Enter your keyword

Saturday, December 31, 2022

December 31, 1912

By On December 31, 2022

 (Posting this article has become an annual tradition ever since the grim end of 2012. It's a reminder that the end of each year ushers in unknowns, but also opportunities for heroism. History does not stand still, and we should never assume that we know how it will come out.) 


The next year  sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, even if it doesn't feel like there is much to celebrate, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are large, the men wear hats, and the word 'gay' means happy. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year has fallen on a Sunday. 

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today's urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York's Finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

On Ellis Island, Castro, a bitter enemy of the United States, and the former president of Venezuela, had been arrested for trying to sneak into the country while the customs officers had their guard down. Gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Castro denied that he was a revolutionary and bitterly urged the American masses to rise up and tear down the statue in the name of freedom.

Times Square has far fewer billboards and no videos, but it does have the giant Horn and Hardart Automat which opened just that year, where food comes from banks of vending machines giving celebrating crowds a view of the amazing world of tomorrow for the world of 1912 is after all like our own. 

We can open a door into the past, but we cannot escape the present.

The Presidential election of 1912 ended in disaster. Both Taft and Roosevelt lost and Woodrow Wilson won. In the White House, President Taft met with cabinet members and diplomats for a final reception.

Woodrow Wilson, who would lead America into a bloody and senseless war, subvert its Constitution, and begin the process of making global government and statism into the national religion of his party, was optimistic about the new year. "Thirteen is my lucky number," he said. "It is curious how the number 13 has figured in my life and never with bad fortune." 

In Indianapolis, the train carrying union leaders guilty of the dynamite plot was making its secret way to Federal prison even while the lawyers of the dynamiters vowed to appeal.

The passing year, a century past, had its distinct echoes in our own time. There had been, what the men of the time, thought of as wars, yet they could not even conceive of the wars shortly to come. There were the usual dry news items about the collapse of the government in Spain, a war and an economic crisis in distant parts of the world that did not concern them. The Federal Reserve Act would be signed at the end of 1913, partly in response to the economic crisis. 

Socialism was on the march with the Socialist Party having doubled its votes in the national election.  All three major candidates, Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft, had warned that the country was drifting toward Socialism and that they were the only ones who could stop it. 

"Unless Socialism is checked," Professor Albert Bushnell Hart warned, "within sixteen years there will be a Socialist President of the United States." 

Hart was off by four years. Hoover won in 1928. FDR won in 1932. 

At New York City's May Day rally, the American flag was torn down and replaced with the red flag, to cries of, "Take down that dirty rag" and "We don't recognize that flag."

The site of the rally was Union Square, one of the locations where Black Lives Matter hangs out, taking over from Occupy Wall Street and generations of radicals.

There was tension on the Mexican border and alarm over Socialist successes in German elections. An obscure fellow with the silly name of Lenin had carved out a group with the even sillier name of the Bolsheviks. China became a Republic. New Mexico became a state, the African National Congress was founded and the Titanic sank.  

There was bloody fighting in Benghazi where 20,000 Italian troops faced off against 20,000 Arabs and 8,000 Turks. The Italians had modern warships and armored vehicles, while the Muslim forces were supplied by voluntary donations and fighters crossing from Egypt and across North Africa to join in attacking the infidels.

The Italian-Turkish war has since been forgotten, except by the Italians, the Libyans and the Turks, but it featured the first strategic use of airships, ushering in a century of European aerial warfare. 

There was a good deal going on while the horns were blown and men in heavy coats and wet hats made their way through the festivities.

World War I was two years away, but the Balkan War had already fired the first shots. The rest was just a matter of bringing the non-phosphorus matches closer to the kindling. The Anti-Saloon League was gathering strength for a nationwide effort that would hijack the political system and divide it into dry and wet, and, among other things, ram through the personal income tax.

Change was coming, and as in 1912, the country was no longer hopeful, it was wary.

The century, for all its expected glamor, had been a difficult one. The future, political and economic, was unknown. Few knew exactly what was to come, but equally few were especially optimistic even when the champagne was flowing.

If we were to stop a reveler staggering out of a hotel, stand in his path and tell him that war was five years away and a great depression would come in on its tail, that liquor would be banned, crime would proliferate and a Socialist president would rule the United States for three terms, while wielding near absolute power, he might have decided to make his way to the recently constructed Manhattan Bridge for a swan dive into the river.

And yet we know that though all this is true, there is a deeper truth. For all those setbacks, the United States survived, and many of us look nostalgically toward a time that was every bit as uncertain and nerve-wracking as our own.

December 31, 1912 was a door that opened onto many things.

Our December 31 is likewise a door, and if a man in shiny clothes from the year 2120 were to stop us on the street and spill out everything he knew about the next century, it is likely that there would be as much greatness as tragedy in that tale.

As the year sweeps across the earth, let us remember that history is more than the worst of its events, that all times bear the burden of their uncertainties, but also carry within them the seeds of greatness. Looking back on this time, it may be that it is not the defeats that we will recall, but how they readied us for the fight ahead. 

America has not fallen, no more than it did when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1912. Though it may not seem likely now, there are many great things ahead, and though the challenges at times seem insurmountable and the defeats many, another year and another century await us.

Friday, December 30, 2022

The Foreign Billionaire Funding the Dem Attack on Hunter Biden Investigation

By On December 30, 2022
“We are proud Americans speaking up against an extreme agenda that is putting money and power over everyday Americans,” Courage for America’s mission statement claims.

If you have any doubt whatsoever that CFA is an American organization, its home page is decorated with a flag draped over a barn. The ‘O’ in its logo even includes flag symbolism.

CFA has announced that it’s “forming a council of proud Americans” to fight Republican investigations into the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden clan.

Waving the flag to cover up the intimidation of elected officials investigating dirty deals with Chinese and Russian oligarchs is a new low even for Biden and his cronies.

Will Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss billionaire allegedly backing CFA, be on the council of proud Americans? It would be awkward for the foreign tycoon to sit on a “council of proud Americans” since he is not, as far as even the media has been able to determine, an American citizen.

Instead, he appears to be living in America under an investor visa.

That hasn’t stopped the wealthy European from using his fortune to drastically influence American politics with the complicity of the IRS, the FEC and the rest of the government.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Wyss, who was accused of getting rich while killing patients, has broken the rules. And nothing says “proud Americans” fighting for “every American” like a secretive organization that doesn’t list its staff and appears to be funded by a foreign billionaire.

Wyss co-founded Synthes, a medical device manufacturer focused on repairing broken bones. In 2010, Synthes pled guilty to illegally experimenting on patients: its president, and its spine division president and two other executives were sentenced to prison. Even though a manager testified that Wyss had made the decision not to go through clinical trials, and owned half the company, he was not charged and has gone on funding the extreme causes of the Left.

The 5 Americans who died were not so lucky. Some of the dead, like Barbara Marcelino, showed signs of the cement used by Wyss’ company, in their lungs.

Wyss’ Hub Project has poured its money into everything from Democrat redistricting efforts to automatic voter registration with a massive impact on our elections. But this time the Hub appears to be focused on playing defense for Democrats against GOP investigations.

“Our goal is to go on offense against the new House majority,” said Zac Petkanas, Hillary’s former rapid response director, and a political strategist now working on behalf of Courage for America, bragged. “We are going to be pointing out the things that those investigations are distracting from.”

