The Problem of Anti-Semitic Leftist Jewish Power

Anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart had spent years arguing that Hamas was a potentially moderate organization. Then when he was questioned at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, he played victim.

But as Caroline Glick notes, there was every reason for Israeli authorities to question Beinart’s visit, because the anti-Israel BDS activist had participated in anti-Israel protests in Israel. Beinart was not, despite his claims, detained. He was asked about his participation in that protest by the Center for Jewish Nonviolence. The Center, despite its name, is used by Jewish Voice for Peace members, a BDS hate group, which also, despite its name, advocates for and supports terrorists who attack Israel.

JVP members are on the banned list. Beinart had participated in a protest organized by a group that it used as a vehicle. So it’s completely normal that he was asked about it just as visitors to this country are asked about their membership in prohibited organizations such as the Nazi, Communist and other totalitarian parties. The BDS blacklist that bigots like Beinart rave about is no different than the United States blacklist on anyone who “has used a position of prominence to endorse terrorism.”

That’s the BDS movement.

JVP declared that it was proud to host Rasmea Odeh. Odeh had been convicted of a supermarket bombing in Israel that killed Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner: two Hebrew University students. It called the terrorist an “inspiration” and used the hashtag, #HonorRasmea. That’s using “a position of prominence to endorse terrorism” which gets you banned from both the United States and Israel.

Beinart writes for The Forward, a paper notorious for attacks on Israel and Jews that veer into the anti-Semitic. Typically anti-Semitic Forward headlines include, "3 Jewish Moguls Among Eight Who Own as Much as Half the Human Race” and "Why We Should Applaud The Politician Who Said Jews Control The Weather."

Beinart, an anti-Jewish activist of Jewish descent, is the perfect fit for an anti-Jewish tabloid of Jewish descent. The Forward's rebranding dropped the "Jewish" part of its name in 2015. That was also the year that Beinart accused Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel of a “tendency, to whitewash Jewish behavior.”

"He is largely blind to the harm Jews cause," Beinart railed against Wiesel in terms ominously similar to those used by anti-Semites. Israel, he claimed, "leads gentiles of goodwill to fear that if they criticize Israel they’ll be called anti-Semites." Peter Beinart or Richard Spencer: who wore the bigotry best?

But the gauzy line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is if anything even thinner among obsessive Israel bashers of Jewish origin like Beinart or The Forward’s Jane Eisner, its radical editor who stripped the lefty tabloid of its Jewishness, but not of its poisonous hatred of Jews. On the cocktail party circuit, Beinart is misleadingly billed as a ‘liberal Zionist.’ Like the Holy Roman Empire, he’s neither a liberal nor a Zionist. Neither liberals nor Zionists excuse Hamas or blame the victims of terror for their own deaths.

Terrorism is a "response to Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights," Beinart has insisted. It’s “the Israeli government is reaping what it has sowed.” His vicious hatred of the Jewish State is matched by his crush on Hamas. "Hamas is the final frontier," Beinart bloviated in 2009. “A shift in US and Israeli policy towards Hamas is long overdue,” he insisted in 2011. And seven years later, it’s still overdue.

Recently in The Forward, Beinart compared Israel's embargo on Hamas to Soviet gulags and Hiroshima. American Jews, he poisonously insisted, were responsible for "the strangulation of 2 million human beings." (Much of the column is actually recycled from a 2014 Beinart column. This self-plagiarism is typical of Beinart who hasn't said anything new in a decade. He only says it more shrilly.)

In that same column, Peter Beinart blamed Israel for not having “embraced” a Hamas government. Unlike Israel, Beinart has embraced Hamas and spent a decade blaming Israel for not following suit. Beinart castigates American Jews for giving Israel the benefit of the doubt, but that’s exactly what he does for a genocidal Islamic terrorist organization that has been killing Jews, in its Muslim Brotherhood incarnations, before the Gaza blockade, before the Six Day War, and before an independent Israel.

Like most anti-Semites, the anti-Zionism of Beinart, The Forward and most of the anti-Jewish Jews is a pretext. Bashing Israel is just an excuse for bashing Jews. It’s why Beinart’s critique of Wiesel’s position on Israel quickly becomes a discourse on Jewish power and the “atrocity” of the Purim story.

It's why Roger Cohen's New York Times column praising Beinart's attack on Zionism was titled, "The Dilemmas of Jewish Power." Jewish power is the theme that Beinart returns to again and again in his attacks on the Jewish community. It’s also the theme of The Forward’s clique of Jewish bashers. And it’s the quintessential theme of anti-Semites on the left and the right, Jewish and non-Jewish.

Reducing the question to Jewish power is a classic leftist formula for legitimizing anti-Semitism. The left is not concerned with questions of right and wrong, but with power and powerlessness. Every leftist critique of Israel takes the same microscopic view, ignoring history and context, zooming in on the relative strengths of Hamas and the IDF, the GDPs of Israel and Gaza, while ignoring over a thousand years of Muslim persecution of Jews, and the Muslim world that stands behind Hamas, and announcing that might makes wrong. But Beinart and The Forward take that formula way beyond the green line.

Their critique of Jewish power is the same in America as it is in Israel.

When a black Washington D.C. councilman affiliated with the left claimed that Jews control the weather, Eisner’s Forward published not one, but two defenses of his hateful views, by attacking Jews.

"We are pretending Jewish education is showing our brutal historical treatment in ghettos — while in the same breath stepping over today’s ghettos to do so, and attacking a man representing one of them," Rafael Shimunov railed against Jews with, "300 times his wealth, and 1,000 times his privilege."

Shimunov wears multiple hats. He’s a top dog at the Working Families Party which was an ally of the weather control councilman, and a member of the anti-Israel hate group, If Not Now, dubbed by Beinart in The Forward as a Jewish Black Lives Matter. But If Not Now disavowed Beinart’s praise. BLM claims to stand for black lives, while If Not Now isn’t fighting for Jewish lives. It’s fighting to destroy them.

Whether it’s Hamas or an anti-Semitic council member, the left’s argument is the same. Bigotry and murder are only wrong when practiced by the powerful against the powerless. Instead of defending themselves or protesting, Jews must realize that they are the guilty ones because of their power.

The left has two types of identitarian movements. Those of the powerless take power. And those of the powerful destroy theirs. Jews have been marked as a powerful group. The only Jewish movements that the left will tolerate are those that, like If Not Now, are dedicated to the destruction of the Jews. That’s why a leftist Jewish civil rights organization is an impossible contradiction in terms.

It’s not about Israel. It’s about Jews.

To understand how the left sees Jews, make one simple adjustment to their lexicon that strips away a common euphemism. When Forward editor Jane Eisner wonders, “Are African Refugees Paying The Price Of Jewish Power?”, the right way to read that is to spell “Power” as “Evil.”

The Forward is full of critical headlines about “Jewish Power,” from “New Film Reveals The Perils of Jewish Power,” to “The Burdens of Jewish Power” and “How the Jews Are Tarnished by Money.”

Jewish power, Karl Marx, whose bearded visage still sneers from The Forward’s old building, claimed, is self-interest. That self-interest has corrupted Jews. And Jewish self-interest has corrupted the world. Only socialism, enlightened global altruism, can redeem the world from the corruption of the Jews.

Behind the special pleading, the foaming outrage, the laughable invocations of Jewish tradition and morality, Beinart, Eisner, The Forward and Jewish Voice for Peace are working off the same Marxist critique of Jews. Israel’s crime and that of its Jewish supporters, they contend, is that its self-interest has corrupted Jewish morality. The only way to redeem the Jews is to destroy Jewish self-interest.

To destroy Israel.

Only by abandoning their self-interest, their power, even their survival, can they atone for what Marxist anti-Semites, from their great bearded master on down, see as the ‘original sin’ of the Jews.

Marx saw Judaism as the embodiment of Jewish self-interest. For the latter-day left, for whom Judaism doesn’t exist, Israel is Marx’s embodiment of Jewish clannish power. Like Marx, the anti-Israel left is convinced that Israel corrupts and controls America. Even, echoing the old leftist anti-Semite, that America is becoming like Israel. Destroying Israel will liberate Jews from their selfish Jewishness.

Peter Beinart, The Forward and JVP aren’t putting forward bold new ideas. Their Jewish sources are not, as they claim, the prophets of Israel or the Kotzker Rebbe, but the original prototype of the anti-Jewish Jew. Their prophet is the pathological anti-Semite who raved, “What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

Over a century and a half later, Marxist criticism of the Jews has made few innovations, replacing Judaism with Israel, and to a lesser degree, money with power. Leftist anti-Zionism is so hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism because its roots are still in the same anti-Semitic Marxist sewer.

The Anti-Jewish Jews preach the salvific powers of the left to redeem the selfishness of the Jews. Only the left can save Jews from Jewish power. Only the left can redeem Jews from clinging to their guns, bible, and land by destroying Israel.

Karl Marx was right about one thing. There is a struggle between Judaism and the left. For the left to win, Judaism must be destroyed. And Beinart and The Forward are still waging his war on Judaism.

And the Jews of Israel are winning through the traditional Jewish strategy of surviving. Every Jewish child born in Israel, every Jewish home that rises on a hill, is a defeat for Beinart, The Forward, and the left.

Is it any wonder that Peter Beinart can’t stop making the case for Hamas?





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

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In the Capital of British Pakistan

Muslim terrorists attacking the British Parliament in cars has become an annual tradition.

