic tropes” over an old video of ex-Muslim activist Ayann Hirsi Ali who had been forced to flee Muslim death threats and the factual statement that “there is no moderate Islam.” That quote actually came from Turkey’s Islamist dictator who had argued, “Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate. ‘ Islam can only be one thing.” And CAIR has certainly spent its existence proving that.

The final member of Florida’s anti-PragerU coalition was an unindicted co-conspirator in funding Hamas. As the Department of Justice noted, “the evidence at trial linked CAIR leaders to Hamas, a specially designated terrorist organization, and CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.” CAIR offers a guide for educators and no one objects to that because leftist educators prefer Hamas to PragerU.

While Florida has shown no signs of retreating from allowing teachers to use the PragerU curriculum (as they do supplemental materials from many other organizations), the New Hampshire Board of Ed postponed a vote on allowing a financial literacy course by PragerU on such controversial topics as how to read pay stubs and how compound interest works.

Radicals from Occupy New Hampshire Seacoast to the local AFT-NH teachers’ union rallied to oppose what even opponents admitted was “a non- or less-controversial course on financial literacy”. The Boston Globe weighed in without offering a specific criticism of the course materials.

The two Democrats running for governor, Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig and Executive Councilwoman Cinde Warmington, warred with each other to warn about the threat of PragerU.

Craig claimed that “PragerU does not reflect New Hampshire values” without clarifying how the educational group’s materials failed to align with the state’s motto of “live free or die”. The controversial mayor’s administration had previously approved COVID relief money to be spent on a high school drag show. That does reflect Craig’s version of New Hampshire values.

Warmington wildly warned that PragerU teaching students how to calculate their taxes would “undermine the bedrock of our democracy”. Democracy can’t survive if kids learn to add. That may explain why leftist public school systems have destroyed math education.

The attacks on PragerU are short on substance and heavy on alarmism. One podcast denounces it as “far-right” and a “right-wing propaganda machine” guilty of a “reactionary political agenda” and “a regressive vision of society”. All of this is a repetitive leftist way of saying that it’s conservative. None of the critiques of PragerU get any less hypocritical.

Leftists who are obsessed with indoctrinating students accuse PragerU of indoctrination. The same activists who claim to be fighting against book bans also want to ban PragerU.

According to teachers’ unions, the media and radical activists, racism, porn and terrorism belong in schools, but financial literacy and the constitution don’t.





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

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Sunday, August 20, 2023

How the DOJ Outsourced Trump’s Indictment to House Dems

By On August 20, 2023 In
When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saw the indictment of Trump, she observed that, “it’s interesting to see how similar they are to some of the charges recommended by the January 6 committee and I commend, again, the committee.”

Soumya Dayananda, a senior investigator for the House Democrat committee claimed that, “the committee’s work provided this path.”

A New York Times article described the indictment as having a “narrative that was nearly identical”.

The Democrat prosecutor’s team admitted its dependence on the Democrat congressional committee by citing its work in its demand that the former president’s trial take place in early January 2024 so that it can overshadow the election and any potential inauguration.

The document filed by the Smith team claimed that it would produce materials to the Trump team including “unredacted materials obtained from other governmental entities, including the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol”. The filing also argued for the relevance of the “report written by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.”

Smith’s team was arguing that much of the evidence that it would introduce at trial had already been produced and made public by the House Democrat J6 committee. Trump’s team would receive the unredacted version of the materials and could then expect to be ready for trial.

It was a more official admission that the J6 indictment was just the J6 committee operating within the Justice Department and empowered to abuse the law by bringing criminal charges.

The media had described the House Democrat J6 criminal referrals as “historic.” They are historic in the sense that no partisan congressional committee had ever arranged to conduct a criminal trial of an opposing presidential candidate before.

That’s history of the banana republic kind.

The Democrat committee had issued four criminal referrals Three of the four charges in the indictment were adopted verbatim from the Democrat committee’s criminal referral. Smith swapped out the entirely unsupportable ‘insurrection’ charge for an anti-Klan law which among other things bans wearing costumes on highways.