And who better to distract Americans from those investigations into Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals than a shadowy dark money group allegedly funded by a foreign billionaire?

NBC News has reported that Courage for America has a “seven-figure budget and support from the Hub Project, a giant Democratic dark money network, the group plans a robust operation including polling, paid advertising and social media campaigns, along with traditional opposition research and communications.”

But what NBC didn’t bother to mention was that the Hub Project appears to have been set up by the Wyss Foundation. A complaint by Americans for Public Trust noted in a filing that the Hub Project’s business plan “recommended that the group ‘be solely funded by the Wyss Foundation at the outset’ and that it would work behind the scenes to “dramatically shift the public debate and policy positions of core decision makers.”

Courage for America wants to target the Republican House majority and help Democrats fight off investigations into scandals like Hunter Biden and his foreign business operations.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee have found 50 countries where the Biden family has looked into doing business. And they also intend to investigate Joe Biden’s role in some of those ventures. These hearings will potentially look into everything from Hunter’s Chinese-backed cobalt mine deal to a Russian oligarch. And the Democrats will defend against allegations that Biden, his brother and his son engaged in dubious business deals with shady foreign tycoons by turning to yet another shady foreign tycoon.

“The American people need to be introduced and educated about the extremist agenda of this new House and also who these members are,” CFA’s Petkanas blustered.

The CFA is so open that its site doesn’t even mention Petkanas, or Naveed Shah: its spokesman. Not only are CFA’s donors secret, but so are its staff and leadership. Instead of listing its staff, CFA references its “council” to divert attention from who is running the show.

That’s suspicious behavior for an organization that claims that it’s all about transparency. CFA is even working with another group calling itself the Congressional Integrity Project which vows to expose the “reality behind Republicans’ politically motivated oversight and investigations targeting President Biden and Democrats.” Nothing says integrity like a dark money machine helping Biden and his cronies intimidate elected officials investigating his corrupt activities.

The level of coordination between CFA, CIP and the Biden administration was revealed when the Washington Post mentioned that, “while the CIP is not formally tied to the White House, its leaders have spoken with President Biden’s aides and it recently brought on Jeff Peck, a former chief-of-staff to Biden from his time in the Senate.”

Biden appears to be covertly coordinating with a dark money machine group funded by a foreign billionaire to stop investigations into his dealings with foreign business interests.

If that’s not impeachable conduct, what is?

“These are sham investigations,” Kyle Herrig of CIP fumed. “We’re going to leave no stone unturned. No one has done the investigative research we’ve done on these investigators. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

“We have a multimillion-dollar budget, and we’re staffing up with a team of researchers and communicators,” he warned.

Where does that “multimillion-dollar budget” come from?

Dark money means that no one knows. The Washington Examiner couldn’t find anyone at CIP’s supposed offices and its spokesperson wouldn’t even provide a name.

This plot to fight investigations into corruption and abuses by the Biden administration has only revived questions about Wyss and his money machine. And the legality of his ongoing efforts to influence our political system for the benefit of the Democrats and the Left.

This is the phenomenon discussed in Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo. The pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center began our project of exposing the abuses of the tax code by the political operations of the Left. While the IRS investigates conservative nonprofits on behalf of its allies in the White House, it allows leftists foundations and nonprofits, especially those allied with Biden, to flout the law and corrupt our system.

Biden’s effort to obstruct the investigations into the family business rely on a tangled network that includes David Brock’s Facts First USA, which we previously investigated, and groups which appear to derive their support from a foreign billionaire. This is the definition of corruption.





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

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, December 29, 2022

New York Gov Frees 11-Year-Old Boy’s Killer

By On December 29, 2022
On a cold October day in ’93, an 11-year-old boy brought a piece of birthday cake to his mother.

The Queens neighborhood, less than two miles from former President Trump’s childhood home, had seen better days. Giuliani was still a year away from taking office and under Mayor Dinkins, a racist pro-crime hack, New York City had hit lows that it would not see again until the return of Dinkin’s pro-crime protege, Bill de Blasio.

As Travis Lilley headed off with cake from a birthday party downstairs to the New Look Beauty Salon where his mother was working, the street was overrun with drug dealers fighting turf wars. New York Boulevard, renamed Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, after one of the first black politicians in the borough because it was where Brewer opened the Democratic Club that still bears his name, with its fast food joints, auto repair shops and beauty salons, was dangerous.

The beauty parlor that Travis’ grandmother owned was on an intersection favored by drug dealers. Local business owners had complained to the Dinkins administration with no results.

Travis, who would forever remain eleven on that day, went downstairs to the beauty parlor that his grandmother owned. Drug dealers opened fire. The bullets, the prosecutor would later describe, “tore away the back of Travis Lilley’s head.”

Travis died in his grandfather’s arms surrounded by broken glass.

“It was his only grandchild — the baby died in his arms,” a neighbor said.

What happened on October 30, 1993 was an evil act. But it was the ordinary kind of evil that men have done throughout human history. What happened next was the extraordinary kind of evil that defines societies.

The pro-crime Left fell in love with the man convicted in the 11-year-old boy’s death.

At the sentencing of the first shooter, Travis’ mother scathingly dismissed the bawling gunman’s claims of innocence with, “he knows he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail. That’s all he’s concerned about.”

At the sentencing of the second man, his pal, the judge declared, “It is my hope that you never again have access to decent, innocent people.”

That hope has proven to be false.

Gov. Hochul decided to commute his sentence, noting that, “Mr. Bryant has earned an Associate’s Degree and Bachelor’s Degree, and recently earned a certification through an entrepreneurial training program.” And what is the life of a little boy dying in his grandfather’s arms worth compared to his killer’s entrepreneurial training program?

“Why NY’s ‘Poster Child For Clemency’ Is Still Behind Bars,” a social justice reporter, who had written a similar agitprop piece for CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, funded by the leftist Craigslist billionaire, complained.

Bruce Bryant, 53, a former crack dealer, is anything but a child. The child was Travis.

“Bryant isn’t the only one confused as to why he continues to be overlooked for clemency. Steve Zeidman, director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at CUNY School of Law, has helped over a dozen New York state prisoners successfully gain clemency, and he said there’s no one more deserving of freedom than Bruce Bryant,” she wrote.

“Even if Bruce was as guilty as a human being can be, he still warrants clemency, because of all he’s done inside,” Zeidman insisted.

Zeidman, who records show earns over $180,000 from the publicly funded City University of New York, has been an articulate spokesman for the assorted monsters rattling the bars of their cages, eager to get out and maim, rob and kill all over again. 

Who speaks for Travis? No one.

“Say Their Names — The People Deserving Clemency,” the law professor demanded in one screed, urging Gov. Hochul to let out Bryant, along with Stanley Bellamy, now also freed by Hochul, who had shot a man in the head at close range during a robbery in 1985.

Who will say Travis’ name?

It’s a pity that the New Yorkers who are regularly robbed, beaten and killed by thugs aren’t paying someone $180,000 a year to say the names of the victims, just of the killers.

“Rotten Social Background and Mass Incarceration: Who Is a Victim?” Zeidman wondered in the Brooklyn Law Review. It’s easy to spot the victims. They’re the ones who don’t have $180,000 law professors agitating for them and who die forgotten in the arms of their loved ones.

