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Monday, October 31, 2022

Every Day is Halloween Now

By On October 31, 2022 In
A zombie is shambling down the street, one leg dragging, arm waving at the sky before collapsing on a discarded cardboard refrigerator box. A thin trail of blood can be seen on the back of his dirty shirt.

It’s not Halloween yet. It’s just Thursday.

But in the America of Drag Queen Story Hour, of homeless encampments, random arsons, gangs smashing their way into stores, street takeovers with blowtorches and meth addicts screaming into the night, all the monsters are real and every day of the year is Halloween.

Zombies and monsters are real. Some are dead end vagrants from skid row. Others operate at the highest levels of government.

In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, Frankenstein’s monster reborn, shambles, looms and issues strange noises that faintly resemble human speech as he strives for the Senate. Joe Biden attends conferences and offers impromptu word salads while dressed as the naked emperor. Neither are functional human beings, but our standards are low enough that we accept any level of dysfunction as normal. Anything else would be “ableist” and we fear words more than monsters.

But it’s the ‘Halloweenization” of ordinary life that gets far too little attention.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the streets of major cities were filled with men and women wearing black masks over their faces. The long Halloween of the lockdown, perhaps the longest on record, was just one of those costume changes in which all of society got a makeover.

But masks can be taken on and off. Social dysfunction is a lot harder to fix. The drug addicts lying in gutters are not just wearing a costume, they’ve become the costume. Just as if we had worn the masks long enough, we might have become the masks.

Costumes are everywhere.

One day, Dr. Rick Levine chose to put on a dress and a long flowing blond wig and he became Rachel Levine. The Biden administration decided to make Rick into a four-star-admiral and now he’s Admiral Rachel Levine allowing him to wear an exciting new costume. In a society where a man can become a woman by thinking it, he can also become a four-star admiral.

When every day is Halloween, reality is just another hate crime and anyone can pretend to be anything they want to as long as they’re willing to pay the price.

TikTok trends drive massive transgender identification among teenage girls. Some begin taking hormones or even undergoing surgical mutilation that they will forever regret.

But then there’s no taking off the mask.

The endless Halloween of medical costume shops ensures that the temporary desire to change bodies, to escape the unwelcome physical reality, will become an inescapable nightmare. Unlike Walmart or K-Mart, there’s no returning these costumes. And there’s no escape from the playacting of a surgical center.

That is what an unserious society has trouble understanding.

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow,” Philip K. Dick wrote in the afterward to his novel A Scanner Darkly. “Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style.”

The days when drug abuse was the worst effect of the counterculture are now a fond memory. The zombies, the ones already here and those yet to come, are everywhere. The old drug epidemics have given way to the terrors of fentanyl. Three New York City professionals, a Wall Street executive, a Columbia Law School grad and a therapist, died of cocaine overdoses laced with fentanyl provided by a phone delivery service.

They were just playing in the street, but playing in the street is a life-style.

We’ve become a society of people playing in front of moving cars while pretending that moving cars are a society construct created by whiteness, the patriarchy and outmoded ways of viewing the world. What was once a risk has become a virtue and a social cause. The zombies lying in cardboard boxes and shivering in tents in the Valley noonday heat are just casualties of the cause.

The cause is destroying reality and replacing it with fantasy: an endless night in which we can become anyone we want to be and replace society with a series of egotistical fantasies.

Reality is as real as ever. The only ones we’re destroying are ourselves.

In the endless counterculture Halloween in which drag queens cavort in front of schoolchildren, teenagers go under the knife in the hopes of being reborn into another sex and the people of a united nation join separate warring tribes, there are newer exciting forms of madness on display.

Wearing costumes was a transgressive act in many cultures. A night or a day of brief fun, people testing what it was like to be someone else and to turn the social order upside down. Nobody wanted to live in a world in which there’s no way to know what is real and what isn’t.

But that’s the world we live in now.

Costumes have become the norm and normalcy is the aberration. Men dress up as women. An NAACP president turned out to be a white woman who identifies as black. New York State Senator Julia Salazar is an antisemite who identifies as Jewish. And it’s revealed that prominent Indian activist figures, Marlon Brando’s Oscar night princess, a prominent academic, a poet, were just white people even though they took to dressing up as Indians all year round.

Identity politics values what people identify as more than who they are. Magical thinking leads people to believe that life is just a costume that you can change when you want to. In a world that is becoming increasingly unreal, it’s easy to think of reality as endlessly malleable.

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford, dressed up in Steve Jobs drag and convinced investors to hand her hundreds of millions of dollars. No one actually checked to see if she could do what she promised because she wore the right costume. Lesser dot com con artists have taken to doing the same thing. And buy themselves private jets from the proceeds.

Money, like so much else, is becoming unreal. Facts give way to narratives. And skilful propagandists have discovered how to make not only morality, but reality appear relative. Everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist, digging so deep that nothing seems true anymore.

That is the endless Halloween in which the game, the funhouse mirrors and costumes, give way to the sudden panicked realization that there is no more reality, only a perpetual game of let’s pretend.

And there’s nothing playful about the game anymore.

The monsters are real. And sometimes they’re obvious. Other times they’re authority figures discussing how to sexually mutilate children. Nobody is a monster in their own story. And even those dressing up as monsters, don’t believe that they are. But monsters are defined not by what they believe they are or what someone else believes what they are. The only test that truly matters is the one of consequences. Everything except reality is just a series of word games.

Millions of people would like the costume party to end. They’re done with the masks, the drag acts and the lies. They’d like everyone to take off the costumes and bring reality back.

The good news is that reality didn’t go anywhere, the bad news is that we have. And it’ll take more than the midnight of one day to bring reality 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. 

Thank you for reading.


(Frame from Kensington Avenue - Kim Gary video)

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Sunday, October 30, 2022

New Report Warns America's Woke Military "Would Struggle in a War"

By On October 30, 2022 In
For the first time the Heritage Foundation’s index of American military strength has ranked us as ‘weak’. The index warns that the Army “remains ‘weak’ in capacity with only 62 percent of the force it should have”. And even the Army has admitted that it has missed its recruiting target by 10,000 personnel which is expected to climb to over 20,000 by the end of the next fiscal year.

As Heritage and the Wall Street Journal note, “From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216.” The Navy however is focused on inclusion and diversity. The situation at the Air Force is much worse with the Heritage report warning that “the munitions stockpile” would probably “not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks”. But the Air Force is also focused on diversity and inclusion.