Khalid Masood did it last year, running over pedestrians before slamming into the railing of Westminster Palace, and then going on a brief stabbing spree that ended when he was shot dead by an armed police officer, who unlike the unarmed police officer he stabbed to death, had a gun because he was protecting a government official. 2017’s parliamentary attack ended with 5 dead and dozens injured.

This year, Salih Khater decided to have a go at parliament even though it was out for the summer recess. He smashed his car into a barrier near Westminster Palace after running over a number of pedestrians. The Sudanese refugee was much less successful at it, wounding only 3 people and killing no one.

Both Muslim terrorists not only carried out attacks against the same location, they had been living at addresses 10 minutes apart. Sater, 2018’s parliamentary terrorist, had been living above the Bunna internet café in South Birmingham. Masood, 2017’s parliamentary terrorist, had made his home over the Shiraz Persian restaurant, owned by a devout Muslim, also in Birmingham.

Muslims make up over 1 in 5 persons of the population of this former British working-class stronghold. Sparkhill, named after the gently flowing Spark Brook, once a hub of British life, has had its history erased by the migrant flood, until it was dubbed by BBC’s Citizen Khan sitcom as "the capital of British Pakistan." The Mermaid Inn, a local landmark pub which dated back centuries, was turned into an ethnic restaurant. Various other historic pubs have declined into grimy Pakistani eateries.

Sparkhill’s British past is becoming as much a matter of archeology as the Roman coins occasionally dug up under its streets. Its present is violent, murderous and Islamic. Its future is yet to be decided.

It’s only fitting that the “Capital of British Pakistan” should be at war with the British Parliament.

The “Capital of British Pakistan” was also where the ‘Three Musketeers’, Naweed Ali, Khobaib Hussain, and Mohibur Rahman had etched "Kafir", meaning non-Muslim Infidel, in Arabic, on their meat cleavers in preparation for a killing spree last year. Evelyn Road, where Ali and Hussain had lived, was once famous for its Church of the English Martyrs. But there is a different breed of martyr in Sparkhill now.

These three Birmingham terror plotters shouldn’t be confused with Irfan Naseer, Irfan Khalid, and Ashik Ali, who had called themselves the Four Lions while plotting to kill as many Britons as possible through everything from setting off nail bombs, to shooting up synagogues to attaching blades to a car and running over non-Muslims.

"Just drive it into people in crowded area," Khalid had suggested.

The terror plot was funded by collecting on Ramadan for Muslim Aid. Some of the money went to a Muslim school. The rest for terror.

Nasser hailed from Sparkhill and Khalid from Sparkbrook.

They were among eleven Birmingham Muslims sentenced in that Islamic terror plot.

1 in 10 imprisoned Islamic terrorists in the UK came out of the “Capital of British Pakistan”. It was where the money for the massive Muslim terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels changed hands. The money, which helped kill over 100 people in two other countries, came from welfare payments made to Anwar Haddouchi, a Muslim in Birmingham, even though he had long since left to join ISIS. Two other Muslim colonists in Birmingham, Zakaria Boufassil, and Mohammed Ali Ahmed, passed along the cash.

And that’s not the only international terror connection to Sparkhill. Sparkhill was also where Imam Tarik Chadlioui, the Muslim religious leader accused of contact with one of the Bataclan Islamic terror bombers who killed 89 people in Paris, lived and is facing extradition to Spain over Jihad videos.

The roads of the Jihad lead to Birmingham.

When Al Shabaab, the Somali Islamic terror group allied with Al Qaeda, filmed a recruitment video aimed at Muslim settlers in the UK, it listed Birmingham as its top source of recruits.

The UK’s first Al Qaeda bomber came out of Birmingham. Over in Sparkbrook, Moinal Abedin had turned his house into a bomb factory after 9/11. After serving his sentence, he’s a free man in Birmingham. Some years later, Rashid Rauf plotted to blow up planes flying from the UK to the US using soda cans. (A soda can was eventually used by ISIS to blow up a passenger plane in Egypt killing everyone on board.)

Birmingham’s real Citizen Khan emerged when Parviz Khan of Alum Rock led a plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier. Zahoor Iqbal, one of his henchmen, was also from Birmingham. Last year, Zahid Hussain, was busted with a pressure cooker bomb in Birmingham. Like a number of other Muslim terrorists, he had used Christmas tree lights as a detonator and planned to blow it up on a rail line.

Like Citizen Khan and Rauf, Hussain was from Alum Rock in Birmingham. Ummariyat Mirza was also arrested last year in Alum Rock for preparing for a knife attack. His wife, Madihah Taheer, was also arrested. His sister had been passing around pictures of severed heads and other ISIS propaganda.

"Can we get married already?" Taheer had asked. "I want you to kill people for me I have a list."

Possible targets for the Birmingham knife attack had included the RAF and a synagogue.

Junaid Hussain, the head of ISIS' Cyber-Caliphate unit, which published the addresses of American soldiers, hailed from Birmingham. As did many other ISIS recruits including Awat Hamasalih, Rasheed Benyahiya, Gabriel Ramus, Humza Ali, Anas Abdala, Abdelatif Gaini, and Tareena Shakil, who took her toddler with her to join ISIS, and Ali Akbar Zeb. A number of these were the so-called “paintball Jihadis”.

Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Nahin Ahmed were jailed on charges of preparing for terrorist acts.

These are some of the examples why Birmingham has been dubbed “Terror Central” by the British press.

British authorities meanwhile are up to their old ostrich games. Shortly after the latest Muslim attack on the British Parliament, they dispatched armed police to protect Birmingham mosques from some broken windows. Had there been armed police on the scene during last year’s attack on Parliament, some of the five victims of that Muslim terrorist attack might still be alive. That’s real broken windows policing.

Amnesty’s UK Director called the broken windows, rather than the murderous terror attack that preceded them, “another shocking example of a hateful attack on our streets.”

There are no shortage of hateful attacks coming out of Birmingham. But they’re coming from inside the mosques, not from outside. And yet the media and the authorities have already found it more urgent that windows were broken in a mosque than that a terrorist attacked a center of British government.

At the Birmingham Central Mosque, whose chair had attacked counterterrorism as Islamophobic for singling out Muslims, and which had booed a Muslim police commander after the previous parliament attack, a trustee whined about Islamophobia and claimed that they are the real victims.

"It’s affecting people who are the most vulnerable in society.”

The most vulnerable people in society aren’t Muslim settlers in Birmingham. They’re the tourists visiting the British parliament in 2019. Or any time another Birmingham Muslim terrorist tries to run them over.

And maybe the next “Citizen Khan”, from the capital of British Pakistan, will successfully attack the capital of Britain.





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

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The Billion Dollar Homeless Scam

New York City will be spending $2.06 billion on its Department of Homeless Services. There are 61,421 homeless people in the city which is spending $33,539 per homeless person.

That’s only a little short of the starting salary of an FDNY firefighter at $39,000.

More money will be spent on the homeless than on the firefighters who save New Yorkers from burning buildings. The FDNY will have to make do with $2.04 billion, and the health department with $1.6 billion.

That’s impressive for DHS, a department that was only created in 1993 by the disgraced Dinkins administration and is now burning through more cash than agencies fulfilling actual vital city functions.

Two years ago, DHS had over 2,600 employees. That’s 1 employee to every 23 homeless people. Meanwhile 234 New Yorkers get only 1 police officer to serve and protect them from criminals.

Has this vast infusion of cash solved homelessness in the city? Nope.

New York’s homeless population has kept on growing until it now has more homeless people than any other city. New York City’s homeless growth rate is also faster than that of any other city.

Maybe because it spends more than any other city. But Los Angeles is catching up.

Its $4.6 billion package of homeless tax increases are staggering. Los Angeles doubled its homeless budget to $450 million. Los Angeles County plans to spend $374 million. That’s 1 percent of a budget meant to service a population of over 10 million going to just 53,193 people.

As Los Angeles threw more money at the homeless problem, its homeless population increased 26%.

New York City and Los Angeles only account for 3 to 5 percent of the country’s population, but for a quarter of the country’s homeless population. Even considering inflated real estate prices in both cities, a national problem should not be this disproportionately concentrated in only two cities.

San Francisco will be spending $279 million on 7,499 homeless people. Seattle is spending $63 million, up from $39 million four years ago, while the Puget Sound area may be spending up to $1.06 billion.

Seattle’s homeless population is up 44% in two years to 5,500. The Seattle Times claims that Seattle has a higher concentration of homeless than New York and Los Angeles.

New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Portland, Seattle and the Bay Area are responsible for much of the national growth in homelessness. Activists blame the crisis on soaring real estate prices. While those are some of the most expensive cities in the country, they’ve been that way for quite some time.

Rapid gentrification may catch local residents by surprise in cities with more recent booms. But no one is likely to be surprised by the cost of living in the Bay Area, Los Angeles or New York City. And those cities are also dedicating the most resource to fighting homelessness while only making the problem worse.

The statistics on homelessness are full of such curious mysteries. Why do New York and California have more homeless people than 30 states combined?

Why does Texas have only 17% of the homeless population of California? Why does Colorado have four times the homeless population of Utah? Why do Oregon and Washington have more homeless than Montana, Idaho, South and North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa combined?

The pattern is political. And lucrative.

Social crises justify huge spending and expansions of the government. The homeless crisis is largely a problem in lefty cities where it’s heavily subsidized.

Federal HUD homeless grants hit $2 billion in 2018.