It is also just as easy to spot evil.

There are two tiers of evil. On the first and lesser tier of evil are the men who commit horrifying acts and on the second and greater tier are those who transform their evil into a societal norm.

Almost 30 years after Travis died in a beauty salon on New York Boulevard, and shortly after a sickened city finally fought back against not only the drug dealers, the rapists, robbers and other thugs, but the pro-crime political culture that had enabled them, criminals are victims again.

In a CUNY puff piece written on Bryant’s behalf, the man convicted in Travis’ killing claimed that he turned to crime because he “saw white, wealthy customers mouth off to his father.” A customer is rude to a waiter. What else can his son do except start selling crack?

White leftists love sob stories like that. But the ultimate victims of mythologizing crime as a reaction to racism are the little black kids like Travis whom it kills. And at some point it needs to be asked why white leftists have so much love for black killers, but none for black victims?

Gov. Hochul, who refused to bring back bail and stop the crime, survived her election due to dirty tricks, election rigging and a lack of empathy by the Zeidman class, the wealthy upscale leftists who have once again destroyed New York City, for the victims of crime.

Crime continues to terrorize New Yorkers and pro-crime leftists continue to lie about it. And the victims, stabbed in the neck, teeth smashed out on an evening walk, raped, beaten and killed, are shut out of the cheerful conversation about the need to free criminals and end policing.

“Individual traits are not the driver of criminal behavior,” Zeidman insisted.

It’s an old argument. The loudest voices arguing that we have no choice in our actions are those who defend the worst possible crimes. The difference between a moral and immoral society is human agency. The atrocities of the twentieth century were committed by men who believed that human beings were little more than animals or social variables. We defeated them in Europe, but tragically we never defeated them in America. And now they’re calling the shots.

The world has moved on since the murder of a little boy bearing a piece of birthday cake. The corner where the New Look Beauty Salon once stood has been occupied by the Al-Baraka Islamic Halal market. A pro-crime governor and legislative leaders occupy Albany.

Gov. Hochul is taking her victory lap by commuting the sentence of an 11-year-old boy’s killer.

Over 3 million people in New York voted for this. In 1993, two men pulled the triggers on the bullets that likely took Travis’ life. In 2022, 3,030,712 people pulled the trigger.

That is the difference between individual evil and societal evil.





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

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

Son of Biden’s Iran Envoy Works for ‘Iran Lobby’

By On December 27, 2022
During the 2008 election, the Obama campaign dropped Robert Malley as an adviser over his work with Hamas on behalf of George Soros’ International Crisis Group. Once in office, Obama brought back his old buddy into the National Security Council.

Malley (pictured above) then became the lead negotiator for the sellout deal to legitimize Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite vocal criticism from Iranian dissidents and the country’s freedom movement, Biden chose Malley as his special envoy to Iran. Even as Robert Malley continues conducting outreach to the Islamic terrorist state on behalf of the Biden administration, his son works at a pro-Iran organization tied to a key figure in the Iran Lobby.

Robert was the son of Simon Malley, an adviser to PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and the founder of a Communist party in Arafat’s native homeland of Egypt. Blaise Malley represents the third generation of the family’s leftist radicalism being used to prop up Islamist movements.

The son of Biden’s envoy to Iran spends his time undermining American efforts against Iran.

Blaise Malley is listed as a full-time reporter for the Quincy Institute run and funded by key figures in the pro-Iran movement. His most recently article agitates against further American involvement in the conflict against the Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen whose motto is, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse to the Jews, Victory to Islam.”

Iran spends an estimated $20 million a year backing the Houthis. Their ability to hold parts of Yemen is crucial to the terror regime’s ambitions for the region. America’s first strike against the Houthis was actually in response to their cruise missile attack on the USS Mason.

The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was founded by George Soros and Charles Koch. Its donors include a roster of leftists and their foundations including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Giustra: the billionaire at the center of the Clinton Foundation scandal involving the sale of Uranium One to Russia.

The executive VP of Quincy however is Trita Parsi: a dual Iranian-Swedish national who founded the National Iranian American Council. NIAC, described by critics as the ‘Iran Lobby’, has been accused of violating tax laws and the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Quincy’s board includes Francis Najafi. a wealthy Iranian real estate developer who is also a major funder of NIAC, and Amir Handjani, the exclusive broker for an American company doing business with Iran, and a Quincy Institute fellow, who also appears to be a donor.

Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American dissident journalist targeted for kidnapping by the regime, tweeted that, “NIAC and Quincy are the Russia Today of the Iranian Regime. They spend all of their time defaming critics of the Islamic Republic, myself included. When the regime attempts to kill us they’re either silent or mealy-mouthed. ”

As an envoy, Robert Malley is in theory supposed to represent American interests. At a minimum, close family members of Biden’s envoy to Iran should not be employed by an organization that has a vehement pro-Iran agenda and ties to pro-Iranian financial interests.

But Blaise, who was nurtured by the same Islamist-internationalist network, who served as a managing editor at the Journal of Middle East Studies and wrote his thesis on “Is a Left/Right Coalition on Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy Feasible” is just the latest incarnation of the Malley family which seems to have been bred to undermine America and support its enemies. It’s only a matter of time until Blaise rises through the think tanks and then into the government.

And Blaise is benefiting from some of the same connections that followed his father around.

A recent letter in defense of Robert Malley fumed that, “those who accuse Malley of sympathy for the Islamic Republic have no grasp of – or no interest in – true diplomacy”. It was signed by, among others, Trita Parsi’s brother, a board member at NIAC, Amir Handjani, a board member and two fellows at Quincy. How better to dispute the accusation that Malley is on Iran’s side.

The difference between father and son is that the elder Malley is embedded within the government and has to be a bit discreet, while the younger Malley is free to do his best Tokyo Rose impression in the virtual pages of any publication that will run his propaganda.

In The American Prospect, a leftist publication, Blaise Malley warned that “Iran’s leadership may also have lost trust in an American government”, suggested that the Islamic terror state might be “keeping the door open to improving relations with the United States”, but cautioned that “it would be a mistake to assume that Iran doesn’t have a say in the deal’s future as well.”

Iranian propaganda could hardly be any more clearly packaged.

In The New Republic, Blaise Malley claimed that sanctions on Iran had killed 13,000 people despite the fact that food and medicine are not sanctioned. Malley quoted a Quincy official complaining that America had sanctioned Iran and “we won’t guarantee to lift the sanctions if they go back to doing what we wanted.”

“No good has come of trying to isolate other authoritarian countries, such as Iran, North Korea, and others,” Blaise Malley whined at the Washington Examiner.

Forget isolating them abroad, the question is how do we isolate them at home.

Foreign agents for Iran, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire network around them have overrun D.C. and the media. And top government officials are complicit in the corruption.

As Iranians protest for freedom in the streets, Robert Malley and the pro-Iran influence networks have been caught up in the backlash. Malley was forced to apologize for a tweet that he described as “poorly worded”. And NIAC, Quincy and their circle have tried to reject allegations that they are part of an ‘Iran Lobby’ by offering some concerned noises about the protests.

The Malley family has come a long way since the French Interior Minister stated that Robert’s father and Blaise’s grandfather was issuing “genuine appeals to murder foreign chiefs of state”.