The Navy is rated as very weak in capacity and weak in readiness. The Air Force ranks as very weak due to “problems with pilot production and retention, an extraordinarily small amount of time in the cockpit for pilots, and a fleet of aircraft that continues to age”. The Heritage index warns that “there is little doubt that it would struggle in war with a peer competitor”.

The Space Force is described as weak because “there is little evidence that the USSF has improved its readiness to provide nearly real-time support to operational and tactical levels of force operations or that it is ready in any way to execute defensive and offensive counterspace operations.”

Only the Marine Corps is rated as strong. Even our nuclear capabilities are slipping with “Russia and China are aggressively expanding the types and quantities of nuclear weapons in their inventories. Nearly all components of the nuclear enterprise are at a tipping point with respect to replacement or modernization and have no margin left for delays in schedule.”

It’s no coincidence that the ‘wokest’ service branches also show up as the weakest.

The takeaway from the Heritage report that “the current U.S. military force is at significant risk of not being able to meet the demands of a single major regional conflict while also attending to various presence and engagement activities” should be a grave warning and a wake up call.

Anyone worried about these numbers will find scant comfort in Biden’s new National Security Strategy released earlier in October. The NSS is supposed to define an administration’s vision. And Biden’s NSS is depressingly faithful to the woke obsessions that have made us so weak.

The National Security Strategy asserts that “we have broken down the dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy”. America’s strength lay in a dividing line between foreign and domestic policy. Weak, troubled and totalitarian nations conflate the two. As does Biden.

That dividing line meant that America could aggressively confront foreign enemies abroad while maintaining civil liberties at home. The Biden administration, like its Obama predecessors, has insisted on conflating domestic and international political conflicts, defining the domestic opposition as a “threat to democracy” on the same spectrum as foreign autocratic regimes.

Without the dividing line, the Biden administration is free to insist that the welfare state, its corrupt green subsidies and every single leftist agenda item are actually part of our national security strategy. The NSS even defines Biden’s open borders as “investing in our people”.

Wokeness is at the heart of the NSS with the assertion that “we are building on the work of generations of activists to advance equity and root out systemic disparities in our laws, policies, and institutions. Indeed, pluralism, inclusion, and diversity are a source of national strength in a rapidly changing world.” This same rhetoric about DEI has been rolled into military doctrine so that unprecedented military weakness appears like a strength because it’s a diverse weakness.

Racial and identity politics quotas are also national security. Or as the NSS asserts, “Prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility to ensure national security institutions reflect the American public they represent.”

Tellingly, “modernizing and strengthening our military” comes at the very end of the second subsection behind agenda items like Biden’s corrupt special interest giveaways, and, most damningly, “strengthening our democracy”. Only a totalitarian banana republic would include attacks on domestic opponents in its national security strategy. And that, sadly, is what we have.

“As Americans, we must all agree that the people’s verdict, as expressed in elections, must be respected and protected,” the NSS pointedly jabs, before reciting talking points about federal takeovers of elections and the need for “critical reforms continue to be needed to strengthen our system of governance.” Defining political opponents as a national security threat and the lack of legislation favoring its faction’s electioneering as a national security problem is coup talk.

And the military? Modernizing the military gets a meager 5 paragraphs in a 48 page national security strategy.

The Biden NSS admits that “our competitors and potential adversaries are investing heavily in new nuclear weapons. By the 2030s, the United States for the first time will need to deter two major nuclear powers, each of whom will field modern and diverse global and regional nuclear forces.”

The good news is that the Biden regime will be “taking further steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and pursuing realistic goals for mutual, verifiable arms control”.

And the concluding plan for the military, as summed up in the final paragraph is to “strengthen the effectiveness of the force by promoting diversity and inclusion” and “rooting out violent extremism”.

Biden’s National Security Strategy for strengthening and modernizing the military is to impose political tests, purge political opponents and appease foreign enemies. It’s no wonder that Putin and Xi look at this administration and begin making moves on Ukraine or Taiwan.

The NSS isn’t the document of a world power, but of a declining nation squabbling with itself, but incapable and unwilling to assert any kind of meaningful presence at home or abroad.

The National Security Strategy is fixated on the endless bureaucratic lists of global internationalism. It’s European in its view of the United States as benefiting most from a globalist system “governed by the UN charter” rather than taking independent action for its own interests.

The NSS names China and Russia as threats, but remains too fixated on fighting conservatives at home to take foreign threats seriously. And so the NSS Global Priorities section concludes with warnings that the real threat comes from “a range of domestic violent extremists, including those motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice, as well as antigovernment or anti-authority sentiment”. It urges “Congress to advance commonsense gun laws and policies” and address “the crisis of disinformation and misinformation”. Which is to say, speech it doesn’t like.

Having eliminated the “dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy”, the Biden administration now treats Americans like foreign enemies and makes domestic woke obsessions, like global warming and equity, into the pivot of our foreign policy. The military is there to be made “diverse” and inclusive” while being completely unready to fight and win.

The Heritage Index and the Biden National Security Strategy are documents that come from wildly different worlds. The NSS is a vision of a world where most things can be solved with meetings and equity while the Index warns that if we face a war against a serious military power, we could lose or at the very least suffer casualties and severe setbacks beyond what we expect.

It’s been a long time since our military has been this weak. And it’s never been this woke.

The two reports warn us in different ways that we are at risk of losing a war if we end up in one. We’re not ready for a serious fight and if history is anything to go by, that is exactly when we are likely to find ourselves in a war.




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. 

Thank you for reading.

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Friday, October 28, 2022

NYC Issues ‘Halal Guide” Featuring Terror Mosques

By On October 28, 2022
Before the 21st anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, New York City issued an official “Halal Guide” to its landmarks and tourist attractions.

The guide, featuring Muslim women in hijabs in front of skyscrapers, informs us that Muslims are “making an indelible mark on the City” and boasts of the “over 275 mosques spread across all five boroughs—more than any other metro area in the US”. That’s almost one mosque for every 9 people murdered in and around the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists.

The guide, to its credit, begins its Manhattan section with the 9/11 Memorial in its “Must See & Do” section, but that’s probably in alphabetical order. Beyond halal eateries, it seems clueless about what Muslims might want to do in New York City, recommending a visit to an “avant-garde theater” in a warehouse featuring a production of 4:48 Psychosis, a play by a suicidal British playwright who then killed herself. The play was described as a “75-minute suicide note”.

That might also be a good description of New York City’s decision to issue a Halal Guide.