Homelessness statistics often come from the very agencies that are being glutted with cash to fight the problem. Worse still, many of the counts are being carried out by volunteers. Verification is chancy. Billions are being spent on a problem whose growth and scope is being charted by the self-interested.

The billions being poured into solving the problem are going everywhere but to the homeless.

In Los Angeles, the billions in tax hikes going to build homeless housing are being spent on units that cost an average of $479,000 per unit. At that rate, it would take $15 billion to house all the homeless.

That’s 150% of the entire budget. And by then the population would have doubled.

The building boom is going on even though Los Angeles County already has plenty of beds in shelters that aren’t being used. Anyone who travels downtown can see homeless encampments rising around homeless shelters. More than half of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) shelters aren't filling their beds. The average utilization rate is 78%. The problem isn’t a shortage.

Homelessness is largely a mental health and drug abuse issue. The issue isn’t a lack of housing.

But that hasn’t stopped cities like Los Angeles and New York from spending billions on housing programs that aren’t addressing the core issue of homelessness. But they were never meant to.

Homelessness is a manufactured crisis that funnels money to special interests, building up a social welfare sector of the government, while subsidizing and fueling the scale and scope of the problem

New York City is blowing through $1.1 billion to house the homeless in hotels introducing drug use and prostitution problems into luxury rooms. It’s building homeless shelters in neighborhoods that are protesting the crime and drug use such places bring. The overall plan to spend $2.6 billion to build 15,000 units to deal with the homeless crisis isn’t working very well.

The Department of Homeless Services is allowing shelters to name their own price for housing residents. Rates went from $78 per person to four or five times that. Housing the homeless runs to $328.58 a day at one shelter run by Samaritan Village, a major shelter provider. That’s the price of a luxury hotel room.

Samaritan Village, which runs much of New York City’s homeless shelters, is headed by Tino Hernandez, the former Deputy Commissioner for Adult Services at the Department of Homeless Services. Since Hernandez took over at Samaritan, an investigation revealed that its DHS contracts went up 590%. Meanwhile, Samaritan has been troubled by allegations of abuse and misappropriation of tax funds.

Meanwhile on the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority was using money intended for the homeless to buy its employees $165 hiking boots and an antique brass table.

The homeless crisis is a river of money that flows to the politically connected who have no interest in solving it, but a great deal of interest in perpetuating it. Dubious statistics, misleading reports, tax hikes and sweetheart deals are used to mobilize an institutional solution that only worsens the problem.

It’s a scam that runs easily into the billions while destroying lives and communities.

‘Homeless’ is a fake political term that deliberately misstates the problem. The issue is mostly not a lack of housing, but some combination of mental illness and drug use that make it difficult to maintain residential status. There are ordinary people who are genuinely homeless, and the media makes a point of highlighting their stories, but homelessness is mostly not a problem of housing, but of treatment.

While the media tells only one side of the story, it’s the mentally ill and the severe addicts who are the public face of the homeless crisis that the residents of major cities encounter every day. It’s these sights that move them to approve of spending hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars on programs that they believe will remove the horrible sights that they’re seeing from public view.

And that incentivizes the social welfare system and its allied activists to worsen the problem so as to squeeze more money out of taxpayers. Every budget increase means more homeless on the street, more street crime, drug use, and random abuse. Funding the system isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

The homeless crisis is a billion dollar scam. It isn’t being solved. It’s only getting worse.





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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What Anti-Semitism in Europe and the Campus Have in Common

Burkay, an unemployed Muslim Turk, wearing a stained white "Miami Beach" shirt attacked three Jewish people in Vienna, Austria.

It was just another day in a city where Muslim terrorists had once thrown grenades into a synagogue during a Bar Mitzvah killing a woman who threw herself onto the grenade to save the children. The attack had taken place with the complicity of a government notorious for its friendliness to terrorism.

Last year, Austria had 503 anti-Semitic incidents.

That's impressive considering that the country only has around 9,000 Jews. There has been 1 anti-Semitic incident to every 18 Jews in Austria.

That same year, Germany had 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents to approximately 100,000 Jews.

In Bonn, Germany, a Jewish professor from Baltimore was assaulted by a Muslim yelling, “No Jew in Germany!” When the police arrived, they assaulted the professor. There was a protest march. A videotaped attack by a Syrian Muslim refugee in Berlin had led to another protest march and a slap on the wrist for the assailant. 10 Syrians attacked a man wearing a Star of David while screaming anti-Semitic slurs. A Jewish teen was assaulted in a Berlin train station. “I’ll slit your throat, you f***ing Jew.”

One statistical survey listed the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany rising by 60% in 2017.

In the UK, there were 1,382 incidents to 263,346 Jews. In Italy, there were 109 incidents to some 28,000 Jews. In the Netherlands, there were 113 incidents to 29,900 Jews.

Austria’s extreme proportion of anti-Semitic incidents to Jews is not so much an outlier as a signifier. The number of anti-Semitic incidents can have an inverse relationship to the Jewish population of a country.

Or of an area in the country.

While the vast majority of British Jews live in Greater London, there were 773 anti-Semitic incidents in London and 261 incidents in Manchester which is home to only 30,000 Jews. Manchester has a proportionately larger Muslim population and a smaller Jewish one. While a smaller Jewish population may make anti-Semitic Islamic attacks more challenging, it can also leave Jews more vulnerable.

These statistics suggest that the combination of a high Muslim population and a small Jewish population are the highest risk factors for anti-Semitic attacks. European countries like France and the UK that have both a large Jewish and large Muslim population may have a lower proportion of overall incidents, but the Jewish population will also experience more personally damaging violent anti-Semitic attacks.

Violent anti-Semitic attacks in France rose by 28% to 92 in 2017. British Jews saw a 25% rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks from 77 to 97. Meanwhile overall incidents in the UK had only increased by 3%.

A larger Jewish population creates more opportunities for violent attacks while smaller Jewish populations require the attackers to operate on the internet or limit themselves to vandalism.

In the United States, anti-Semitic incidents in general increased by 43%, while violent attacks declined by 47%. The total number of anti-Semitic assaults in the United States is listed at 19. That’s in a country whose Jewish population is numbered between 4 and 5 million. Meanwhile the largest European Jewish population centers have seen 4 or 5 times the number of violent assaults with a fraction of the Jewish population.

What accounts for these fundamental differences between the United States and Europe? The Jewish population is less urbanized in the United States than in parts of Europe. (Though much of it is still concentrated in the New York area.) There is, as a result, far less contact between Jewish and Muslim population centers in the United States than there is in the United Kingdom and France.

And, most significantly, there is little covert or overt approval for Muslim anti-Semitic violence.

One place where that is not the case is the college campus. And so anti-Semitic incidents on campuses have actually doubled for two years in a row. The fact that anti-Semitism on campus is increasing faster than in the general society should be deeply troubling to Jewish organizations and the educational system. Yet the problem continues to be ignored for the same reason that it is ignored in Europe.

There were 457 anti-Semitic incidents on school and college campuses in 2017. That would account for over a quarter of the total anti-Semitic incidents in America. And rising anti-Semitic incidents on campus also account for more than a quarter of the 2017 increase in anti-Semitic incidents nationwide.

Just as in Austria, a small percentage of the Jewish population experiences a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic incidents. That’s what the college campus has in common with Hitler’s birthplace.

College campuses are unique because unlike most of the United States, they offer political sanction for anti-Semitism and for anti-Semitic political movements. Extremism thrives on modern campuses. Harassment of Jewish students by hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine is often covered up by their campus allies on the left. Debates over whether the attacks on Jewish facilities, cultural events, Holocaust commemorations and individual students are anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist cloud the issue. These are the same conditions under which anti-Semitism in Europe was nightmarishly reborn.

Campuses more closely resemble Europe than they do America. Like European countries, campuses have left-wing governments, are ruled by political correctness and ignore individual rights. When their growing Muslim populations collide with their large Jewish student populations, the outcome much more closely resembles European Jewish life than the way that American Jews expect life to be.

The campus is the canary in the coal mine. It’s where American Jews are beginning to experience a European style of anti-Semitism where the complicity of the authorities in the harassment perpetrated by a growing Muslim population and its left-wing allies leaves Jewish students uniquely vulnerable.

American anti-Semitism is taking off on campus, but it won’t stay there. School and college campuses are the places where a new generation learns what it means to be an adult member of society. The tolerance for campus anti-Semitism won’t remain an aberration. Instead a generation of students will carry those lessons into their workplaces, into the government and the private sector.

The administrators, managers, elected officials, judges and thinkers of tomorrow are being shaped on the campuses of today. Their experience will shape what life will be like for all of us decades from now.

A campus environment that normalizes anti-Semitism will turn life for American Jews into Europe.





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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Who Really Killed Liberalism?

Think pieces mourning the fall of multiculturalism drift through the fetid pool of the media and its smaller foreign policy pond is afloat with almost as many pieces mourning the multinational order.

In these revisionist histories, the resurgence of racial tribalism among Trump voters in the heartland and explosions of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe (aided by the ubiquitous vast Russian conspiracy) did in the great multinational and multicultural projects. Brexit and Trump killed the liberal order. Wealthy right-wingers and the Russians had secretly financed a campaign to undermine human progress.

Nonsense.