But while the presentation may have changed, the underlying content remains the same.

The Biden administration is maneuvering to appear to condemn the Islamist regime’s brutal crackdown on the protests while covertly supporting it. But it’s hard to maintain that illusion when the son of Biden’s envoy to Iran is pushing Iranian propaganda for the Iran Lobby.





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

Thank you for reading.

Monday, December 26, 2022

Elizabeth Warren’s Billionaire Sugar Daddy

By On December 26, 2022
Liz Warren hates billionaires. Just ask the millionaire leftist. Or don’t, she’ll be happy to virtue signal to you anyway. The Elizabeth Warren official store even sells a “billionaire tears” mug for only $28 bucks: a profit margin that would be obscene if a capitalist billionaire were doing it.

Who actually funds Warren’s political ambitions? Our investigation of her political organization reveals that it’s billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar. Advisors include Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Like her Cherokee heritage, Warren’s identity as a crusader against billionaires is fake. Without billionaires backing her organization, she wouldn’t have achieved so much influence in the Biden administration.

In November, Senator Warren appeared at a conference with a rant that mentioned billionaires eight times, accusing Republicans of running up the deficits with “tax cuts for billionaires” and arguing that, “Republicans will fight hard for billionaires, billionaire corporations, and conspiracy theorists. Democrats must be willing to fight even harder for working families.”

That was a little awkward because the conference was co-hosted by the Omidyar Network which is a foundation created and funded by Franco-Iranian eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Of the other five co-hosts, four, Groundwork Action, Roosevelt Forward, the Economic Security Project, and Demos, also received Omidyar funding. The Economic Security Project needed some help because its creator, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, just has a mere half-billion to his name. Warren was speaking at a billionaire’s private social justice playground.

The only billionaire tears were those of laughter from Omidyar: the richest man in Hawaii.

It’s doubtful that Warren didn’t know that she was there as the keynote speaker for a billionaire’s event since Pierre Omidyar has played a massive role in her political operation.

The Roosevelt Institute was described by Politico as “Warren-allied”: that’s an understatement.

The organization employs Warren associates, allies and past aides. It reportedly assembled the lists of appointees that Warren had demanded from Hillary Clinton and likely Biden, and who would potentially go on to fill positions in a potential Warren administration. The Roosevelt Institute doubles as Warren’s campaign operation, think tank and presidential campaign staff.

This linchpin of Warren’s political operation and future is backed by a billionaire. If Omidyar were to cut off funding for the Roosevelt Institute, she would be crying into her own ‘tears’ mug.

The Roosevelt Institute harbors the worst socialist economic extremists.

When Saule Omarova’s nomination to the Treasury Department, at Warren’s behest, was torpedoed by her Lenin scholarship and support for eliminating private banking, the Roosevelt Institute brought on the Moscow State University grad as a senior fellow.

Key Warren allies and personnel work for the Roosevelt Institute which is, conveniently, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Warren has appeared at Roosevelt events and the institute has promoted her various measures with its personnel effectively acting as her spokespersons even though it’s illegal for C3 nonprofits to get involved in partisan politics or back a candidate.

But the entanglement between the Roosevelt Institute and Warren allegedly went much further.

The Roosevelt Institute had apparently assembled a list of jobs in what was expected to be the Hillary Clinton administration and “interviewed over 1,000 potential candidates”. Some version of this list was likely used for the Biden administration which is staffed with Warren allies.

Take Bharat Ramamurti, a top Warren economic policy aide and managing director at the Roosevelt Institute, who was picked by Biden’s people as a Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. Julie Margetta Morgan, a senior domestic policy advisor for the Warren campaign, became vice president of research at the Roosevelt Institute, and then joined the Biden transition team and holds a senior position at the Department of Education.

And who funds the Roosevelt Institute?

The Omidyar Network has provided at least half a million dollars to Warren’s pet socialist group. It has sponsored the Roosevelt Institute’s roster of ‘smash capitalism’ events. Roosevelt Institute podcasts are, in the words of CEO Felicia Wong, are “made possible with support from Omidyar Network, a social change venture that is reimagining how capitalism should work.”

The troubling intersection between the Roosevelt Institute, Warren’s list and the Omidyar Network was brought home by the appointment of Joelle Gamble of the Omidyar Network, who was also on the board of the Roosevelt Institute, as a top Biden economic adviser. Wong hailed “Joelle Gamble and Omidyar Network. Thank you for your smarts, your service, and your dedication to America’s workers.”

What Warren’s list was actually doing was taking a billionaire’s pet activist to the White House.

Beyond Omidyar, the Roosevelt Institute has picked up $4.7 million from George Soros’ Open Society networks. And Wong is an alumnus of Soros’ Democracy Alliance machine.

Warren’s allies also received $1.2 million from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund: a family of billionaires, money from MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, $1.1 million from Irish duty free billionaire Chuck Feeney, and $600,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with other billionaire foundations.

Vox even described Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes acting as a “senior adviser to Wong at the Roosevelt Institute.”

So much for that billionaire tears mug.

David Horowitz and John Perazzo described the abuses of nonprofit organizations with the complicity of the IRS in Internal Radical Service. Front Page Magazine has continued to delve into the abuse of nonprofit organizations as campaign operations, but even by those standards, Warren’s allied nonprofit uniquely blends a presidential library, a nonprofit and advocacy arm.

The Roosevelt Institute is a partner of the FDR Presidential Library. The FDR Library is administered by the National Archives. The Institute, a 501(c)(3), also has Roosevelt Forward, its own 501(c)(4) which claims to work with members of Congress to “build new rules for the American economy and our democracy”.

Using a presidential library to generate a political advocacy nonprofit and a lobbying group is certainly an example of building new rules. These rules directly entangle an arm of the federal government with a politician’s political organization and a partisan group that works with PACs.

Elizabeth Warren complains that billionaires have too much political influence. Her political power depends on a billionaire-funded ideological operation promoted by the government.

The FDR Library states that it’s “administered by the National Archives and Records Administration with the support of its nonprofit partner, the Roosevelt Institute” and links directly to the Warren political site, encouraging supporters to sign up with Warren’s political group.

Felicia Wong serves as the head of both the Roosevelt Institute and Roosevelt Forward. She also served on Biden’s presidential transition advisory board and was appointed by the Biden administration to its Committee on Racial Equity. But the revolving door can also go both ways with Warren’s digital press secretary and spokeswoman for her presidential campaign who went on to work as a senior communications strategist for the Omidyar Network.

While many remarked on the Warren takeover of the Biden administration, few noted that it was financed by leftist billionaires and foundations. As the unpopular politician continues to plot her next move, the Roosevelt Institute and its billionaire sugar daddies remain crucial to her future.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, unpopular and unlikable, who once faked an Indian identity, jettisoned it to mock up populist credentials as a champion against the rich. At least those richer than her. Billionaire-bashing is an implausible pastime for a party whose operations, especially the more radical ones, are funded by billionaires, whose populism is bought for it by vast wealth.

Warren has gotten away with her hypocritical virtue signaling this long because no one before us took a close look at her political operation. That is what the David Horowitz Freedom Center does and is continuing to do. Our investigative journalism exposes the truth about the corrupt abuses of the oppressors who pretend to be victims, the comfortable class warriors and the puppets who pretend to be populists. The politician with her Cambridge mansion isn’t a populist.