The Halal Guide also advises Muslims to visit The Lit. Bar, a bookstore/wine bar with a sizable LGBTQ section. That’s not so much a suggestion as a hate crime.

But the Halal Guide also makes a point of appending the location of a nearby mosque, one of those 275, to each American landmark. And the Guide’s choices have quite a history.

The Halal Guide recommends the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. The ISBR was a target of NYPD surveillance before the De Blasio administration dismantled the city’s potent counterterrorism machine.

Shahawar Matin Siraj, a Pakistani who worked at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge’s bookstore, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a plot to bomb a midtown Manhattan subway station.

After the attack, Zein Rimawi, a founder and board member of ISBR, ranted, “You see Afghanistan, and it’s a war against the Muslims. Iraq, it’s a war against the Muslims. Palestine, it’s a war against the Muslims. Chechnya, a war against the Muslims.”

The ISBR’s alleged support for Hamas came up when another Muslim terrorist opened fire on a van full of Jewish boys after attending services at the mosque. A newspaper account stated how the Islamic terrorist, “heard the imam at Bay Ridge sermonize about the importance of jihad and about how the Jews harbor eternal hatred for Muslims”.

A secret NYPD document had stated that the police believed that “individuals believed to be supporters/members of Hamas may have links to the Bronx Muslim Center and the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.”

Is the Bronx Muslim Center in the Halal Guide? Obviously. The Bronx Muslim Center is promoted as the prayer destination of choice for devout tourists visiting the Bronx Zoo.

But things get much worse when the Halal Guide goes back to Brooklyn.

Want to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, nearby Prospect Park (the borough’s answer to Central Park) or visit the Brooklyn Museum? The Halal Guide recommends Masjid At-Taqwa.

The Al-Taqwa Mosque, mentioned six times in the guide, is headed by Imam Siraj Wahhaj who was an unindicted co-conspirator in the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Wahhaj is famous for saying things such as “you don’t need nuclear weapons or even guns! If you have faith in Allah and a knife!” and “I will never ever tell people, ‘don’t be violent, that is not the Islamic way.’ The violence has to be selected”.

Also he’s spoken in favor of stoning people to death and cutting off their hands. “If Allah says 100 strikes, 100 strikes it is. If Allah says cut off their hand, you cut off their hand. If Allah says stone them to death, through the Prophet Muhammad, then you stone them to death.”

New York City is guiding tourists to his mosque and hoping they won’t have any body parts chopped off.

Three years ago, the FBI raided a compound owned by his son and found the remains of a 3-year-old boy. Members of the Wahhaj family were indicted for “providing material support to terrorists” and “conspiracy to murder an officer or employee of the United States”.

The NYPD conducted surveillance of the Al-Taqwa Mosque. The city noted in a legal filing that Wahhaj had “testified as a character witness for Clement Hampton El, a Masjid At Taqwa attendee who was convicted as one of the Blind Sheikh’s coconspirators in the Landmarks Plot.”

That was a plot to bomb tunnels and bridges, and other locations on July 4th.

The filing also noted that “members of the mosque’s security team have instructed individuals on how to disarm police officers” and terrorists who attended various mosque combat classes.

In Queens, the Halal Guide recommends the Masjid Al-Falah or the Al-Falah Mosque. The mosque was associated with the Tablighi Jamaat movement and was described by Stratfor as its North American headquarters. Tablighi Jamaat has been linked to multiple Islamic terror attacks and movements. “We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,” the FBI’s deputy chief of international terrorism section had warned, “and we have found that Al-Qaeda used them for recruiting now and in the past.”

The Halal Guide touts the Al-Falah Mosque for anyone visiting Corona Park or the Queens Museum. And if you don’t like Al-Falah, there’s the Al-Iman Mosque which was at the center of the false claim that it had been attacked by an Islamophobe who peed on their prayer rugs.

The actual story was that Omar Riviera, a Latino man on a bender, urinated on the street near the entrance to the mosque. After the media was saturated with false claims that he had shouted “anti-Muslim slurs” and “terrorists” and was accused of a hate crime, the case collapsed. Meanwhile the mosque appeared to host antisemitic conspiracy theories.

And if those options don’t seem good, try the Hazrati Abu Bakr Siddique mosque.

The Afghan mosque was also the choice of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan terrorist trained by Al Qaeda who wanted to bomb subway trains during rush hour in time for Ramadan.

The mosque was at the center of a legal battle between the imam and its founders who accused each other of supporting the Taliban. Also, allegedly a member of the mosque, was Saifur Rahman Halimi, a representative of Afghan terror warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who had been allied with Bin Laden, and whose forces were responsible for the murder of American soldiers.

All of this is considered fit for a Halal Guide issued by New York City.

Stroll through Central Park, the guide advises, pay your respects at the 9/11 museum and memorial, then go on to Brooklyn and Queens, stop by a few terror mosques.

The Halal Guide closes with a shot of downtown Manhattan past the Brooklyn Bridge. On top of the tower is an American flag. One of the two made famous when people, fleeing the carnage of the Islamic terrorist attack on September 11, walked across it, some covered in ash. The picture’s angle conveniently evades the two towers that are missing. And will always be missing.

The Halal Guide, unintentionally, tells the story of what they took from us and what replaced it.




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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Democrats Don’t Want Federal Employees to Have to Come to Work

By On October 26, 2022 In
The pandemic divided Americans into two classes: those who could work from home and those who could not. Federal government employees were members of the privileged class.

And they don’t want that to change.

During the pandemic, over 90% of the EPA, USAID, the Department of Education and, ironically, the Department of Labor, were 'working' online.

The utility of federal agencies could roughly be measured by whether their employees were mostly showing up to work, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, or were permanently out to lunch like the Department of Housing and Urban Development which did the vast majority of its work over the internet..

While the pandemic is over, the privilege of the political pajama class isn’t.

Long before the pandemic, Obama had signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010. Two years before the pandemic, Rep. Sarbanes of Maryland, who had originally introduced the Act, alongside Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, both of whose districts are full of federal workers, proposed the Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act to free even more federal employees from having to come to work. The 2018 Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act wanted over a fifth of federal employees working from home in response to efforts by the Trump administration to get them to come to the office.

“We must push back against the Trump administration’s repeated attacks on federal telework programs," Sarbanes had complained.

That bill never went anywhere, but it’s now being rebooted by Sarbanes and Connolly as the 2022 Telework Metrics and Cost Savings Act with a new post-pandemic gloss.