Trump and Brexit were responses to the collapse of liberalism. The collapse was accelerated when supposedly liberal political movements on both sides of the ocean endorsed two tribalisms. On the European side of the ocean, the EU tossed aside its post-national pose to back Muslim tribalism and its mass migration at the expense of the nation-state. On the American side, the Democrats abandoned even the pretense of believing in equality to fully embrace the pettiness of tribal identity politics.

The authorities were no longer creating a newly equal order, but recreating an old tribal one in which some people were more equal than others. And once that became obvious, their old working-class white constituencies backed Trump in the US and backed Brexit in the UK. Their votes didn’t break a liberal order. Instead, the votes reflected a recognition that liberalism no longer existed; only tribalism did.

The left resents these defections by the white working class, but it was the left that truly defected. The old lefty romance with the working class has left behind only a handful of artifacts, like mementos from an old relationship, a fondness for expensive prole wear, folk music, stories about old coal miners (not the current despised polluters), and occasional forays into trying to live on a few dollars a day. But even two generations ago, the left was trading its working-class costumes for ethnic togs and jewelry.

These days the left romanticizes race the way that it once did class. But class can be shifted, race can’t. It was one thing to demonize capitalists and another to demonize entire races. Class war could be rationalized as an effort to make society fairer by sharing the wealth, but race can’t be shared. No Communist revolution can redistribute skin color or any other fixed attribute of human biology. Tolerance and equality were liberal answers to racism, but they could never be lefty answers.

Instead of redistributing wealth, the left began redistributing racial power. It inveighed against the boogeyman of racial tribalism even as it was busy creating it. To a leftist, racism against white and black people, the national aspirations of a Briton or a Pakistani, a Frenchman or an Algerian, can’t be equated. The moral authority of the oppressor can’t be compared with the moral authority of the oppressed. But what people increasingly saw was the rebirth of racial tribalism and national chauvinism at the hands of the very people who had supposedly been fighting to tear down tribalism and chauvinism.

The white working class found itself on the wrong side of a class and race war. And it fought back.

The badges of mourning for the old liberal order are being flaunted as a talking point by the chattering classes. But these hollow exercises of grief are disingenuous coming as they do from the actual killers.

Race relations in the United States collapsed under Obama. The collapse wasn’t the result of a backlash against Obama’s race. If that were the case, he would never have won two presidential elections. It resulted from policies that he implemented whose purpose was to cause racial division. Unlike liberals, leftists had never believed in the races getting along. They profited from conflict, not coexistence.

Lefties had no problem with racial divisiveness until it began costing them elections. And then they belatedly realized that identity politics and tribal bloc voting were tools that could work both ways.

The European Union had been an old lefty project past its prime. The idea of France, Germany, the UK, and Poland all belonging to the same union had impressed a generation that had seen world wars. A younger left saw the EU as a gang of nation states. A generation of mass migration from the Muslim world would have removed the EU from the pages of history far more thoroughly than Brexit.

The EU had always been meant to be an intermittent step to something bigger and global. Like the UK and the Netherlands, the day would come when the EU would be sucked into the international order. Its bureaucrats would lose their authority to a world bureaucratic authority operating above their heads.

The real objection to Brexit wasn’t that it fatally crippled the EU, but that the blow moves European countries toward the nation-state instead of away from it, to the national instead of the transnational. Even the tensions that led to Brexit were meant to grease the wheels rolling the EU into a more global order. The left isn’t objecting to the exploitation of those tensions, but to who actually exploited them.

The EU was always meant to die. And racial tribalism was meant to define American politics. If the media honestly want to look for the killers, it can always look to the left. It was the left that reduced American and European politics to exercises in vicious tribalism. It was the left that undermined the liberal order, tossed out liberal solutions and now pretends to cry for the liberalism that it killed.

Trump rose from the ashes of a fire that Obama set. The GOP had failed because it was too busy fighting the last war against liberal opponents who still believed in maintaining the order. It didn’t understand that Obama was qualitatively different than Carter or Clinton. He wasn’t just working within the system to transform it, but to destroy it, pitting its elements against each other to break them down.

The only response to a radical willing to burn everything down was an equal willingness to burn.

That is what Trump and Brexit both have in common. They’re creatively destructive responses to the destruction of the liberal order by revolutionary radicals.

When European leaders opened their gates to mass migration from the Muslim world, they made it clear that the European Union was over. The only question was whether Britain would escape its collapse or go down with it. When Obama opened America’s borders, the same message was sent. That’s why building a wall has become has become the definitive symbol of the Trump revival.

Media pundits paint Brexit and Trump’s wall as isolationist responses. But the part that they leave out is that they are isolationist responses to a leftist catastrophe whose purpose is destroying nations. There’s a big difference between closing your door when your neighbor needs help and when your neighbor is shooting at you. The media portrays Trump and Brexit as the former when it’s really the latter.

The left made multiculturalism and the multinational order unviable as a power play. But the play went awry. Instead of the left’s plans moving forward, they’ve been set back. And instead of taking responsibility, the left is blaming everyone else for its own crimes against liberalism.

Trump didn’t break the old order. The left did.





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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South Africa Goes Zimbabwe

"Strongman politics are ascendant," Barack Obama warned in South Africa. He spoke passionately about "the politics of fear and resentment" at the Mandela Lecture. He worried that we were entering a world, “where might makes right and politics is a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions.”

While the media used the remarks to attack Trump's meeting with Putin, Obama had shared a stage with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa who had come to power promising to seize land from white farmers. Ramaphosa was the latest in a series of ANC strongmen, including his predecessor, an alleged rapist, beginning with the Communist terrorist whose legacy Obama was commemorating.

President Ramaphosa had vowed early on to seize land from white farmers without compensation. "The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans,” he had declared. And denied that such racist Communist tactics were unconstitutional. Now he’s moving to modify South Africa’s constitution.

Initially, the ANC, which is partnered with the South African Communist Party, had claimed that seizing land would not violate the law. Now it’s actually going to change the South African constitution.

“It has become pertinently clear that our people want the constitution to be more explicit about expropriation of land without compensation,” President Ramaphosa announced.

When your only rule is mob rule by ANC thugs, it doesn’t really matter what a piece of paper says.

“We will accelerate our land redistribution programme not only to redress a grave historical injustice, but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation,” Ramaphosa claimed in his State of the Nation address.

Zimbabwe had already made great strides in improving agriculture through land seizures.

Land was stolen from the farmers who knew how to work it and handed out to politically connected thugs. Soon the former "bread basket" of Southern Africa was starving. Black groups pleaded with the white farmers to remain. Rural Zimbabwe died. Hyperinflation made the currency worthless. A trillion dollars might not be enough to buy one egg. A former food exporter was forced to rely on food aid.

"If white settlers just took the land from us without paying for it," Mugabe had declared, "we can, in a similar way, just take it from them without paying for it."

Ramaphosa’s rhetoric is an echo of one of Africa’s worst racist strongmen. Land seizures won’t bring South African land into “full use”, as he claims. It will mean productive land falling into the hands of ANC thugs who will be too corrupt, incompetent and greedy to do the hard work of working the land.

South Africa’s agricultural sector will go the way of Zimbabwe.

Cyril Ramaphosa is one of South Africa's richest men and has an estimated net worth of $550 million. How did a socialist student activist make a mint? The answer is an inevitable as it is unsurprising.

South Africa’s agricultural sector has been steadily in decline. Farms used to provide millions of jobs. Now they offer less than a million. Wheat planting has fallen to a third. Cotton to a tenth. A country that once exported wheat, is now importing millions of tons while its agriculture sector fails.

The decline of South Africa’s agriculture has gone hand in hand with what it euphemistically calls its land reforms. White farmers have been murdered or driven off their land. But land seizures, legal and illegal, with compensation or with a hatchet, haven’t made South African agriculture more productive.

Instead South Africa is becoming increasingly dependent on agricultural imports to feed its people.

Like Zimbabwe, South Africa is due to revisit the same implacable economic consequences of land seizures that took the Soviet Union down the road to famine and terror. Toward its end, the USSR, despite possessing territories that had once bulged with rich harvests, had gone deep into debt to buy food from the United States. The African National Congress’ Communist roots are taking South Africa down the same path as its fallen Communist masters. And with the same miserable results.

Comrade Ramaphosa, as Comrade Mandela liked to call him, is less of a strongman, than a weak man. More afraid of thugs like Julius Malema and the greed of his ANC comrades than of dooming his people to hunger. The ANC is populated with thugs who are impatiently waiting to loot South Africa’s corpse. And they’ve grown tired of pretending that they are anything more than a failed state’s Marxist mob.

The constitutional gambit is a desperate attempt to legitimize racist mob violence and ANC corruption. It takes the constant assaults on white farmers and tries to disguise lawlessness under the color of law.

1 white farmer in South Africa has been murdered every 5 days. This ethnic cleansing has been going on with the same regular clockwork as the tributes to Nelson Mandela and his even more murderous wife. The racist violence, the murders, rapes and land seizures, the chants of, “Shoot the Boer” are backed by lies about a shadow white majority somehow still ruling South Africa even after all the years of ANC rule.

The media frequently repeats fake news statistics which claim that white farmers own 70% or more of the country’s farmland. The actual number is less than a quarter. Some of the best land in South Africa is already in black hands. And, just as in Zimbabwe, it hasn’t remedied the agricultural or social problems.

South Africa’s agricultural sector is already on its deathbed. Its corrupt economy is incapable of competing on the world stage. Its exports are not at issue, its ability to feed its own people is. Aggressive land seizures won’t do much more damage to South Africa’s economy, though it will discourage investors and drive out more white farmers, but will bring its society to its knees.