And the radical billionaires she pretends to posture against have made her their puppet.

Elizabeth Warren’s entire career has been built on lies. The billionaire tears mug from a politician who owes her influence to the backing of billionaires is just Liz’s latest scam.





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

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

How Big Tech and the FBI Hacked the Constitution

By On December 25, 2022
Elvis Ming Chan, the FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge at the center of the TwitterFiles scandal, had started out as an engineer at NEC: a Japanese computer company. The son of Chinese immigrants who was raised in Seattle, near the hub of Big Tech, Chan describes a tech industry where going into national security was always a backdoor option.

“One of my buddies who I worked with at the company I was at, his game plan was always to join The Bureau,” Chan revealed in an interview. “And he got in and he’s calling me from the FBI academy in Quantico, which you were able to visit with me. Maybe we’ll talk about that later. But he said, ‘Elvis,’ he’s calling me on the phone, he’s like, ‘you would love this. We’re shooting guns. We’re kicking down doors. I’m learning about the constitution. This is awesome.’”

Chan was able to influence Twitter so well because he had come out of the tech industry.

The FBI offered tech industry dorks the opportunity to shoot guns and kick down doors, to wield visceral power rather than just virtual power. While the tech industry influenced far more lives, the Bureau could offer something more tangible. It’s why so many of the recent FBI raids on political opponents have featured large teams of heavily armed men. Behind the body armor are ‘mall cops’ with Ivy League degrees who enjoy shooting guns and kicking down doors even though there’s no threat that they’re dealing with that requires them to be doing either one.

Looking to get a hold on the internet, the FBI recruited from the tech industry. And looking to get a hold on security, the industry recruited from the FBI with at least a dozen senior Twitter personnel coming out of the bureau. The revolving door blurred the lines between the government and the tech industry. It’s still unclear what Twitter was doing on its own initiative or at the behest of the FBI. And it’s unclear where the allegiance of FBI people like Chan really lay.

In 2017, the FBI set up a Foreign Influence Task Force in response to Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate hoax. The legal premise of FITF, charged with combating, in the words of FBI Director Wray, efforts by foreign governments to “sway U.S. voters’ preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people’s confidence in our democratic processes” was dubious from the start.

Enemy propaganda had always existed. The legal basis for using the FBI, which is charged with domestic operations, as the lead was bound to mean targeting Americans rather than foreign enemies. The FBI had no meaningful legal authority to do anything about foreign propaganda except to do what Chan was doing, which was to form relationships with Big Tech companies and guide them to do the things that the Bureau could not legally undertake to do itself.

The Clinton influence operation that led to Russiagate had always been based on such revolving doors between industries, ex-intel personnel working for former reporters who could bridge the gaps between the media, the FBI and political campaigns using their relationships.

TwitterFiles has cast a harsh light on the fourth leg of the chair.

Russiagate had two phases. While in its first phase it was meant to win an election, in its second phase it was meant to subjugate the internet to government and media oversight. Having failed to achieve Plan A, the coordinated scandals and investigations between the media and the DOJ, Plan B set out to build new relationships between the DOJ, media and Big Tech.

These relationships were based on the big lie of what was initially a crisis of “foreign influence” that eventually became a “crisis of democracy”. Big Tech put media fact checkers in charge of flagging material to censor out front while the FBI flagged material behind the scenes. Much as in Russiagate, the media were the public face of a campaign while the DOJ kept its role secret.

The Hunter Biden laptop scandal tested the model with the FBI providing the guidance that Big Tech would follow to censor the story. Claims of foreign influence had become a pretext for a direct attack on freedom of the press as a major paper was censored using false FITF claims.

Big Tech had been prepped for four years to “redo” the 2016 election correctly. Democrats had blamed Hillary’s stolen emails and the FBI’s response to it for their election defeat. In 2020, the FBI and Big Tech had been prepped to properly play their role when Hunter’s laptop emerged. And that was done by wiring the FBI and Big Tech together into a single political operation.

Personnel is policy. Putting Big Tech people inside the FBI would transform its worldview from law enforcement to content moderation. And moving FBI people into Big Tech would lead platforms to see everything as a threat. The hybrid entity was a paranoid content moderating monster that wielded the untrammeled power of Big Tech and the authority of the feds.

“My mission is, ‘Protect the American people and uphold the constitution,’ Chan claimed. That’s noble, but what he was doing at FITF was hacking the constitution using a back door oligarchy.

The Constitution depends on boundaries between branches of the government, between elected officials and law enforcement, between government and industry, between the media and the government, and between the publishing platforms that enable speech and the government. When these boundaries collapse, the constitution becomes meaningless, and the Bill of Rights a series of technicalities that can be violated with impunity by an oligarchy that subdivides its powers by compartmentalizing them between private and public sectors.

When the DOJ, Big Tech, the media, administrations, companies, engineers, agents, and executives all work together toward the same political goals, the constitution is a dead letter.

And then there are doors to be kicked in and guns to be shot, people to be censored and stories to be suppressed for the emerging ruling class that pretends its coordinated actions are mere synchronicity when they are actually a conspiracy against the constitution.





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

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, December 22, 2022

How Islamists Took Over the Georgia Democratic Party

By On December 22, 2022
In 2015, Ruwa Romman was enabling Oglethorpe University’s Students for Justice in Palestine to pass the first BDS resolution in the region. Around the same time the Jordanian immigrant began working with the Georgia Muslim Voter Project and became the communications director for the Georgia operation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the funding of Hamas. A year earlier an individual in Atlanta by the same name urged readers to “join the BDS movement” during the Hamas campaign against Israel caused by the Muslim Brotherhood terror group’s kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, including Naftali Fraenkel, an American citizen.

“I could write chapters about what I have gone through,” Ruwa Romman, told CNN, alleging that she had faced constant discrimination and hate in America.

From CAIR she went on to the Poligon Education Fund. Poligon was co-founded by Wardah Khalid, an anti-Israel activist with UNRWA and the Friends Committee who is now working on bringing Afghans to this country as a senior policy advisor in the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services. Despite the fact that Poligon was specifically set up to promote the “Muslim presence on Capitol Hill” and lobby members of Congress, it operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in what is a likely violation of tax codes tolerated by the IRS.

Now, Ruwa Romman is an incoming member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Gushing media profiles depict her as the “first Muslim woman” in the Georgia House and the first “Palestinian” elected in the state. Beneath the fawning media profiles that emphasize her accomplishments are the greased wheels of a political machine that abuses its nonprofit status.

The Georgia Muslim Voter Project, where Romman worked to “increase voter turnout”, is also a 501(c)(3), despite its political agenda and involvement in elections, and partnered with CAIR’s Georgia chapter, also a 501(c)(3). In a midterms press release, CAIR Georgia congratulated Nabilah Islam and Sheikh Rahman, who were elected to the Georgia State Senate, and Farooq Mughal and Ruwa Romman, elected to the Georgia House. All four are Democrats.

Muslims now make up two members or 10% of the 22 member Georgia Senate Democrat delegation. To understand how disproportionate this is, there are 5 white and 2 Muslim Democrats in the Georgia Senate. That’s in a state with a population of 10 million where Muslims, despite frenzied growth, still amount to approximately 100,000 migrants.