The bill once again includes a ‘floor’ on online work for government workers.

Rep. Sarbanes told an interviewer that his bill would "pressure, in some instances, the agencies, all agencies, to look at how they can embrace telework."

During his State of the Union address, Biden had promised that, "The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.” The telework push violates that promise which was never properly implemented. At the time, Republican House members Rep. James Comer and Rep. Jody Hice had warned that not only weren't government workers back on the job, but that the Office of Personnel Management was describing a transition to a "hybrid work environment" and promising to use the experience of the pandemic to "integrate telework and remote work".

Biden, his speechwriters and his teleprompters were not telling the truth. The administration's appointees and political allies had been hard at work, figuratively, cutting attendance requirements and allowing federal employees to stay home well after the threat had passed.

A month later, Rep. Yvette Herrell had proposed her SHOW Up Act, which argued that "Americans are struggling to receive their tax refunds, veterans are having difficulties accessing their benefits, and it’s all because of backlogs created by expanded telework policies for federal bureaucrats. It is long overdue for the federal workforce to return to work in person."

But pandemic ‘zoom’ work was not a temporary phenomenon. Nor was it meant to be.

Rep. Connolly cheered that due to the pandemic, "the cultural barriers to telework have essentially collapsed."

Rep. Sarbanes boasted that, "You’re going to continue to see a real premium on this that has been kind of enhanced and introduced to a lot of the workforce because of the pandemic."

This is not about the pandemic. It's a longstanding effort by politicians who represent government workers legislating to protect them from having to actually work. Much as teachers’ unions tried to keep schools closed in order to force a permanent transition to ‘zoom class’, federal unions exploited the pandemic to fundamentally restructure what their jobs look like.

The teachers didn’t want to come back to work. Ever. Neither do federal bureaucrats. And both have powerful unions and a lot of politicians working for them, not for citizenry.

While some remote work makes sense, the pandemic push to have federal government workers stay at home proved disastrous.

25% of Department of Health and Human Services personnel didn't even bother logging in.

A Functional Government Initiative report revealed that HHS had discovered that, "on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working". The report had to be leaked because of the partisan political pressure to push telework without any regard for the consequences to citizen services or national security.

Senior citizens and disabled people calling social security hotlines were unable to get through because the SSA had put workers who couldn't take calls at home on leave. The IRS proved even more dysfunctional with offices overwhelmed and hotline calls going unanswered.

National defense, which has already been compromised by multiple Chinese and Russian hacks, has new vulnerabilities being introduced in order to accomodate online work for people handling classified materials. Despite that, Biden’s Defense Department people are pushing telework because national security isn’t a Democrat priority, but catering to federal unions is.

“As we look at our reentry to the workplace, we can’t expect to return to ‘business as usual’,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks argued. “Throughout the pandemic we learned a lot about how we can embrace telework."

While career bureaucrats like Hicks “embrace” working in their pajamas, thousands of active duty military personnel who risked their lives under fire are being forced out over Biden’s illegal vaccine mandates. The same policies are destroying the military in two complementary ways, firing heroes who actually show up in the line of fire, while enabling DOD bureaucrats to log in online to their daily diversity seminars. This is a simple process for destroying the military.

It’s understandable that federal unions want to use politicians like Sarbanes and Connolly to maximize their benefits. And that includes not having to commute to work. Especially in Washington D.C. The country would probably get along better if the majority of federal employees stayed home and never showed up to work at all. Especially in the EPA and the Department of Education which make the country worse each hour that they’re on the job.

But the demands for telework are another painful reminder to most of the country that the balance of power long ago shifted away from voters and to the administrative state. And while we would be better off without much of the federal government, telework tends to hit customer services first as we saw with the IRS and social security hotlines. Federal agencies won’t actually stop working or cashing checks, but they will be sloppier in ways that hurt people.

Telework will then make accountability and getting answers much harder to achieve.

National security agencies pursuing telework benefits are exposing even more of our systems to our foreign adversaries. Even when online work doesn’t involve any classified information, remote accesses help open doors that our enemies can begin to exploit.

And it’s not only agencies and departments that are directly intelligence or military in nature whose telework poses a national security threat.

The Office of Personnel Management is at the epicenter of both engaging in telework, (75% or more of OPM employees worked remotely during the pandemic), and promoting it to the rest of the government, but it was responsible for one of the worst government hacks under Obama.

The OPM hack by the Chinese Communist regime exposed tens of millions of records and provided the enemy in Beijing with a thorough list of government employees including possible secret operatives. Hearings into the hack revealed that OPM had not secured the majority of its own systems. And that a contractor who had been brought on board to manage personnel records had one administrator in Argentina and another in China.

Telework is a bad risk.

Americans already pay for a massive government bureaucracy. Would it be too much to ask its members to actually show up to work?





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. 

Thank you for reading.

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Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Virginia Military Institute Went Woke, Enrollment Fell 25%

By On October 25, 2022
The Virginia Military Institute is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the presence of women at the nation’s oldest state military college with an appearance by Kimberly Dark: a fat rights activist and author of lesbian fanfic who wants to “reimagine masculinity”.

“Why couldn’t we see that America has been racist forever, sexist forever?” Dark ranted in a post titled, “For those who do not want a Trump presidency — this is what we will do now.”

Under Superintendent Cedric Wins, this is what the Virginia Military Institute has become.

“How have you benefited from adherence to your gender role?” a VMI diversity training presentation asks. The resources for it included journal articles like, “How Military Service Members Reinforce Hegemonic Masculinity.” There’s not meant to be any room for “hegemonic masculinity” at an institution whose students experience spartan living and the warrior tradition.

The institution that gave us Patton, Marshall and Byrd now asks about your “gender role”, urges you to reimagine “masculinity” and spews hate toward anyone who happens to be white.

VMI’s Preston Library’s DEI resources features “The History of White People” and “White Guys on Campus” discussing “whiteness” and the “habits of racism among white male undergraduates” along with the racist ravings of Ibram X. Kendi in “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”.

The message at VMI is one of undisguised loathing for white people, injecting the ugliest racist concepts of critical race theory directly into the campus dialogue while trying to silence critics.

Superintendent Wins, VMI’s woke head, has been accused of undermining its proud tradition and driving away cadets. His “One Corps, One VMI Unifying Action Plan” puts DEI at the heart of VMI and claims that it will “empower Cadets to gain strength through diversity, acceptance by inclusion”. But the cadets aren’t coming.