All of this violates what Attorney Merrick Garland, who handpicked Smith to go after Trump, had promised. During his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, Garland had assured his audience that no “politics would have any influence over prosecutions or investigations.”

“The president has promised that those decisions will only be made by the attorney general, and that is what I plan to do. I do not plan to be interfered with by anyone. I expect the Justice Department will make its own decisions in this regard,” he told senators.

“I want to make clear to the career prosecutors…that my job is to protect them from partisan or other improper motives,”

By the time the J6 committee circus was on their way, Garland was telling a different story. “I am watching, and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live,” he promised Democrats. “And I can assure you that the Jan. 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings.”

“The Jan. 6 Committee Returns With One Viewer in Mind: Merrick Garland,” Time Magazine headlined its coverage.

AG Garland and his boys and girls were doing more than watching. The Justice Department contacted the House J6 lead investigator to let him know that his work “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting” and asked for transcripts.

Despite that the Justice Department kept claiming that these were separate investigations. It is now undeniable that the DOJ J6 investigation piggybacked on the work of the House Democrat J6 committee, and that Garland lied when he claimed that there would be no political influence.

The investigation had been as political as it could possibly be because it was undertaken by Democrat opponents of the former president in order to prevent him from running again.

Despite Garland’s promise to “pursue justice without fear or favor”, he provided a rubber stamp for a partisan effort by his boss and his congressional allies to go after an opposing candidate.

Smith’s reliance on the work of the J6 Democrats also raises serious questions about his claim that the Justice Department was conducting “the most wide-ranging investigation in its history”. If the DOJ was conducting a more wide-ranging investigation than say after the attacks of 9/11, why does it appear like such a carbon copy of the work of House Democrats? Why is Smith’s team citing the J6 committee’s materials as representing much of the evidence for the trial?

The House Democrats on the J6 committee had far more unlimited purse strings, blowing through millions of dollars in its investigations, hiring outside investigators and benefiting from a large staff. The “most wide-ranging investigation in its history” wasn’t conducted by the DOJ or Jack Smith, but by the House Democrats who spent lavishly on their political lynch mob.

The 57 staffers and the millions in spending meant that House Democrats and their paid personnel and outside investigators did the real work that Smith had dropped in his lap. This was nearly the same arrangement as Russiagate, where work done by Hillary Clinton’s campaign was then deposited in the Justice Department and the FBI for a rubber stamp.

The Justice Department followed the same protocol in both Russiagate and J6: taking an outside Democrat political hit job and pretending to go through the process of validating it. The actual purpose of both Russiagate and the J6 indictment is the same: to rig an election.

Attorney General Merrick Garland lied when he promised an apolitical justice department. Instead he set out to replicate the abuses that the Obama administration had perpetrated with Russiagate on a much larger scale.

The Trump indictment is not the work of an apolitical DOJ, but of a Democrat committee. It’s not there to provide justice, but to define the election around a Democrat criminal proceeding.

The only real difference between Russiagate and the J6 trial is that the former failed to launch. Garland, Smith and their political backers and bosses intend to make sure this one sticks.





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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Friday, August 18, 2023

The Decline and Fall of ‘Woke’

By On August 18, 2023 In
Walking into the children’s section of a public library, I spotted a copy of ‘Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice’’. Published in 2020, it’s almost a cultural artifact because ‘woke’ has gone from a hip term for leftism to a battered conservative punching bag in the culture war.

‘Woke’, the term, peaked in 2020. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and appeared as a category on Jeopardy. Next year, Essence magazine announced its list of ‘Woke 100 Women’. In 2020, Disney’s Hulu aired ‘Woke’:, a tedious series about a college activist.

By 2023, wokeness has come to mean leftist extremism. It’s most often used by Republicans and hardly ever by Democrats who act baffled at the idea that there was ever such a thing as wokeness. Much like ‘Defund the Police’, a set of sounds that once defined lefty culture, has been flushed down the memory hole and everyone is pretending they never heard of it.

In Seattle, the home of wokeness, “race and equity experts” say it’s “time to get rid of woke.”