Muslims make up 1% of Georgia and yet enjoy a representation ten times their number.

This disproportionate Islamic power reflects the tremendous political influence that Islamists have gained over the Democrat Party and the political machine that mobilized to elect CAIR allies. It is no coincidence that the two Georgia Democrats in the United States Senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, are both opponents of Israel and have Islamist ties and backing.

Last year, CAIR touted an exit poll showing that 91% of Georgia Muslims had voted for Warnock and Ossoff. Only 6% voted Republican.

“Georgia Muslim voter turnout and preference were a deciding factor in electing Rev. Warnock and Ossoff, tipping the balance of power to Democrats in the U.S. Senate,” CAIR-Georgia boss Abdullah Jaber boasted.

CAIR, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which is barred by tax codes from getting involved in elections, was boasting of its people electing Democrats, after having been involved in getting Muslims to the polls.

But as Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo documented, the IRS has enabled the rise of a Democrat empire of nonprofits funding partisan elections. That is part of what happened in Georgia and around the country. And Islamists are taking advantage of it.

Behind the Islamist political machine was a lot of money. Much of it coming from the Left.

The Georgia Muslim Voter Project scored $110,000 from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC misleadingly described this as grants for groups led by “black people and people of color.”

The CAIR-allied project also benefited from funding provided by the Proteus Fund and the Southern Partners Fund.

Ruwa Romman had co-founded the Georgia Volunteer Hub focusing on the 2021 runoff whose members included not only CAIR and the Georgia Muslim Voter Project, but Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project, Bloomberg’s March for our Lives and the Young Democrats. Its goal had been training volunteers for the runoff. The Hub illegally mixed C3s like CAIR and the Georgia Muslim Voter Project with openly partisan Democrat groups while working on an election.

Having been incubated and prepped by her experience working with election nonprofits, funded at taxpayer expense, the CAIR Islamist in her hijab was more than ready for a turnout election.

Romman beat Republican candidate John Chan by 57% to 42% in the general election after beating another Chinese candidate, J.T. Wu, in a narrow Democrat primary by a mere 579 votes. District 97, with a population of 67,480 is 34% white, 14% black, 11% Hispanic and 27% Asian. Turnout for the Democrat primary was less than 5% of the overall statistical population. And turnout for the general election was at a little over a quarter.

The Islamists had used nonprofit taxpayer-funded resources to turn out their voters, focusing on voter registration in the mosques that have popped up as organizing centers across Georgia.

And the mosques are nonprofits too.

That also helps explain what happened in Georgia elections in the last few years.

Muslim migration has changed the demographics of the state. In 2010, there were an estimated 53,000 Muslims in Georgia. That number appears to have doubled. Atlanta boasts of 80 mosques and 75,000 Muslims. At the same time the number of Muslim inmates tripled.

Georgia had one of the fastest growing populations fueled by refugee resettlement. It is no coincidence that the co-founder of the Poligon Fund has gone on to work as an adviser for the Office of Refugee Resettlement which is moving 1,000 Afghans into Georgia.

With more to come.

In 2021, 3.2% of all refugees were directed to Georgia. This is part of the wave of demographic change which Islamists have harnessed, but which transcends any particular group, and yet whose overall goal is to transform conservative states like Georgia into leftist dominions.

CAIR Georgia’s government affairs director noted that they were in a “state where the Muslim population is only approximately 0.7 percent of the total population – much of it centered in the Atlanta metropolitan area.” That population is growing quickly, but more importantly it’s organized. And the organizing is funded by leftists and by nonprofits protected by the IRS.

The Georgia Muslim Voter Project is an example of a new wave of Islamist organizations which have moved beyond advocacy and into elections. The Project takes in funding from leftist groups, but also from new Islamic-leftist funding mechanisms such as the Pillars Fund, a “national nonprofit” that “amplifies the leadership, narratives, and talents of Muslims”.

Pillars, founded by a former program director for the McCormick Foundation, boasts a board of directors that includes Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur, a chief of staff for the Bill Gates Foundation, and Deana Haggag, a program officer at the Mellon Foundation. The Pillars Fund has received grants from the hijacked Doris Duke Foundation and $1.6 million from the MacArthur Foundation.

While Americans slept, Islamic organizations morphed and crept deeper into the infrastructure of the Left, capturing its election machines and its foundations. Georgia is just one of the results.

The Muslim Brotherhood, always adept at imitating the organizations and societies it wants to take over, has copied the political structures of the Left, working from within, building its own models and merging them into the originals in order to achieve greater power and influence.

“Our democracy is under attack by Republicans,” Ruwa Romman claimed. But what sort of democracy do Islamists believe in?

As Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing once said, “In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”

CAIR Georgia last year promoted a broadcast on the “Life and Contributions of Imam Siraj Wahhaj”.

That is its idea of democracy. And the abuse of nonprofits for election activities means that we’re funding our own takeover.





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

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Democrats Want to Colonize Puerto Rico by 'Decolonizing' It

By On December 21, 2022
There have been six referendums on Puerto Rico’s status. Three of those referendums happened in the last ten years.

In the 2020 referendum, 52% of Puerto Ricans voted to become a state and 47% voted against.

Democrats and their media, obsessed with rigging the senate by adding two senators, hailed this narrow victory as a clear mandate for statehood.

It’s actually a near split with a mere difference of 60,000 votes.

Compare that to the Alaska statehood referendum which passed by 83% or the Hawaii referendum which cleared by a somewhat more modest 68% but still hit the 2 to 1 mark.

House Democrats, with the complicity of a few of the worse Republicans, managed to pass the Puerto Rico Status Act. The bill only states that it must pass with a “majority of the valid votes.”

That’s not a reference to voter fraud, but to the 2017 referendum in which statehood won by 97%, but only because everyone who didn’t support statehood boycotted the referendum, and the 2012 referendum in which there were 500,000 blank ballots submitted as a protest.

(Puerto Rico’s statehood referendums are as dysfunctional as the territory itself.)

A serious statehood referendum for Puerto Rico would at least ask for a 2 to 1 majority. Democrats will however be perfectly happy if they win a referendum by the population of a square mile of Manhattan, even if it’s against the will of nearly half of Puerto Ricans.

And they call this “decolonization”.

Plenty of Hawaiians resent the United States, but they still want to be part of it. Puerto Ricans would like the benefits of citizenship while maintaining political independence from America.

That’s the so-called ‘commonwealth’ option.

The Puerto Rico Status Act lists three options on the referendum, ‘Independence’, ‘Sovereignty in Free Association with the United States’ and ‘Statehood’. Sovereignty or Commonwealth would allow Puerto Rico to make treaties with foreign nations and still retain our citizenship.

The model for this is the British Commonwealth and its former colonies in the region.

But America isn’t a monarchy. We don’t have a king who is going to formally be Puerto Rico’s monarch even as it signs treaties with Communist China. Nor do we have some obsessive need to prop up an outdated empire by having a bunch of third world countries acknowledge Charles III or Biden I. A commonwealth status for Puerto Rico has no constitutional basis at all.

That hasn’t stopped Pelosi and House Democrats from passing such a bill anyway. And 16 Republicans, who probably barely even read it or understood it, from voting for it anyway.