Enrollment for the new VMI class fell by 25%.

Wins blamed the pandemic and even falling birth rates, but that fails to explain why the number of freshmen fell from 522 in 2020 and 496 in 2021, to 375 now.

It clearly wasn’t the pandemic. Were those the birth rates kicking in?

The VMI Inclusive Excellence plan called for pushing “diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice” on students, faculty and alumni. It was based on the One Virginia Plan which declared that “Inequity is rooted in America’s foundation.” Young men who once turned to VMI for its tradition of excellence and were eager to serve their country are now going elsewhere.

VMI’s Board of Visitors had already hosted a state equity official pushing critical race theory and the hatred toward white people of “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. A good deal of effort is being spent on eliminating, renaming and “recontextualizing” historical elements of VMI’s legacy. And VMI’s woke personnel are overtly dismissive. A faculty member insisted, “We really aren’t military. I have a bird on my shoulder – doesn’t mean anything – just I am a field professor, So – compare us more to University of Maryland than a military academy.”

VMI’s DEI training included “White Like Me: Race, Racism, and White Privilege in America.”

According to the video, “white privilege” is “built into the very foundations of the country.” The video, with its racist attacks on white people, its partisan attacks on Republicans and promotion of Obama shows where VMI’s woke leadership wants it to be.

Another video, “Disarm Hate”, uses the Islamic terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub to “demand LGBTQIA equal rights, fight the NRA and challenge America’s obsession with gun violence.”

Critics of critical race theory at VMI have spoken out through the Spirit of VMI PAC. Gov. Youngkin’s victory has brought a fresh wind of change to the racist equity systems imposed in the Northam era. But VMI’s woke leaders are doing their best to turn the proud institution into just another woke college campus. And the fall in enrollment shows that it’s working.

Superintendent Wins has angrily fought with VMI alumni working to defend its proud traditions in clashes that have gone public. Arguing over VMI’s massive spending on “equity”, the superintendent railed at a critic, “You have no understanding of DEI or what it means, or how much of the funding for DEI is represented in our request.”

To see what DEI means, just go to VMI’s DEI resources list assembled by Lt. Col. Ticen and Maj. Carroll that includes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” which states that the 9/11 firefighters and police officers “were not human to me” and Ibram X Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” which contends that, “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a race-neutral one.”

If there’s any ambiguity left about how much the VMI administration loathes and discriminates against white people, there’s a direct link of “anti-racism resources” as a “resource to white people”. Black people and other races, it’s understood, cannot be racist. Only white people.

The resources also include not only the 1619 Project, which claims that America was built on racism, but also “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” and Howard Zinn

While trying to explain why students weren’t coming to VMI, Superintendent Winsblamed, among other things, “Ideological differences among a divided alumni base.”

But the divisions aren’t among the patriotic alumni who served their country, they were imposed by Wins and leftists who are making VMI a divisive place defined by the ugliest racism.

“Misinformation regarding our initiative for diversity, equity and inclusion and the thought, the notion, the misinformation about the institute and what it’s doing or what it’s not doing with critical race theory is certainly having an impact, we believe,” Wins complained.

Except it’s not “misinformation”. It’s the DEI agenda that’s right there in VMI’s resources.

The Virginia Military Institute deserves better than Wins and wokeness. So do the great men who came out of it. And their nation that needs the service of the heroes of tomorrow.



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

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Monday, October 24, 2022

If You Liked Big Brother, Meet Google’s Big MUM

By On October 24, 2022 In
Forget Big Brother, Big MUM is Google’s new tool for suppressing conservatives.

MUM or Multitask Unified Model was hyped last year as the company’s new machine learning algorithm. MUM had been initially described as an innovative way to allow Google’s dying search service to answer natural language questions by drawing on multiple sources.

While MUM’s applications initially appeared to be apolitical, that quickly changed.

Google first unleashed MUM to fight what it considered COVID “misinformation” by making sure that everyone saw “high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization”. By reducing the number of sources to only those that agree with its agenda, Google is able to deliver fast results while getting rid of different points of view.

A Forbes article described how MUM would "check information across multiple reliable sources" to allow "the system to come to a general consensus". Google had once built its search around the vast diversity of a bygone internet, but it has spent the last decade draining the diversity and depth of the pool and replacing it with the shallow manufactured consensus of its agenda.

Google long ago ceased being a way to find different answers and its search results are deliberately repetitive. Search is an illusion. The user thinks that he’s browsing the internet when he’s actually spinning his wheels in Google’s walled garden. This is most obvious in shopping and in politics: two areas where Google has strong interests and tries to manipulate users into believing that they are exploring options when they’re being hand fed variations on a theme.

Or as Pandu Nayak, VP of search at Google, wrote in a recent post, “By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact.”

The last thing the world needs is another centralized computer system enforcing a consensus.

Google disagrees with many of its users about what “reliable sources” or “high-quality sources” entail. MUM helps the Big Tech search monopoly manufacture a consensus, on what it claims is a universal fact, and to promote snippets on its own site that promote that consensus.

The monopoly doesn’t see its search service as a way to rank sites. The Big Tech monopoly, like its counterparts, doesn’t want users actually leaving its sites, and wants to force a “consensus” answer on them in its search engine. MUM is another tool for keeping users on its digital plantation. The underlying notion behind MUM is a continuing redefinition of search, not as browsing an array of sources, but as a way of delivering a single instantaneous answer.

Googlers have long been obsessed with the idea of replicating Star Trek's fictional computer which would offer the answer to any question in a robotic female voice.

MUM is the next step in this Big Sister quest.

“The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building. It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically," Amit Singhal, then the head of Google's search rankings team, boasted.

Singhal was later forced to leave the company over sexual harassment allegations.

“It was the perfect search engine,” he gushed about the Star Trek computer. “You could ask it a question and it would tell you exactly the right answer, one right answer—and sometimes it would tell you things you needed to know in advance, before you could ask it.”

In 2022, Google’s search is hopelessly broken because the company no longer has any interest in providing the search service that made it a monopoly, giving a ranked list of diverse results, but wants everyone to speak into their phones and receive a single answer. The consensus.

Google’s snippets and knowledge panels displace links to actual sites and provide what the monopoly claims is the definitive answer. Its search assistant is similarly set up to provide a single answer. Google doesn’t want you to compare answers, but to listen to MUM.

And sometimes Google wants to give you the information before you ask it.