Meanwhile the plight of South Africa’s white farmers continues to be ignored. The ANC genocide has been slowly unfolding for a generation with the complicity of the same leftist leaders who covered up Communist genocides in the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cambodia. But this latest legitimization of land seizures by the ANC will only encourage a further outpouring of racist attacks on white farmers.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has urged helping the persecuted white farmers of South Africa receive political asylum. But while every “persecuted” group is fast tracked for asylum, the door still remains shut for a productive population that has been targeted for economic ethnic cleansing.

In his State of the Nation speech, President Ramaphos declared, “We are building a country where a person’s prospects are determined by their own initiative and hard work, and not by the color of their skin, place of birth, gender, language or income of their parents.” Seizing land from people because of the color of their skin and giving it to those who haven’t worked for it is the opposite of that vision.

And yet it’s easy to see why Obama was so comfortable with a politician who could twist the language of equality to justify identity politics theft and the verbiage of tolerance to justify racial oppression.

South Africa, like the Soviet Union and Venezuela, like Cambodia and Cuba, is not just an atrocity, it’s a cautionary tale. Ideology, more than race, connects the scattered strands of the leftist killing fields. To pretend that what happened there cannot happen here would be ignoring the lessons of history.

And a new red famine is growing where the red blood of white farmers flows into the dying earth.






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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Omarosa and Peak Trump Bashing Hits Publishing

Did a major publishing firm waste seven figures on Unhinged, Omarosa Manigault’s fake book?

A parody tweet featuring a faked except from Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury book created the Gorilla Channel meme as media types quickly fell for the idea that President Trump spent 17 hours a day watching an imaginary cable channel where gorillas fight each other.

But that's nothing.

A Simon and Schuster subsidiary paid Omarosa Manigault a reported seven figures for a book in which she claims that Trump wanted to take his oath of office on a copy of The Art of the Deal instead of the bible. The source of the story appears not to be Trump, but a popular Trump impersonator.

Someone should have noticed that. But when fake news meets fake books, there’s no time to check the stories that are too good not to print. The seemingly endless appetite of lefties for Trump bashing touched off a gold rush in the media and its allied publishing companies to mint new bestsellers.

Unhinged, the Omarosa book in question, was apparently sold in July and published in August.

That’s a ridiculously quick turnaround that would have made any serious fact checking impossible. Nor, apparently, was any serious fact-checking attempted, according to subjects like Frank Luntz and George Conway, who are named in the claims that she makes about President Trump using racial slurs.

Simon and Schuster is a subsidiary of CBS. The entanglement between fake books and fake news is a phenomenon that pervades the various sectors of the media as reporters write and report on books.

Simon and Schuster, like many other publishers, has been cashing in on Trump Derangement Syndrome. Samples include Bob Woodward's 'FEAR: Trump in the White House' to be published on 9/11, 'It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America', a book whose title just doesn't know when to stop, and Michael Ian Black's 'A Child's First Book of Trump'. "The beasty is called an American Trump/Its skin is bright orange, its figure is plump," Black clumsily rhymes.

Simon and Schuster had also published Hillary Clinton’s ‘What Happened’.

Woodward’s FEAR is an obvious answer to the success of Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Both are similarly themed pseudo-journalistic insider accounts. Book sized volumes of the type of fake news that have made lots of money for Bezos’ Washington Post and Sulzberger’s New York Times.

FEAR comes out in September. Before Woodward’s FEAR, though there was more fear at Simon and Schuster with the July release of The Monarchy of Fear by Martha C. Nussbaum. But the pop philosophy attack on Trump misfired. And the two S’s had a hole in August between Monarchy of Fear and FEAR.

So the publishing giant quickly signed a deal with Omarosa and filled its August hole with her crazy claims. Like Fire and Fury, and FEAR, Unhinged plugs into the fake news cycle. Even as the Manafort trial is petering out, leading to snide media attacks on Judge Ellis for restraining the prosecution’s antics and denying them the show trial that their ratings and Chartbeat graphs so badly needed, Unhinged arrived.

The titled of Unhinged could easily refer to Omarosa and the bizarre claims that a major publishing house decided to pay her seven figures for. Aside from the quest for a tape of Trump’s racial slur (Omarosa had spent enough time around media lefties to know that even hinting at the existence of such a thing would unleash a feeding frenzy that would make sharks chasing bloody meat seem sedate), and the suggestion that Trump wanted to take his oath on The Art of the Deal, there’s her claim that Melania uses her fashion choices to “punish” her husband. That’s yet another media conspiracy theory.

Unhinged really isn’t a crazy book. It’s a deeply cynical one. It takes media conspiracy theories and feeds them right back into the media. Omarosa was flushing fake news into the media’s fake news sewer. Omarosa cashed a seven figure check by giving lefty conspiracy theories, no matter how bizarre, the stamp of approval of having an ‘insider’ in the Trump White House tell them their beliefs are really true.

That’s why Simon and Schuster signed the deal and made Unhinged its August anti-Trump pick. Unhinged is unhinged nonsense. But what’s better for fake news than a fake book?

And why shouldn’t Omarosa work the same side of the street as Michael Wolff? Despite his journalistic credentials, Wolff’s narrative was full of holes, his claims dubious and his credibility shot. Fire and Fury contains an admission early on that the book is probably full of lies, but blames those lies on Trump associates. When he tried to extend his 15 minutes by using the same strategy to accuse Nikki Haley of having an affair with Trump, while blaming her for his own implication, even the media turned on him.

And then stopped inviting him on.

Omarosa is working her way through the Wolff slime trial, making dubious claims, invoking a journalistic journey, contradicting herself, blaming the contradictions on everyone else and distorting the events that she supposedly witnessed to make bizarre and inflammatory claims about President Trump.

Meanwhile she keeps dropping illegally recorded tapes that only address her own egotistical careerism.

And that’s where the misfire began.

Instead of getting a #1 bestseller, Simon and Schuster had to settle for #5. As CNN notes, even Rick Wilson’s anti-Trump rant made it to #2. Pro-Trump books by Jeanine Pirro and Gregg Jarrett got to #1. And that’s despite the millions of dollars in free media coverage lavished on Unhinged.

Without the backlash from the White House, Omarosa might not have even gotten to #5.

What went wrong with Simon and Schuster’s seven figure investment?

Unhinged is a self-serving book. Omarosa’s tapes were her big ticket item but they’re there to back up her own narrative of being unfairly fired. The left-baiting claims are just the chocolate coating for the creamy center of her own careerism. And in her past, she had alienated the media badly enough that plenty of big media talking heads were eager to pounce. Not all were as hysterical as April Ryan, who dubbed Omarosa “evil”, but no one in the media was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Instead the media has been unhelpfully calling Omarosa out on the contradictions in her story.

The media isn’t investing too much in Omarosa. But like Wolff, she feeds the fake news media cycle, doling out the material that the media will amplify in its daily hysterical coverage for a Democrat demographic that is obsessed with Trump and has even less selectivity about what it consumes.

Simon and Schuster’s August anti-Trump bid appears to have misfired. The publishing giant is no doubt hoping that the misfire had more to do with Omarosa’s personal qualities than the end of the gold rush.

Bob Bender, a Simon and Schuster VP, predicted back in May that the Trump rush in publishing is about to fade. “Nobody’s going to do that for the second year—assuming there is a second year.”

If Bob Woodward’s FEAR misfires, then the era of fake books may be fading. And that’s bad news for fake news. Both fake news and fake books were a media gold rush fed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. But the golden age of Trump bashing may be ending. And then the soaring sales of the Washington Post and the New York Times, not to mention the few reporters still writing political books who weren’t named in #MeToo scandals, will crash down to earth as the golden age dies.

Omarosa’s Unhinged may be the fake book that broke the fake publishing camel’s back.






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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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Sarah Jeong and the Media's Alt-Left

Ever since the New York Times decided to hire racist blogger Sarah Jeong, despite her history of hateful tweets about white people, “the world could get by just fine with zero white ppl and the thing stopping POC (people of color) is...a disinclination toward genocide?”, white women, men, heterosexuals and Christians, and then refused to part ways with her (unlike its treatment of previous hire, Quinn Norton, whom the left had accused of homophobia based on a few tweets, despite her being gay), the debate has been about all the wrong things.

Jeong isn’t really the issue. Her racism is typical of an influential subset of the left.

Some of the pro and anti Jeong essays briefly circle around the actual problem before quickly zooming away. Andrew Sullivan writes in his anti-Jeong essay of the “extent to which loathing of and contempt for ‘white people’ is now background noise on the left”. Vox's Zack Beauchamp, wrote in his pro-Jeong essay that comments such as hers in the "the social justice left" about "white people" are typical.

But what part of the “social justice left” or “left” is really producing Sarah Jeongs?

To answer that question we have to talk about what no one really talks about, the alt-left. Unlike the alt-right, a subject of numerous essays, news reports and investigative pieces, the internet culture of racism, misandry and heterophobia that is the millennial alt-left is mostly undocumented.

The alt-left’s norms of discourse are defined by the same harsh contempt and winking racism that appear in Sarah Jeong’s tweets. It’s an internet culture where “white people” is an inherently derogatory term and new slurs, such as “caucasity”, are coined. Ironic racism is defined as “resistance” to whiteness. And what better way to resist whiteness than with racial slurs aimed at white people?