Putting both the commonwealth and independence on the ballot is supposed to split the nationalist vote and allow statehood proponents to get their bare majority. But as clever as Pelosi and House Democrats think they are, Puerto Rican politics has been based in no small part over debating this issue for generations and suspecting every referendum of being rigged.

The nationalists will accept nothing short of independence. And their terrorists remain heroes to many. Especially New York City’s Puerto Rican politicians. Commonwealth supporters keep arguing about what their imaginary ideal of an impossible relationship looks like. And statehood proponents can only hope to carve out a narrow referendum victory that, if past history is any guide, will be preemptively sabotaged by everyone else who disagrees with them.

Puerto Rico is much too dysfunctional to manage statehood or much of anything else. Anyone who has watched the aftermath of natural disasters play out has seen a little of how broken and corrupt its governmental structures are. And the only real argument statehood proponents have is that with two senators they’ll be able to wrangle a lot more money to go to Puerto Rico.

That much is undeniably true. Puerto Rico has the example of multiple broken cities across America whose citizens don’t work for a living, they vote for a living, and whose politicians exist to trade support for cash. But most Puerto Ricans also know that all that money will, like the massive amounts of aid after every hurricane, find their way into the pockets of politicians.

There will be little left over to improve life for ordinary people.

But Puerto Rico is also so broken that there may be no choice. It exited bankruptcy this summer after its debt was cut by 80% without fixing any of the issues. It has a 44% poverty rate and 60% are on Medicare or Medicaid. Crime is high. The murder rate is four times that of America.

There are more Puerto Ricans living in the United States than there are back home.

Statehood has no purpose except to give Democrats two senate seats and inject even more money into what is already the most corrupt place around. “9th mayor in Puerto Rico this year accused of corruption” is how a typical AP headline sums up the state of affairs.

Responsible officials and activists in Puerto Rico are trying to clean up some of the mess. They have little interest in yet another referendum that isn’t going to do anything about the real problems. They would rather maintain the status quo as a territory without another bout of infighting over proposals that serve no one except fanatics and the politically corrupt.

Democrats are obsessed with statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., not because they care about either place, but because they have a road map for rigging the senate. And while there’s no doubt that D.C. statehood would lead to two Democrat bloc votes that would be as corrupt as they would be loyal, Puerto Rico’s politics are a whole lot more complicated.

Puerto Ricans were supposed to help turn Florida blue, but Gov. DeSantis won 56% of the Puerto Rican vote. And back home, Puerto Rico is more conservative than the Puerto Ricans living in the United States. Puerto Rico’s legislature has been moving on abortion bans Judge Juan Perez-Gimenez, a Carter appointee, kept on fighting the Supreme Court’s gay marriage position in two decisions, longer than most other federal judges. On a variety of social issues, Puerto Rico is more socially conservative than almost all Democrat areas in the United States.

But, despite the attempts to align the country’s parties with Democrats and Republicans in America, or our political movements, Puerto Rico is not America. Its politics and worldview fit within the culture of the region. Puerto Ricans have their distinct identity and want to be who they are. The current status quo is the best of a bad bargain that would either try to merge a foreign failed state into America or give it the independence to fail on its own.

Puerto Ricans have failed to provide any kind of enthusiastic support for statehood across six disastrous referendums. The two most legitimate referendums in the 90s, which had the highest turnout, stalemated when voters chose the status quo or commonwealth over statehood.

Much like the EU, Democrats want to keep Puerto Ricans voting until they vote their way.

Democrats are attempting to force a narrow victory that they can use to drag Puerto Rico into the United States, even if 48% of the population is opposed, for their own political power. Whatever the outcome, much of Puerto Rico will view it as an illegitimate conspiracy. And they will react accordingly. Puerto Rico can only ever become an unwilling and hostile state.

After the history of Puerto Rican political terrorism, which included an assassination attempt on President Truman, there’s little doubt that Democrats know this and don’t care. All they can see is the possibility of two free senate seats. But most Americans and Puerto Ricans should care.

Democrats claim that they want to ‘decolonize’ Puerto Rico, but what they actually want to do is colonize it. And that’s why plenty of Puerto Ricans remain hostile to their proposal.

Puerto Rico doesn’t want to be America, it wants to be Puerto Rico.

The latest referendum push is a bad idea that America and Puerto Rico are better off without.





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

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Why the ADL Abandoned Antisemitism and Went Woke

By On December 20, 2022
In 2018, the ADL announced that it was no longer in the ‘kindness’ business. “Forget Kindness. Schools Need to Foster Social Justice,” Jinnie Spiegler, the ADL’s curriculum director, barked.

By three years old, Spiegler claimed white children in America are already racists.

Spiegler, an obsessive leftist with seemingly no Jewish interests, whose Twitter account promotes antisemitic leftists like AOC, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar, has a singular obsession.

“When my daughter was 3 years old, I taught her the word stereotype,” she revealed in one article. “I figured that planting the seed might yield fruit soon enough.”

Planting leftist ideological seeds in children is what the ADL’s education programs do.

While the ADL claims to fight antisemitism, like a lot of activist groups it discovered that there was a much better way to pay the bills by getting into the business of diversity training and education. That freed the ADL from having to solicit Jewish donors or to care about antisemitism.

When Jonathan Greenblatt, a former Obama operative, took over the ADL, its annual revenues were $56 million and had been roughly in that range throughout the decade. A year later they shot up to $65 million, then $76 million and totaled $91 million in 2020. With revenues having nearly doubled in 5 years, the odds of ousting Greenblatt remain vanishingly small.

The ADL shares a fundraising firm with Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the ACLU, but it also has developed a massive nationwide presence in the educational system.

Its educational ‘No Place for Hate’ arm claims that it’s present in 1,800 schools reaching 1.3 million students in one school year. It offers “anti-bias” workshops and training, online and in person for teachers, and curriculum and ‘non-hate’ certification for schools. According to the Seattle branch of the ADL, “workshops cost a school or district $1200″. Activists have documented contracts with school districts amounting to tens of thousands of dollars each.

But one of its more successful areas is also where its teachings may violate state law.

Florida’s ‘Stop Woke Act’, signed into law by Gov. DeSantis, bars subjecting any student to the idea that anyone is morally superior or oppressive on account of their race. The ADL’s ‘No Place for Hate’ handbook however demands that students “explore, recognize and acknowledge your privilege” and defines racism as “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color, based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people”

The familiar message here from critical race theory is that only white people can be racist.

This violates the Stop Woke Act’s warning that schools may not teach that “an individual’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

The ADL operates its ‘No Place for Hate’ program in Florida. One press release bragged that “22 public schools in Miami-Dade County were designated as ‘No Place For Hate’, including all 8 City of Miami Beach Public Schools”. Another claimed that it was present in 234 Broward County public schools which is the 6th largest district in the country with 270,000 students.

That means potentially as many as 270,000 students may be taught that white people are evil.

This disastrous program is being funded by $100,000 in federal funds.

Broward is such an asset for the ADL that its local director, Kiesha Edge, a former black employee of the Florida Department of Health, is now the ADL’s National Director of Education Operations, even while remaining back in Florida, in charge of 450 “education facilitators”

“We live in a society where systemic racism is alive and well,” Edge contended.

The only remaining systemic racism is teaching kids that they’re racist because of their race.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center took the lead in drawing up a K-12 code of ethics to end classroom indoctrination banning “teachers from using their classrooms for political, ideological, or religious advocacy.” But that is exactly what the ADL is doing with ‘No Place for Hate’.