If you own an advanced Android phone, you may find that Google Assistant will interrupt conversations to offer its own “insights”. Google is also pursuing “prebunking” of what it considers “misinformation” with preemptive propaganda campaigns.

Jigsaw, the company’s most explicitly political arm, is researching what it calls "prebunking" or attacking views it opposes before they can even gain traction. Prebunking is currently being experimentally tested by Google's Jigsaw to fight "misinformation" in Poland and other Eastern European countries against Ukrainian migrants. This is only a test and Jigsaw expects there to be much wider application for the information techniques that its “researchers” are developing.

Google's YouTube already has a broad set of bans covering everything from questioning global warming, contradicting medical experts, and debating 2020 election results. These are a window into the company’s political agendas and how it seeks to enforce political conformity.

While it seeks to narrow the sphere of acceptable information in its platforms, Google is working with the leftist Poynter Institute, one of the most notoriously biased fact check spammers, to develop "media literacy.". The company claims to have spent $75 million on efforts to fight "misinformation." And who determines what misinformation is? He who controls the algorithms.

As the midterm elections approach, YouTube spokeswoman, Ivy Choi, promised that the video site's recommendations are “continuously and prominently surfacing midterms-related content from authoritative news sources and limiting the spread of harmful midterms-related misinformation.” The technical term for this is mass propaganda. That’s what Big Tech does.

The internet was revolutionary because it upended the central systems of mass propaganda which allowed a government and a handful of men to enforce their consensus on a helpless public through the mass media of newspapers, radio stations, movie theaters and television sets. Big Tech’s Web 2.0 killed the revolution and restored the oligarchy. Its monopolists see the internet as only a faster way to deliver more immersive propaganda to the masses.

The Big Tech monopolies took off by taming the web, shrinking its vast promise and diversity of content into smaller walled gardens that they could dominate and monetize. Facebook inhaled most of the social interactions on the internet and locked it up in its private platform. Google is determined to do the same thing to the bewildering parade of ideas of the entire internet.

When Google’s senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan first introduced MUM, he suggested that the goal was to “develop not only a better understanding of information on the Web, but a better understanding of the world." What happens on the internet doesn’t stay on the internet.

Conservatives are one of the cultural barriers because their existence is a marked reminder that Big Tech does not control everything. While its executives and employees are socially insulated wokes operating in major urban centers, they manage systems that extend around the country and the world. When they encounter different points of view, they seek to wipe them out.

MUM is yet another tool for enforcing a totalitarian conformity on the diversity of the internet.

Google doesn’t want you to think differently or to think for yourself. What it wants users to do is to shut up and listen to Big MUM.





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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Saturday, October 22, 2022

“Don’t Trust Experts, Experts Say”

By On October 22, 2022 In

 I’m worried.

“Is ‘rainbow fentanyl’ a threat to your kids this Halloween? Experts say no,” NPR assures me.

And if there’s one thing we’ve learned in these past few years it’s to believe the opposite of what experts say. The media has given up trying to get people to trust it and now asks it to trust its handpicked experts. And those experts say the same exact things that the media says.

Every subject is now tackled by experts.

Do you think that a Senate candidate who can barely grasp a sentence is worrisome?

“Fetterman’s use of captions is common in stroke recovery, experts say,” the Washington Post wheedles. Experts tend to say that Democrats should be elected and Republicans shouldn’t be. They agree that when a Democrat does something it’s very different than when a Republican does it. And if you think the experts are biased, the experts will say that they’re not. Q.E.D.

Experts warn of the rise of “misinformation”. And misinformation has come to be defined by people disagreeing with experts. Experts say that anyone who disagrees should be deplatformed. If you disagree with the deplatforming, they say you should be deplatformed too.

Much like Canadians say “eh”, and the Brits say “innit”, the media says “experts say”.

The media is notorious for sticking “experts say” in any story no matter how irrelevant. No opinion, no matter how stupid or wrong, can fail to be headlined with expert opinion. Take, “Can a Person Be Fat and Fit? Health Experts Say Yes”, “Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say” and “Is it safe to blow out birthday candles? Here’s what experts say”.

I don’t know about you, but I always consult experts before blowing out candles.

The COVID era led to a boom in credentialism and expertism. These aren’t playing quite as well as they used to. “Is COVID Under Control in the US? Experts Say Yes” duels with “There are the new COVID variants that experts say could fuel a winter surge” which was preceded by, “Is the COVID pandemic over? Too soon to say, experts insist.” At least in China, they always say the same thing. “Tight control needed for outbreaks, experts say.” Now and forever.

Expert originated from the Latin meaning a person who had become wise through experience. It now has nearly the opposite meaning of someone who has a degree and credentials. To consult an expert is to roll off a litany of degrees and titles with little emphasis on wisdom or experience.

When Jill Biden insisted on being called “Dr”, the media rallied to her defense. “She has a title of her own that isn’t ‘wife’ but ‘expert,’ in this case on education.” Rana el Kaliouby, “an expert in artificial emotional intelligence”, urged other PhDs to add “‘Dr’ to your twitter name to show how many of us there are. We deserve respect.” Experts in being experts say they deserve respect.

The use of doctorates in titles is ubiquitous in European countries as a class signifier. Americans used to ridicule the absurd pomposity of non-medical doctors who wore doctor drag because we never had much of a class system. Credentialism is constructing one made out of experts who have never been less credible even in the days of phrenology.

Jill Biden’s thesis for her Ed.D degree was filled with spelling errors and read like a freshman term paper. It was based on a questionnaire and Kyle Smith noted that “again and again, the books she cites turn out to contain a huge proportion of the material relevant to her discussion in their first 20 pages.” But experts say all of that is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about.

Why do experts keep saying things? For one thing there’s so many more of them.

Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people with doctorates more than doubled from 2 million to 4.5 million. That’s a lot of instant experts.  During that same period, the number of institutions handing them out like candy rose over 10%.

In 1958, a total of 8,773 doctoral degrees were awarded, the majority of them in scientific fields. Back then they were a whole lot rarer and the holder was worthy of some respect. Three years later, the Apollo project was underway. In 1969, the year we landed on the moon, 25,743 doctorates were awarded, most of them in science.

In 2020, 55,283 doctoral degrees were awarded. And we’re far dumber for it, even if the experts won’t say so because they’re part of the problem. Many of the doctorates may be in science, but only in the sense that Dr. Jill Biden is a doctor. Quite a few, like Jill’s, are in education including plenty of emotional intelligence doctorates. There are PhDs in diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. Including a Justice and Diversity in Education from Vanderbilt. Arizona State boasts of the “nation’s first School of Social Transformation” as part of a gender studies PhD program. Fat studies have their doctoral programs and experts say that’s good.