Sarah Jeong’s hateful tweets aren’t extraordinary examples of one woman’s bigotry. They’re variations on the typical memes and jokes on the alt-left. When we talk about Jeong’s racism, we’re really talking about the bigotry of an intersectional movement that is obsessed with punitively destroying the “privilege” of white people and other majority groups with racist memes, taunts and harassment.

The alt-left preceded the alt-right. The features of the alt-right that the media has attacked are mirror images of its origins counter-trolling the alt-left. When Sarah Jeong’s critics and defenders claim that she was “counter-trolling”, they hilariously get the origin of the internet culture species completely wrong.

Long before the alt-right (at least in internet years), the alt-left was weaponizing racist memes (“white tears” was a popular one) and harassing targets with online mobs (today’s social justice mobs are alt-left online harassment coordinated with alt-lefties in the media). The current trend of media stories that dox targets on the right almost all tend to come from media millennials aligned with the alt-left.

This isn’t the first time that the alt-left’s ironic racism has gotten its members in trouble. There was plenty of outrage when Drexel University's George Ciccariello-Maher had tweeted, "All I want for Christmas is white genocide". Just like Jeong, the defense was that Maher was just kidding.

The claims by Vox lefties that Sarah Jeong and the “social justice left” are being ironic in their racist remarks about white people, is not a defense, it’s an indictment. Ironic racism was prevalent on the alt-left before it was mirrored by the alt-right. It’s also a misuse of the term. Non-ironic irony is typical of millennial internet culture that uses humor as a distancing mechanism to normalize repellent views.

That’s not ironic. It’s cowardly and disingenuous.

The “ironic” alt-left humor of Sarah Jeong uses absurdity and winks to convey actual hatred for white people. But the same “ironic racism” that the media condemns when it appears on the Twitter accounts of the alt-right is somehow acceptable when it appears on alt-left accounts like Jeong’s. Even the argument that Jeong and the alt-left are just joking is the same “wrongfooting” defense that the media never accepted from the alt-right, even as it now tries to “wrongfoot” the right on Jeong’s racism.

Even the 1488ers, the Neo-Nazis who are the most noxious part of the alt-right, had their original counterparts in the tankies (Communists) in the internet culture of the alt-left. (You’re less likely to have read about them because the media loves writing about Neo-Nazis, but not its own Neo-Commies.)

When we talk about the alt-left, it’s often in terms of antifa, but Black Lives Matter owes as much to the alt-left as it does to the black nationalist thugs it adores and worships. And the violent activists are just a tiny portion of the larger internet culture that is the alt-left. But neither is the alt-left composed of minorities. Most of the alt-left, like the rest of the left, is white. Its racism isn’t the outcry of an oppressed minority, as the pro-Jeong pieces have contended, but of an ideological bigotry.

As John Perrazo notes in the Freedom Center’s pamphlet, “The War on Whiteness”, “The ultimate objective in stigmatizing whiteness is to intensify racial tension. But the anti-whiteness movement also intends to destroy whites’ comfortable assumption that their skin color is ‘normal’ or ‘neutral,’ without consequences, and to make them color-conscious and ultimately rub their noses in their whiteness.”

The left politicizes race. The alt-left’s war on whiteness is an overt rejection of post-racial neutrality and the grand bargain of civil rights. The stream of racist abuse aimed at white people is meant to politicize whiteness. And to force white people to align with racist movements on one side or the other.

What the alt-left fears above all else is post-racial coexistence. And so it fights tolerance with racism.

Why do we hear so little about the alt-left? For the same reason that the media throbs with defenses of Jeong’s ironic racism and the leftist internet culture that birthed it. The media’s millennial new guard is drawn heavily from the alt-left. It seeks out and destroys media millennials who are not alt-lefties.

The alt-left is the media. Gamergate, frequently referenced in the defenses of Sarah Jeong, was a clash between the alt-left entrenched in gaming journalism (tech journalism, and especially gaming journalism, were the parts of the media most likely to hire and quickly promote millennials) and gamer culture. But the alt-left now pervades the entire media from foreign affairs to sports journalism.

Jeong’s past tweets are just one of numerous examples of millennial media hires who had been caught spewing toxic alt-left rubbish. Jugal Patel and Fahim Abed kept their gigs with the New York Times after their old and ugly tweets came to life. There was no reason to think that Jeong would lose hers.

Sarah Jeong’s alt-left racism wouldn’t have dissuaded the New York Times. It was the reason she was hired. Being a vocal alt-lefty on social media while blogging about social justice issues has been part of the Tumblr-to-Times pipeline for a while now. The media looks for a social media background in its millennial hires. Broadcasting alt-left memes in those circles makes you more likely to be retweeted, recognized, quoted and hired to fail upward with more racism at major media orgs.

Gamergate used to be a debate about the alt-left’s takeover of journalism. Now that the alt-left controls journalism, period, it’s become a national debate about fake news.

Sarah Jeong’s racism isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a culture that is taking over newsrooms. The complete disregard for facts, the pervasive contempt for the political opposition, the impassioned victimhood, and the ravening hatred poorly disguised as comedy now defines the media.

And so we don’t talk about the alt-left, because when we talk about the alt-left, we’re talking about the media.







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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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The Media Shouldn't Fear Conservatives, It Should Fear Itself

Trump's criticism of the media “is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence,” claims Artie Sulzberger, the latest scion of the New York Times dynasty.

Artie, who got the chairman job because of his last name, earns $5 million a year. The only threat to him came from a shameless bootlicking Washington Post article praising his journalistic humility.

“Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?" MSNBC's Katy Tur whined. “He wants to endanger the lives of journalists,” columnist Connie Smith wailed at Trump.

How endangered is the modern media hack?

Reporters, pundits and other fake news media gobbers have been claiming that Trump is endangering them for a while now.

"How long before someone is seriously hurt, or worse?" New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg demanded last August.

How long? It’s been over a year now.

"Someone is going to do something awful to a journalist," Jeffrey Toobin claimed on CNN. And they have. They’ve mocked, ridiculed and humiliated the media for its hysterical fake news nonsense.

The number of reporters shot by Trump supporters because of his attacks on the media currently stands at zero. And counting down. So the media has shifted gears of predicting that Trump’s criticism will cause reporters to die overseas. Sulzberger warned about the threat to the media overseas. "Trump slams CNN in potentially dangerous way," claims CNN. But agreed that the real threat is overseas.

Reporters are dying overseas. At the hands of Muslim terrorists.

The vast majority of massacres of reporters in recent years were carried out by Muslim terrorists. Of Reporters Without Borders’ own list of the deadliest attacks on the media in the last 10 years, including the most recent suicide bombing which killed 9 reporters in Afghanistan and the obscure Maguindanao massacre, dubbed the "single deadliest event for the press" since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping records, were carried out by Muslims.

The only non-Muslim attack on the list was carried out by a faction of the leftist FARC narcoterrorist group whose leadership was able to meet with John Kerry despite having a reward placed on their heads by the United States. As the media likes to mockingly sneer, “thanks Obama”.

In America, the single greatest death toll for media personnel in the last generation occurred on 9/11.

Maybe the media ought to reconsider its mindless ideological opposition to a terror state travel ban?

The statistical evidence very clearly shows that media personnel are far more likely to be murdered by attackers shouting, “Allahu Akbar” than “Make America Great Again.” They’re also more likely to be hit by lightning than killed by a Trump supporter angry over the latest fake news smear of the president.

The media’s hysteria about the Trump threat is as baseless and groundless as the rest of its fake news.

There’s been no outbreak of violence against reporters in this country. Instead reporters have come more under physical threat from Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other leftists.

Leftist doxer Taylor Lorenz, formerly of the Daily Beast and currently of The Atlantic, who doxed the daughters of a female counterjihad activist, exposing them to potential harm, was punched in the face in Charlottesville. But the puncher was a fellow leftist counterprotester inflicting collateral damage. He got off with a slap on the wrist, a suspended sentence, anger management and community service.

While the media blew up every incident where a reporter in Ferguson inhaled tear gas, actual physical attacks on reporters by Black Lives Matter racist thugs were mostly swept under the media’s dirty rug.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Paul Hampel was beaten bloody by Ferguson thugs.

CNN devoted a fraction of the time to its own correspondent, Sara Sidner, being hit by rocks than it has to all the imaginary dangers of violence from Trump supporters.

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel intern described a mob scene in which reporters were threatened and assaulted.

“When they threw me to the ground, I reflexively curled up into a ball. Blows landed on my back, head and torso. 'Stop! He’s not white! He’s Asian!' I wasn’t sure who said it, or how they knew my race, but within seconds, the punches stopped."

Then he blamed Asians for being insufficiently supportive of the racist black nationalist movement.

Despite all the media’s hysteria, the violent attacks on their ranks in this country aren’t coming from Trump supporters at rallies, but from their fellow leftists who are actually driving the violence.

And the media has covered up the scale of those attacks, especially after Ferguson, while refusing to address the ideological motives of the attackers. It’s made little to no effort to bring those attackers to justice or to challenge the culture of radical impunity that has led to physical attacks on the media.

If Trump supporters had assaulted a white reporter, beat him, and then let him go because he was white, we would never have heard the end of the story. There would already have been a bestselling book, a movie, a memorial and an annual award inspired by those events. And if Republicans were regularly beating reporters to a pulp, we would be hearing about it too. Non-stop. On every channel.

Instead the media wails about the hypothetical threat of one day being attacked by a Trump supporter.

Maybe overseas.