“That word has been taken,” Erin Jones, a DEI consultant who charges $1,000 an hour for her workshops, admitted. “There’s no good way to use that term. I think it’s been so weaponized at this point that there was not a positive way to use the word ‘woke.’”

What happened to ‘Woke’ is the same thing that once happened to ‘Liberal’. Conservatives seized on it and used it to sum up everything wrong with leftist extremism. Before long, no one wanted to identify as a liberal because it meant being seen as a lunatic fighting for sex ed for kids, free needles for addicts, political correctness in the office and surrendering to enemies.

Leftist support for these policies never went away, but leftism underwent a rebrand.

Unlike conservatives who have retained the same name over time, leftists are chameleons. Leftists were first characterized by that name during the French Revolution because they tended to cluster to the left during legislative debates. More specific ideological terms like socialists and communists came and went, and became tainted by association with leftist policies.

There is no name for the Left that doesn’t have negative associations even for leftists.

Senator Bernie Sanders has spent most of his otherwise useless career trying to redeem the term ‘socialist’ in the United States. And recent polls show a growing approval for socialism among younger people. But, as the example of ‘Woke’ shows, that appreciation may not last long once conservatives turn whatever term the Left uses now into a political scarlet letter.

The destruction of wokeness within a matter of years shows why conservatives should not underestimate their cultural power. Barred by the media, censored by tech companies and shut out by the entertainment industry, conservatives were nevertheless able to take the hip new term that leftists had rebranded as and make it as toxic as yesterday’s radioactive waste.

That is something worth taking a moment to appreciate.

Wokes argue that ‘wokeness’ has a long pedigree and will be back. They’re probably right.

In 1923, the Nazis deployed the Sturmlied of the SA with its concluding command, “Deutschland, erwache! Erwache!” or “Germany, awake! Awake”. That same year, Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist fascist, incorporated it as “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!”

Black nationalists complained that white leftists had “appropriated” a black slogan, but it was the black nationalists who appeared to have appropriated a Nazi slogan.

Garvey, usually described as a civil rights activist, was an unabashed fascist. “Hats off to Hitler the German Nazi,” he had cheered and urged his followers to read Mein Kampf.

“What the Negro needs is a Hitler.” he had suggested and had himself in mind for the role.

But Garvey claimed credit for inventing fascism and argued that the Nazis had appropriated it from him. “We were the first Fascists,” the civil rights leader bragged, “Mussolini and Hitler copied the programme of the UNIA.” But just as Garvey copied Mussolini and Hitler, it’s more likely that Garvey borrowed ‘wokeness’ from a Nazi call to arms that included genocide.

Much like its Third Reich inspiration, wokeness has undergone its own decline and fall.

The Nazis, black nationalists and leftist wokes all meant the same thing by the use of the term which was to distinguish those who are ‘awake’ and aware of the crisis from those who aren’t. The hipness of the term required a certain amount of insider cachet which became impossible to sustain when Republican politicians became the ones to popularize wokeness.

When people think of wokeness, they no longer envision the BLM activists who used to appear on TV shows and on children’s books, they think of Gov. Ron DeSantis or an episode of FOX News. Republicans went to war on wokeness and in doing so, they appropriated it, they took the word and made it their own. Destroying the brand value of wokeness is not the same thing as defeating woke policies, but marketing is fundamental to leftist recruitment and expansion.

And now, once again, the Left is between descriptors. Some call themselves “progressives”: a longstanding and twice dated term that sounds like an eyeglasses prescription. Social justice still hovers around the margins but its users still remember when SJW became the derisive acronym of choice. The media, which rarely recognizes the existence of a separate leftist movement, describing its members only as ‘activists’, ‘experts’ or ‘concerned citizens’, likes the idea of an invisible ideology that, much like 1984, no one even has the words to describe.

Wokes still control most major cities and companies, the educational system and the government’s policymaking apparatus, but the backlash has inflicted some casualties. America is still a long way from 1988 when Saturday Night Live aired ‘The Liberal’ depicting a hunted Matthew Modine on the run in a conservative nation. (Like most SNL cultural guesses, it was actually wrong and conservatism had peaked while liberalism was in ascendance). The long-awaited backlash that would usher in a new ‘Reagan America’ has been promised many times in the last two decades, but has never actually been able to survive and take root.