Why? It provides employment for the overflow of experts we’re generating at an increasing rate of 3% a year. Those experts immediately need to get jobs to pay back their astronomical student debts. And those jobs all involve telling us things that they know nothing about.

Experts require authority. The more experts we generate, the more the master class grows. And it’s a master class of idiots who are very sensitive about it and obsessed with suppressing dissent. During COVID, we discovered the proliferation of Masters of Public Health, bureaucrats knew nothing about science, understood even less and claimed total authority anyway.

The less the experts know, the more they say. The petty fascism of a bureaucrat with a nonsensical degree would shame the worst Latin American autocrat. Every political official who can now puts a PhD after his name. Visit California’s election site and you’ll see “Shirley N. Weber, Ph.D” in much larger letters than her actual title as the Secretary of State. Weber got a PhD in Communications before building a Department of African Studies at San Diego State.

From her Twitter handle to interviews, all have to be labeled “PhD”. In a recent interview, Weber proposed changes to the state’s recall elections to protect Newsom and keep someone like Larry Elder from being elected. Weber, appointed by Gov. Newsom two years ago, is obviously an expert. And experts ought to tell us whom we’re allowed to vote for.

The proliferation of experts is a measure of the decline of individual autonomy. Beginning in the last century, a new class of experts, think tanks and invented authorities began envisioning the world as a sterile laboratory in which society and human beings would be engineered to perfection. The great experiment, which began with socialism, eugenics and the end of nations is now concluding with a cargo cult of clowns waving their worthless degrees at the sky.

Slovenia, an ex-Communist country, has the highest percentage of doctorates in Europe. It hasn’t done anything for it and won’t do much for us either. No matter what the experts say.

Genuine expert opinion is welcome when it’s relevant and open to debate. But the degradation of expertise into credentialism and credentialism into Kafkaesque tyranny that pervades every area of modern life demands that the politically convenient opinions of every woke PhD in an invented field be treated as if they have the verities of Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.

The activists have become experts and the experts, activists, and, like at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, we look from activist to expert to woke idiot, and we can’t tell which is which, but we know that we don’t trust a single damn one of them.


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

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Friday, October 21, 2022

Serial Killers Are Too White

By On October 21, 2022 In
Netflix’s new Jeffrey Dahmer movie is revisiting stereotypes of serial killers as white men. The FBI however informs us that, “Contrary to popular belief, serial killers span all racial groups. There are white, African-American, Hispanic, and Asian serial killers. The racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population.” 

We’ve come a long way, baby.

It’s been a long road toward equity and diversity in serial killing. Radford University’s serial killer database reveals that in 1900, a less diverse time, 72.9% of serial killers were white, while only 25% were black and none were Asian or Hispanic. By 1970, progressive forces were making inroads in our society so that only 60% of serial killers were white and 33% were black. Hispanic serial killers, long overlooked, became a serious presence in 1950 when they hit the murder charts at 2.8% and in a massive win for civil rights made it all the way up to 11% in 2000.

By 2010, 30% of serial killers were white, 59% were black, and Hispanic and Asian serial killers were making inroads in a tribute to the nation’s newfound diversity.

Progress for female serial killers has proven to be more elusive. Female serial killers hit an all-time high in the early 20th century with women accounting for a third of serial killers. Sadly the proliferation of serial killings increasingly made murder a a male-dominated field. While in 1900, there were 36 male serial killers to 13 female serial killers, by 2010 there were 110 male serial killers to 7 female serial killers. Even while feminism was moving forward, the number of female serial killers had actually declined in the face of aggressive male competition.

There is no question that serial killers of all races and ages have made enormous strides. The typical stereotype of a white male serial killer in his twenties represents only 7% of the serial killers between 1990 and 2016. That progress shows how far America has come since 1900.

Serial killer diversity has increased so that, as the FBI puts it, killers mirror the diversity of America, nonetheless the representation of serial killers both real and fictional lags behind.

While Jeffrey Dahmer, a white male, has been the subject of numerous movies, like Dahmer, Raising Jeffrey Dahmer and My Friend Dahmer, Carl Eugene Watts, a black serial killer nicknamed the Sunday Morning Slasher, remains largely unknown. Charles Ng, a Kim Jong-Un lookalike, who ran a sex dungeon where numerous women were kidnapped, tortured and killed, has no movies to his name. That shows us how far we have yet to go to fulfill our ideals.

“When you’re a white man, even an incomprehensible, horrific act will not only afford you the benefit of the doubt and an endless amount of excuses but maybe even glorify you to the point of someone making a multimillion-dollar, two-hour-long movie dedicated to unpacking your neuroses,” Teen Vogue complains.

Hollywood isn’t interested in a full representation of serial killing diversity because it’s racist.

White men like Dahmer can kill 17 people and become famous while Watts, who may have totaled 100 victims, can’t get a Hollywood agent to return his phone calls. And not just because he died in Jackson, Michigan in 2007. (Although that probably doesn’t help.)

Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, the Railroad Killer, who offed almost as many as Dahmer, and who had been deported four times to Mexico, is obscure despite the opportunity that his case presents for showing the contribution that illegal aliens continue to make to this country.

“Beneath the veneer of order, purity and casual disassociation there is a raging libido all the more terrible because whites are so emotionally, physically, viscerally out of touch with it,” Richard Dyer, formerly of Marxism Today, writes. “Serial killing must have something to do with whiteness.”

The over-representation of white serial killers makes sense from this perspective as a demonstration of white evil. A white school shooter is bound to spend a year on the evening news while gang members racking up 5 times his total over one month in Chicago are overlooked. To permit the representation of non-white male serial killers threatens the entire cultural and political hegemony of the progressive cause which is based on combatting whiteness. If anyone can be evil, that raises the possibility that the Left can also be evil.

The cultural response to Netflix’s Dahmer movie has been on the role of the cannibalistic serial killer as a stand-in for all white people.

“I’m Done Watching True Crime Romanticizing White People,” reacted Veronica Wells-Puoane at The Daily Beast. “It’s a choice that aligns with my decade-long practice of limiting my interactions with white people as much as possible.”

“Black queer Milwaukeeans on Netflix’s Jeffrey Dahmer series: ‘How dare you?'” an NBC News headline screams.