The groups most likely to kill reporters overseas are Latin American drug cartels and Muslim terrorists. These are the two groups that benefit the most from the media’s leftist advocacy against border security and immigration security reform.

Domestically, the media’s greatest violent threat comes from leftist activists. Overseas, its greatest threats come from the two types of migrants whom Trump wants to keep out and it wants to let in.

Trump isn’t threatening the media. He’s protecting it from the consequences of its own ideology.

If the average media type had enough brains to fill a flash drive and enough common sense to stock a highlight reel, he would be thanking Trump for keeping the media safe from its own stupidity.

Instead the media can’t wait to get blown up, shot, beheaded and beaten by its own political allies. And once it’s through covering up the latest attack on it by Muslim terrorists, black nationalists, Marxist narcoterrorists or lefty thugs, it spreads dire warnings about the consequences of Trump’s rhetoric.

The media’s shameless lying hacks can’t stop the fake news long enough to save their own lives.




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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

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Rename America

Austin’s Equity Office has recommended renaming the Texas city because of Stephen F. Austin's alleged views on slavery. But why stop at just renaming Austin when Amerigo Vespucci took and sold slaves.

Austin, Texas is named after Stephen F. Austin, but America is named after Amerigo Vespucci.

New York City has been on its own anti-history binge, demoting the statue of the ‘Father of Gynecology’ and tearing out plaques memorializing Robert E. Lee attached to a tree that he had once planted, but it’s got bigger problems. The city is named after King James II whose Royal African Company branded thousands of slaves with DY for the Duke of York.

And New York’s problems don’t end there. Its Bronx borough is named after Jonas Bronck, who was likely killed in an Indian raid. Queens is named after the wife of King Charles II (James’ brother) whose husband was also quite active in the slave trade. New York is full of places named after Charlie and his relatives, like Richmond County, and the city and the state would both have to be renamed.

So would South and North Carolina, named after Charles I, and Maryland, named after his wife, who had authorized a trade in African slaves. The Maryland charter was received by Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, whose family owned slaves. Anne Arundel County is named after Cecil's wife.

New Jersey was named by George Carteret under a grant from Charles II. Carteret was connected to the African slave trade through the Royal African Company. A number of areas in New Jersey are named after him and his family. That includes the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, named after Carteret’s wife.

Royal names are a problem that bedevils even the leftist parts of the country.

Prince George’s County is a reliable Dem area in Maryland populated mostly by African-Americans. And it’s one the wealthiest black areas in the country. But it’s named after Prince George of Denmark. What’s a Danish prince doing in Maryland? George was married to Queen Anne. Anne’s extensive shares in the South Sea Company and his formal role as High Lord Admiral tied him to the slave trade.

Virginia and (West Virginia) are named after Elizabeth I who authorized a trade in slaves and at least one of whose ships carried slaves. Delaware is named after Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, who served as governor of Virginia. His tenure in office predated the importation of African slaves but, was current with the use of indentured servants and Indian slaves. Louisiana is named after Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose Code Noir (Black Code) set out the parameters of slavery.

But leaving behind royals doesn’t help. William Penn, the Quaker and liberal role model after whom Pennsylvania is named, owned slaves. Nor does heading west offer any escape from history.

Over in California, Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo’s name rests on the city of Vallejo, that of his wife on the city of Benicia. He was also the founding father of Sonoma and San Francisco was also allegedly nearly named after his wife. Vallejo relied on Indian slave labor to maintain his ranch and oversaw an Indian slave labor system. (Vallejo was also responsible for naming Marin County.)

California itself is appropriately enough named after a fictional character, Queen Calafia, who was both black and a slave owner. West Coast political correctness becomes even more confusing as we head up north. Washington is obviously named after a slave owner, but what about Seattle? It’s named after Chief Seattle, an American-Indian leader, environmentalist icon and a slave owner. (Slave ownership by Indian tribes was not uncommon and has led to debates and lawsuits over tribal membership.)

But back in California, its leftist city has an even bigger problem. Berkeley is named after the Irish empiricist George Berkeley. Berkeley was not only a slave owner, but a vigorous advocate for the enslavement of Africans and Indians. His name has touched off controversy at Yale and UC Berkeley.

Denver is named after James W. Denver, whose tenures as Commissioner of Indian Affairs and as Territorial Governor of Kansas during the struggle between pro and anti-slavery forces were controversial. The same would be true of anyone involved in politics at the time, but the entire anti-history movement is animated by a refusal to see things in any shade other than black or white.

So we can start off by renaming New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, California, Washington, and Maryland. That’s eleven states.

Not to mention the name of the entire country.

And we’ll have to rename Berkeley, New York City, Seattle, Marin County, Austin, Elizabeth and thousands of other cities, town and county names all across the breadth of the United States.

Or we can stop the insanity right now.

The left starts its culture wars with wedge issues. It began with the statues of Confederate generals. But if this goes on, it’s going to end with the renaming of cities, of states and then finally the renaming of the entire United States of America.

These are the stakes.

Either we stop the left’s assault on history or we lose our country. Every time a statue is taken down, a school is renamed, a building is vandalized, a holiday is abolished, we move one step closer to the final undoing of our history. We should not be afraid of the truth. And the truth is that history is complex.

Judging the past by the present is its own form of cultural appropriation. Long after a revolution against the British Crown, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, New York and many others maintain royal names not because Americans have any allegiance or respect for those dead rulers, but because these places are a part of our history. As are the Indian tribes, the French, the Spanish and all those others too.

Names are not necessarily a form of respect. Identity is, more importantly, a form of memory.

The cultural revolutions of the left promise to purify history by purging it. But that Stalinist solution is a lie. History cannot be purified, only learned from. We are all the descendants of flawed heroes. And we can hope to find the truth of our heroism through our flaws, not by the light of the book burner’s fire.

A hundred nations were plunged into dystopian horrors in search of the garden path to the left’s utopia. That’s all that the left’s rituals of purification and mortification of history, the vandalism of statues and facts, offer America. And it is America. Not Marxville, Leninstadt or Maostan. The flawed explorers, generals, and nobles whose names our cities and states bear are far better than the monsters of the left.

The American Revolution, unlike the French, was based not on a murderous search for leftist revolutionary purity, but on accepting our faults and flaws while trying to still live as our best selves. Those who search for a better future by destroying the past will move on to destroying the present.

Our choice is clear.

Reject the left or rename 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.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Who Really Stands Up for America?

On October 1962, destroyers from the Second Fleet streamed out to intercept Russian vessels suspected of delivering missiles to Cuba. Under the shadow of DEFCON 2, Vice Admiral Alfred Ward, commander of the Second Fleet, watched over a blockade of Cuba. The Navy men putting Russian ships under their guns knew that they were the tip of the spear in what might at any moment become the next world war.

The Russians had ordered their ships to keep going. It was up to the Second Fleet to hold the line.

"Admiral, it looks as though this is up to the Navy," President Kennedy told Admiral Anderson.

“Mr. President,” the admiral replied, “the Navy will not let you down.”

On September 2011, under the leftist politico whose admirers tried to sell him as another JFK, the flag of the Second Fleet was taken down. The fleet that had taken point against the Russians was no more.

The justification for the disestablishment of the Second Fleet was the diminished threat from Russia. The Navy was being cut to pieces while Obama focused on boondoggles like the “Green Fleet”.

“Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917,” Mitt Romney had objected next year during a presidential debate. "We also have fewer horses and bayonets," Obama sneered, to the cheers of the media. "The question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships."

When Romney brought up the Russian threat, Obama sneered some more. "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

These days, Obama’s party is mired in a haze of Russian paranoia. But it was their leader who dismantled our first lines of defense and Trump who is restoring our military deterrence.

Seven years after Obama shuttered the Second Fleet, its flag is flying again. The fleet isn’t green any more, it is mean. And it will watch over the East Coast and the Atlantic to checkmate Russian subs.

The shutdown of the Second Fleet was part of Obama’s failed pivot to Asia which ended with a humiliating apology to China for flying a plane too close to one of the Communist dictatorship’s fake South China Sea islands. (Trump has since dispatched B-52s, outraging China, with no apology.)

That was December 2015.

On January 2016, the complete collapse of naval credibility led Iran to seize two United States Navy boats, steal classified information, hold their crews hostage and humiliate them on television.

Obama had forced the Navy to grovel to China. Why not Iran?

Instead of taking decisive action against this second Iran hostage crisis, the appeasement administration instead used it to spin the success of the Iran Deal. The humiliation of the Navy was complete.

But the humiliation of the United States Navy and the United States of America ended on Jan 20, 2017.

The restoration of the Second Fleet is an important step in the revival of America’s Navy. But the full scope of the harm Obama inflicted on our readiness will take generations of hard work to repair.

The USS Enterprise, the descendant of a fabled history stretching back to the American Revolution, which took part in the Cuban blockade, was scrapped by Obama. The Enterprise was one of six carriers scrapped by Obama who wasn’t interested in counting ships or horses and bayonets.

Or in fulfilling the congressional mandate to maintain at least eleven aircraft carriers at all times. Scrapping the USS Enterprise took us to ten even though 10 U.S. Code § 5062 specifically states, "The naval combat forces of the Navy shall include not less than 11 operational aircraft carriers."

Obama broke the law. He undermined our national security. And once again, he got away with it.