And we’re taking on the ADL’s racist curriculum too.

The old ADL is mostly dead. Kiesha Edge and Jinnie Spiegler are what the organization is now:. a collection of woke leftist activists who believe that America and its people are evil racists.

ADL officials can be of Jewish ancestry, like Spiegler, or black like Edge or even Arab, like Senior Vice President for National Affairs George Selim, but what unites them is politics.

And the money doesn’t hurt either.

Education and training is what the ADL actually does more than anything else. What had started out as a gimmick with the ADL’s original ‘World of Difference’ program became toxic as it was transformed into ‘No Place for Hate’.

Spiegler, the ADL’s curriculum boss, objected that “many schools hope to engage young people in social action work, yet mistakenly focus on kindness”. Her ideal was the mobilization of some Parkland students to advocate against the Second Amendment after the school shooting there caused by Obama’s dismantling of school discipline policies.

“The first step is to facilitate students’ learning about the issues in a rigorous and complex way, and then to get them involved in action, advocacy and/or activism,” she laid out.

This year’s No Place for Hate Coordinator Handbook & Resource Guide doubles down on the war on kindness.

“Each year, ADL receives activities from participating No Place for Hate schools that focus on kindness,” the handbook complains. “ADL highly encourages schools, in designing their activities, to move beyond kindness to social justice.”

The ADL’s definition of social justice, one that it’s forcing into schools, is wholly partisan.

Students, Spiegler urges, should not just go “volunteer at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen”, they should “advocate for affordable housing”. Instead of just “tutoring children”, they have to fight for criminals and break up the “prison-to-school pipeline”. Obama’s efforts to break up the “prison-to-school pipeline” led to the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland.

And the ADL states that “each student must have an opportunity to participate in three ADL approved activities”. Parents are not wrong to describe this as partisan indoctrination.

The ADL claims that “as a 501c3 nonprofit organization, we take no position on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for office.” That is not true. Even during the 2020 election, the ADL continued to attack Trump while offering no criticism of Biden. And it certainly does not meet the IRS test of operating “primarily to further the common good and general welfare of the people.”

Its curriculum and its agenda are wholly partisan and like many leftist groups, it operates with the complicity of the IRS and other federal and state regulatory organizations.

But the ADL has bigger issues on a statewide level with its racist educational curriculum.

In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin banned critical race theory and “inherently divisive concepts” from K-12 classrooms. These include the idea that anyone is morally superior or should be “discriminated against because of their race” or that “members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith”.

‘No Place for Hate’ has a sizable presence in Virginia including in the Arlington Public Schools.

These are only two of the twenty states where the ADL’s racist curriculum may run into trouble.

The ADL’s education curriculum had started out teaching tolerance, but now teaches intolerance, and advocates partisan politics. Despite the organization’s origins, its handbook is notable for mentioning Jewish people only three times, once in the ADL’s background and twice in its definition of antisemitism.

But the ADL is not a Jewish organization anymore. It’s a generically lucrative leftist group which provides bias insurance to schools while joining in leftist attacks on conservatives.

A few years after Greenblatt came on board, the ADL announced a new program together with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar: one of the leading funders of the anti-Israel Left. ADL Senior VP Eileen Hershenov was the former general counsel for Soros’ Open Society octopus.

“Kudos to my former boss, George Soros,” she gushed.

Hershenov oversees the ADL’s partnership with the Aspen Institute, funded by Soros. The joint ADL-Aspen program’s civil society fellows included the founding Co-Director of the Open Society Foundation’s Economic Justice Program.

Small wonder that Greenblatt attacks any critics of Soros and the ADL, formerly critical of the Nazi collaborating billionaire, now has a page dedicated to defending the antisemitic leftist.

The ADL’s funders and partners list increasingly resembles those of most leftist activist groups with $1 million from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, the Rockefellers, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. There’s nothing Jewish here.

As an organization, the ADL doesn’t belong in Jewish circles, and its educational curriculum doesn’t belong in any schools.





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

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

The Light of Chanukah

By On December 18, 2022

 A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears no different. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem's wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi'in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish resistance fighters from a small town in the hinterlands and the Hellenized elites of the big city, between those who wished to be Jews and those who wanted to be pawns in an empire, between the tradition of the priests and the progress of a new order, between the Maccabees and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were living in the backwaters of Israel, a nation that had not been independently ruled since the armies of Babylon had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path. 

In the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Maccabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own.

General Seron of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together his soldiers, along with renegade Jewish mercenaries, and was broken at Beit Haran. The Governor of Syria dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen to conquer Judea, destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “My fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God.

"Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory.

"Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning." 

Though the Maccabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands.

Though, worn from battle, the Maccabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they went on to Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God, only to find the Temple and the capital in ruins.

The Maccabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire armies to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on. 

The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on.

For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

120 years after the Maccabees drove out the foreign invaders and their collaborators, another foreign invader, Herod, the son of Rome's Arab governor, was placed on the throne by the Roman Empire, disposing of the last of the Maccabean kings and ending the brief revival of the Jewish kingdom.

The revived kingdom had been a plaything in the game of empires. Exiled by Babylon, restored by Persia, conquered by the Greeks, ground under the heel of the remnants of Alexander's empire, briefly liberated by the Parthians, tricked into servitude and destroyed by Rome. The victory of the Maccabean brothers in reclaiming Jerusalem was a brief flare of light in the dark centuries and even that light was shadowed by the growing darkness.

The fall of the Roman Republic and the civil wars of the new empire, its uncontrollable spending and greed made it hopelessly corrupt. Caesar repaid Jewish loyalty by rewarding the Arab-Edomite murderers of Jewish kings, and his successors saw the Jewish state as a way to bring in some quick money. Out went the Jewish kings, in came the son of Rome's tax collector, Herod.

The promises made by Senate to the Maccabees ceased to matter. Imperial greed collided with Jewish nationalism in a war that for a brief shining moment seemed as if it might end in another Chanukah, but ended instead in massacre and atrocity. The exiles went forth once again, some on foot and some in slave ships. Israel became Palestine. Jerusalem was renamed and resettled. The long night had begun.

But no darkness lasts forever.

Two thousand years after the Jews had come to believe that wars were for other people and miracles meant escaping alive, Jewish armies stood and held the line against an empire and the would be empires of the region.

And now the flame still burns, though it is flickering. Seventy-one years is a long time for oil to burn, especially when the black oil next door seems so much more useful to the empires and republics across the sea. And the children of many of those who first lit the flame no longer see the point in that hoary old light. 

But that old light is still the light of possibilities. It burns to remind us of the extraordinary things that our ancestors did and of the extraordinary assistance that they received. We cannot always expect oil to burn for eight days, just as we cannot always expect the bullet to miss or the rocket to fall short. And yet even in those moments of darkness the reminder of the flame is with us for no darkness lasts forever and no exile, whether of the body or the spirit, endures. Sooner or later the spark flares to life again and the oil burns again. Sooner or later the light returns.

It is the miracle that we commemorate because it is a reminder of possibilities. Each time we light a candle or dip a wick in oil, we release a flare of light from the darkness comes to remind us of what was, is and can still be.

Popular

Blog Archive