And yet conservatives, who operate in a counterculture, should remember that they have the power to hurt the Left. The decline and fall of wokeness is a demonstration of the fragility of leftist cultural power which commands budgets in the tens of billions of dollars, controls private and public institutions, yet is deeply resented and vulnerable to some pointed mockery.

Wokeness, once a badge of pride, has become a badge of shame.





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

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Thursday, August 17, 2023

American Unreality

By On August 17, 2023 In
Ersatz or artificial substitutes for products used to be a wartime necessity. Americans and other westerners have long since accepted the ubiquity of ersatz products for real ones. Everything from butter to maple syrup to meat is replaced with substitutes for dietary or economic reasons.

The ‘ersatzization’ of food has been more than overmatched by the same phenomenon in our culture. Artificially generated images and essays are treated as if they were the work of some higher artificial intelligence rather than just the digitally remixed work of actual humans.

And men are treated as women as long as they insist that they really are women.

Objective measures of reality have fallen by the wayside in favor of a subjective materialism in which it matters only what something appears to be or what we think it is, not what it really is.

The consensual illusion of ersatz foods in which we all know what we’re eating even if we occasionally pretend it’s the real thing has made way for ersatz money, ersatz art, ersatz science, ersatz politics and even ersatz women. With the latter the right to pretend, to pose as something you are not, has evolved into a civil right. To lie and be believed has eclipsed freedom of speech and the traditional rights of women, not to mention science and reality.

Illusion became delusion along a road that began with mass communications and ended with emulation in the entertainment and technology industries as the highest form of art. Emulation, like most subversive arts, required deconstruction. To duplicate a thing, whether it was a scream, a sentence or a human body, we had to deconstruct it into its components and, once deconstructed, it was all too easy to confuse the components and the illusion with the whole.

Transgender activists claim that they’re women because they wear makeup, put on dresses, adopt feminine mannerisms, and, in some cases, take hormones and get castrated. It is significant that the latter are not even real requirements. The only real requirements for transgender status are external imitation and internal conviction. In an artificial age, what we believe and what we pretend to be is what we are. Those who do this are the children of a world where fortunes, stock value, political office and academic credentials are built on illusions.

The dark side of the scientific pursuit of truth was the conviction that by understanding how things in the natural world were made, we could duplicate them and become gods. Our belief that we have achieved this has vastly outstripped the reality where our limited successes stalled early on in the atomic age. The triumph and horror of the detonation of the atomic bomb remains a compelling subject because it appeared to open a new age when it actually closed it. The everyday hard technologies that underpin modern civilization already existed then. All we have succeeded in doing since is to make them cheaper, more efficient and more accessible.

It took the evolution of computer technology for us to enter a world that seemed in line with our inflated sense of our capabilities. Within those systems, programmers appeared able to create worlds and rewrite the rules of reality. Outside them, radicals who had soured on the old socialist vision of industrial progress turned to romanticism and manufactured the myth that human technology, nuclear and industrial, was on the verge of destroying the world.

The myth of man as the destroyer of worlds, propounded by Oppenheimer, a weak man pretending to be terrified of his own strength, was not a response to technological potency, but impotence. Environmentalism was not a reaction to the accelerating speed of technological change, which was actually slowing down, but to a cultural response to the death of progress.

The atomic age’s conviction that experts and scientists would be able to solve all our problems and usher in a better world had faltered and that opened the way for the counterculture to make its case that technological progress was not the solution. While America had sharply reduced poverty, spread prosperity and increased lifespans, these great achievements in daily life had not fulfilled the promise of a future that would sweep away all the social problems of the world.

The promise of omnipotent technological man was replaced with the myths of omnipotent man who could change the world, not through actual accomplishments, but through conviction. Like the Communist dictatorships they were on the verge of defeating, Americans were persuaded through mass communications and educational indoctrination that it was more important to believe the right things than to do them because conviction could transform reality.