The great dismantling of our military fueled Chinese, Russian and Islamic aggressive expansionism. But now the Second Fleet will be headquartered in Norfolk along with NATO’s Joint Force Command for the Atlantic. While media pundits wailed about Trump’s commitment to NATO, Norfolk sends a clear and direct message to the Russians and to NATO about American capabilities and determination.

Under Obama, Russian attack subs and spy ships showed up on our coastlines, approaching naval bases, coming close to our waters, occasionally passing undetected, testing our capabilities and our nerve. While Obama did nothing about the threat to our naval forces, Trump shut down the Russian consulate in Seattle to stop its spying on Naval Base Kitsap, one of the homes of our underwater nuclear arsenal.

Our capabilities have room to regrow, but no matter how much the media lies, our nerve is not lacking.

President Trump nominated Vice Admiral Andrew "Woody" Lewis, a former fighter pilot, who had served on the Enterprise, the Truman, and the Roosevelt, to head the Second Fleet. The Lewis pick demonstrates the administration’s commitment to projecting naval and air power in the Atlantic.

There are no horses and bayonets here. Just Trump’s vision for restoring carrier power. While Obama scrapped carriers in his own game of Battleship, Trump wants 12 supercarriers and a fleet of 350 ships.

"American ships will sail the seas, American planes will soar the skies, American workers will build our fleets," President Trump had declared at the dedication of the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Ford brings the Navy up to 11 carriers. Obama took the Navy below its mandated minimum strength. Now for the first time since those terrible years of appeasement, American naval power is recovering.

By the time Trump is ready to leave office, the Navy should be back up to twelve carriers again. A few years later, the People’s Republic of China expects to have four carriers. Its advanced new vessels will likely rely on stolen technology ripped off by Chinese hackers in the weak and feckless Obama years.

These include the Littoral Combat Ship and Aegis system designs.

The Democrats and the media howling about the national security threat from Russian hackers remain uninterested in the Chinese hacks that stole some of our most vital and advanced national security secrets. They expect us to believe that hacking John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s emails, and posting spam on Facebook, was a bigger threat than China making off with the F-35 plans.

China’s ambitious new supercarrier designs take advantage of our failures during the Obama era. These carriers show that the People’s Republic is thinking of projecting force beyond its territories and islands.

And China has worked closely together with Russia. Its first carrier is an unfinished Russian model. Russian and Chinese vessels are also participating in joint naval maneuvers because they know that seapower hasn’t, despite Obama’s assertions, gone the way of the era of horses and bayonets.

Not a day goes by without Democrat politicians and media ranting that President Trump is failing to protect us from Russian attacks. The return of the Second Fleet is an example of how Trump is doing just that. It doesn’t take the military to protect Democrat email accounts from hackers. The DNC could have spent 20 bucks on physical security keys for its people, instead of on lavish dresses for Debbie.

A single one of Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s dresses would have paid for 200 security keys.

Or the Democrats could have spent the money to maintain the military and deter foreign enemies instead of believing that empty speechifying and diplomacy could take the place of aircraft carriers.

While Obama cut the US Navy, the Russians added warships with cruise missiles. They’re adding an amphibious assault ship capable of carrying 13 tanks. Their missile patrol boats are being hailed for their innovative designs. Putin has announced 26 new ships will be added to the Russian Navy this year.

Where are all the Democrats who shout about how we need to challenge Russia? Nowhere.

In 2016, a Russian warship made it to within 300 yards of the USS Gravely. The Gravely was protecting the USS Harry S. Truman. The warship pointed at the Truman. As usual, Obama did nothing.

These days, the Harry S. Truman Carrier Group is already sending a message to Russian subs in the Atlantic. If the Democrats want to see Trump standing up to Russia, they can look to the waves.

Before long, they will see the flag of the Second Fleet flying once more over the Atlantic Ocean. 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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Thank you for reading.

San Francisco Bans Everything

Here are a few things that are effectively legal in San Francisco: drugs, public defecation and shoplifting. And here are some of the things that are banned or will be banned in the City by the Bay.

Straws. Fur coats. Bottled water. Eating at work. Vaping liquids. Upholstered furniture. Plastic bags. Pet stores. Electric scooters. Coffee cups and packing peanuts. Tropical fish. The McDonald’s Happy Meal.

If you can think of something, San Francisco has already banned it. Or will be banning it soon.

North Korea with a tech industry and some leftover Victorian architecture (which it’s banning tour buses from visiting) has reacted to the collapse of living conditions and fleeing tourists by banning everything.

Everything except the behavior that’s making San Francisco unlivable.

During the Gold Rush, legend had it that the streets of San Francisco were paved with gold. These days they’re layered with human waste after the socialist city legalized public urination and defecation. A bag of 20 pounds of human waste was deposited on the street. Urine corroded a pole so badly that it fell on a car almost killing the driver. But don’t think that you can get away with anything in San Francisco.

San Francisco decriminalized public defecation, but criminalized plastic straws. While bench warrants for public urination are discarded, the straw fines are real and expensive. A California statewide bill goes further with a threat of six months in the county jail for giving a man a straw. When drugs are legal and straws aren’t, the Mexican cartels will soon switch to smuggling drinking straws into California.

Why ban straws? Because straws, according to the San Francisco ordinance, “may threaten public health” and are bad for the environment? Piles of human waste in the street are great for public health and the environment. But a Chicago medical association disagreed and cancelled its planned conference.

When Chicago thinks your city is dirty and dangerous hellhole, you really have a problem.

But America’s greatest experiment with socialism is coping with its collapse by banning everything. The straw ban isn't the last straw. It’s one of a series of San Fran bans that would make Kim Jong-un wince.

The straw ban was the brainchild of Supervisor Katy Tang. Katy was excused from the straw vote because she had to take her bar exam. She had previously won a proposal to ban sales of fur coats. In her press release, Katy noted that, "fur farming contributes to water and air pollution" because each mink produces "44 pounds of feces in the mink’s lifetime."

The press release doesn’t state how many pounds the Board of Supervisors produces a year. Or how much the homeless population that San Francisco’s insane government has cultivated does.

Statistically speaking, Katy Tang would be personally responsible for around 342 pounds of waste a year. Or 7 times more than a mink could manage over its entire existence. The entire Board of Supervisors, which in true Stalinist style votes 11-0 on its insane bans (except when Katy has to take an exam), would directly account for around 3,700 pounds of waste. Or worse than an entire mink farm.

But that’s not accounting for the true legacy of the Board of Supervisors.

The homeless population of San Francisco increased by around 1,000 in six years. Complaints about human waste rose from 5,685 in 2011 to 18,211 in 2016. A 1,000 increase would mean an extra 342,000 pounds of human waste. San Francisco pols clamored that all the mink farms in this country produce a million pounds of waste a year. The homeless population that they cultivated does that in only a few months with an estimated annual output of well over 2 million pounds.

Mink are rabid, deranged animals that bite everything in sight. But millions of them running loose around Frisco would still do less damage than the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

San Francisco’s budget topped $11 billion for the first time. An increase of almost a billion. Annual spending on the homeless is expected to rise to over $300 million.

None of this would be possible without the tech industry that the city is trying to alienate. And if North Korea with a tech industry loses the dot com firms that feed its tax base, it’ll just be North Korea.

And it’s working hard to make that happen.

Another brilliant ban from the board brains would outlaw new workplace cafeterias.

“You can’t have an industrial kitchen in your office building,” declared Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who along with Supervisor Ahsha Safai, was one of the geniuses behind the idea.

When workers eat in cafeterias, it deprives the restaurateurs of customers. The same lefties who banned straws because of their environmental impact, want to mandate the existence of a thousand restaurants, which were formerly serving those straws, without regard to their environmental impact.

What’s the environmental impact of a straw or an employee taking an Uber for lunch? It’s as disproportionate as the environment impacts of Katy Tang, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safai compared to a thousand minks whose senseless aggression is at least the product of instinct, not leftist ideology.

But the great hand of socialism gives and takes away. It just doesn’t make any sense while it’s doing so.

Once the decree passes, the only people entitled to a free lunch in San Francisco will be the same ones defecating on the street. But the workers who actually subsidize the mess aren’t allowed a free lunch.

Socialism will offer you a free lunch. But not if you pay taxes and use the bathroom.

"I urge the Board to focus on making our streets safe. Perhaps then, workers would feel better about leaving their workplace for lunch without having to actively dodge tent camps, human feces, and needles," one San Francisco letter writer suggested.

But that runs contrary to the entire philosophy that turned San Fran into an overtaxed and overregulated public sewer where every problem is solved with a new ban.

“It’s more heavily regulated than the water you’re getting in bottles," a senior advisor to the mayor's office insisted of San Francisco's water in defense of a water bottle ban.

But not everybody wants more regulated water. Some people just want the water that they want.

And the vaping liquids, the goldfish, the upholstered furniture, the plastic bags, fur coats and coffee cups of their choice. Some people just want to drink their bottled water through a straw. They want to wear a fur coat while shopping for tropical fish and upholstered furniture. And then light up a cigarette.

There’s no room for that attitude in San Francisco where each social problem is met with a new ban.

Are restaurants unhappy about the bans on coffee cups, foam containers and straws? Just ban workplace cafeterias to drive customers to them. Are workers and companies fleeing San Fran? Put up a wall made of recycled waste and trash topped with armed homeless encampments to keep them from escaping. Then direct the survivors to eat out at the strawless, coffee-cup less, salt-less and sugar-free vegan restaurant of their mandated choice offering tasteless meals with no more than 40 calories.

It worked for North Korea. It’s bound to work for San Francisco.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.