Every leftist revolution, beginning with the French Revolution, had begun with the slogan that will mattered more than any real world prerequisite when it came to changing the world. Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ condensed that central idea into its name. That reality could be overcome through the assertion of the correct principles took us from the horrors of the guillotine, the mass starvations of the Soviet Union and Communist China, and refracted through the advertising and entertainment industries, along with social media, into an American unreality where people can change their sex if done in line with identity politics principles.

Marxism had never been anything more than a 19th century crank’s pseudoscience wrapped in bad history and worse theory. Karl Marx had been a miserable student and never had any patience for learning anything. The genius of Marxism was that it asserted that the only way to understand anything was to do it. Instead of testing theories against practice, practice had to validate theory. Soviet agriculture was a miserable failure, but that was put down not to the failures of the underlying theory, but to the decadence and corruption of the peasants.

When reality failed theory, mass murder swiftly followed. Socialist theories were all big lies that were upheld with misery and censorship, at best, and with terror and murder at their worst. The intellectuals who studied Marxism either learned to kill or were replaced by those like Stalin whose understanding of theory might be poor, but who excelled at implementing it by redirecting blame for its failures through a French revolutionary drama of purges and random butchery.

In America, the lies still reign supreme from global warming to gender change. The varied lies have at their core the myth that man is omnipotent in both destructive and constructive realms. If man is not restrained, he will destroy the world, but if he is restrained through the right ideology, there is nothing that he cannot accomplish. The good kind of omnipotence comes from adopting a political dogma which when properly implemented can make anything possible.

Overcoming reality by embracing illusion is the test of faith of the dogma. Like the ancient pagans who castrated themselves and then threw the parts into the fire before worshiping the goddess, their modern counterparts embark on pretending to be women as an act of faith. To disbelieve is not just a hate crime: it questions the magical thinking at the heart of the Left.

Ersatz food, once a wartime necessity, becomes ‘sacred’ when eaten to overcome ‘climate change’. Reality becomes illusion and becomes reality again when imbued with virtue. The break between the Marxists and the Wokes over whether virtue signaling matters is emblematic of the larger conflict between industrial and post-industrial social media collectivism.

To ‘live my truth’ rather than the truth is a pivotal decision to change the world through delusion. The old school Marxists may decry a neo-liberalism of bumper stickers and hashtag activism, but it was the 60s radicals who failed at public activism and went into the system, became wealthy and successful, who claimed that they sold out externally, but not internally, who gave us the schizoid state of the postmodern western leftist and he/them fantasy collectivism.

Radical ad execs, coked out screenwriters, and fringe academics ushered in the exciting unreality all around us. Then, financed by Silicon Valley techtopians, social media offered a terrible version of the old vision of creating worlds within the old green and black CRT monitors. The world inside the now 4K monitors is not the same as the real world outside, but even before the arrival of everyday augmented reality wearables people have been conditioned to compare reality against the unreal world of social media, and to find reality, in which the people aren’t as attractive, wealth doesn’t come from imaginary currency and fringe sexuality just leads to unhappiness, as wanting. We live in utopia now and the real world is collapsing around us.

External reality is depressing. It kills dreams. Like the dream of having total power over ourselves and the world around us. The man who believes he is really a woman doesn’t want to be told otherwise. Neither does the politician who just proposed spending another trillion dollars because modern monetary theory tells him that government spending can be virtually infinite.

Children live in a magical world in which dreams mingle seamlessly with reality. Adulthood appears to be a distant mirage of unlimited freedom. The traditional process of growing up was the realization of the limitations and responsibilities of adulthood. Each generation of children has become slower to come to terms with these limitations and responsibilities. For as long as possible they inhabit a childish world in which they can do anything and may not be denied.

The unreal world, enhanced by pharmaceuticals, fantasies and entertainment, offers not freedom through responsibility, but freedom from responsibility by exchanging subjective reality and external mimicry for the basic truths of economics, biology and human nature.

The world around us appears insane because it has left behind reality for fantasy. Sanity can only come from coming to grips with the painful truths of reality all over again.





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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