Invoking the white serial killer is a pretext for such racist tantrums. That is why they command such a disproportionate amount of attention. As symbols and metaphors, Dahmer, Bundy, and Gacy, occasion sweeping racial responses that would be unacceptable if they were directed at O.J. Simpson or an MS-13 gang. The ideal celebrity serial killer is not only a white male, but ordinary, outwardly polite, and well behaved. He is there to suggest that underneath western civilization, its manners and order, is an endless horror that we choose to be unaware of.

It is the same racist argument as the one put forward by Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates and countless critical race theory campaigners, but wrapped in the chewiness of true crime.

In the real world, few crimes are committed by career serial killers. Most are carried out by random street criminals. And these crimes are concentrated in diverse urban areas, away from the pleasant suburban streets where the media’s favorite serial killers, real or fictional, roam.

Those are the uncomfortable truths that true crime is designed to divert us from. Fictional mysteries set in quaint English villages where the killer is the elderly granny you least suspect are a magician’s sleight of hand diverting audiences from the acid attacks and stabbings, not to mention the grooming gangs, of London and Manchester. American true crime is just as determined to miss the forest for the trees, but it damningly uses the tree to create the illusion of a forest. A school shooter or a basement serial killer becomes a national obsession and a metaphor for the country’s real problems which always involve white evil, not crime statistics.

So far 2,865 people have been shot in Chicago this year. 559 of them are dead. These are the numbers you would expect from a war. In the face of such hard truths, racial escapism to a world where the thing to worry about is that the nice white boy next door is really a gay cannibal is a pleasant interlude. A little diversity among the ranks of serial killers would interrupt this fantasy. It would also raise difficult questions about the entire progressive program of blaming the nation’s varied ills on whiteness, white people and white men. Just call it the equity of 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.

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Thursday, October 20, 2022

Zombie Democrats Run a Zombie Nation

By On October 20, 2022

Six months after his stroke and a month before Election Day, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman finally sat down for a disastrous interview in which he offered contradictory responses and responded to closed captions. The Democrat Senate candidate still hasn’t provided his medical records even to a friendly press and social media is filled with awkward videos of his campaign appearances.


Will Fetterman be able to function if he wins? Who knows. Just ask Joe Biden. If he can answer.


Biden, who insists on another term, is barely present and functioning in this one. His attention span varies wildly. He spews incoherent gibberish and lies so wildly that it’s practically a medical condition. Videos show him wandering aimlessly with staff and even a giant bunny acting as handlers for the man who is supposed to be the most powerful figure on the world stage.

The Zombie Democrats aren’t an entirely new phenomenon.

In 1919, two years after he was inaugurated after winning a second term on a promise to keep America out of WWI and to keep segregation in place, Woodrow Wilson suffered another stroke. With the Republicans winning the House and Senate, the Wilson administration launched a ruthless crackdown on political opponents. Wilson had little to do with it. He was incapacitated by a catastrophic stroke. Wilson’s wife had become the first de-facto female president.

But, like Biden, Wilson wanted to run for another term that he wasn’t capable of holding. His greed for power, sabotaged Democrat chances and put a Republican back in the White House.

If Fetterman wins, he’ll join a Senate that includes Senator Dianne Feinstein whom insiders allege has trouble “recognizing colleagues” and following “policy discussions”. “I don’t even know what that is,” she reportedly replied to a staffer trying to explain that they were moving on a continuing resolution.

If Biden doesn’t run then Senator Bernie Sanders, who hasn’t been able to grasp a new idea since 1976, wants in. Why not Fetterman too? He’s at least as functional as the socialist he once supported.

D.C.’s dirty little secret has always been that staffers and bureaucrats run the place, not the officials elected by the people. In the era of the Zombie Democrat, that’s truer than ever. It’s easier to run a government when the elected officials barely know what planet they’re on.

That the Biden administration has quickly become the most radical in under a century isn’t due to any innate extreme streak in its titular figurehead, but to his mental absence from politics. Given a puppet with just enough brain cells to retell rambling pointless stories and read words off a teleprompter, the leftist staffers are showing what they can really do with that power.

Much as with Woodrow Wilson and his wife, the problem with the Zombie Democrats isn’t just that they can’t do their jobs, it’s that someone else is doing their jobs for them. But then that was always true. The massive increase in the size of government since the 19th century has made it impossible for any president to be able to handle. Senators and even House members are just dipping spoons in an ocean, bolstered by career staffers who have a wider scope of D.C.

What actually happens is that think tanks and pressure groups propose things to staffers, which elected officials then write up into legislation, which is then modified by other staffers which, if passed into law, is then interpreted by bureaucrats and later judges to mean something completely different. Under these conditions, why not have members of the nation’s highest legislative body do their work remotely or be too demented or disabled to function?

The sad truth is that nothing will change very much because we don’t just have zombie politicians, we have a zombie government over which elected officials exercise little control.

The difference is that when the officials are themselves zombies that becomes obvious.

The Soviet Union took a beating in credibility at home and abroad when its leaders, beginning with Brezhnev, became senile apparatchiks who could barely read their speeches and, beginning with Andropov, could barely even stay alive in power. Gorbachev took office as a compromise candidate because he was the youngest. But the real problem wasn’t age. As he discovered, no one could actually run the Soviet Union, they could only bring it down.

Biden is discrediting America in a whole new way even while doubling down on Obama’s policies. At least under Obama, people felt reasonably certain that he was awake most of the time. Now there are invisible hands programming a teleprompter, speaking in an earpiece, guiding him on and off the stage, presenting things for him to sign and speaking on his behalf.

The media’s enthusiastic defenses of Fetterman’s inability to function are really apologetics for Biden and for the entire zombie system of elected officials who are there as puppets and fronts.

In our perpetual night of the living dead legislators and executives, the unfitness to hold office is actually a qualification. Unable to focus or understand, they are dependent on their eyes and ears, on their handlers and longtime friends, on lobbyists and assets to tell them what to do.

In D.C.’s Weekend at Bernie’s sequel, those politicians who spend the most time in office become an immovable force. The longer they manage to stick it out, the more pliable and useful they become. It’s a game that the young, the middle-aged and the elderly can all play. As long as, like John Fetterman, they spent their lives being taken care of by their families until, when suffering a stroke, they are then given into the care of their wives and their handlers.

Having burned through most identity politics groups, the new frontier is running people who are just not there. The media is already rallying attacks on anyone suggesting that Fetterman isn’t able to function and shouldn’t be in this race, accusing them of ‘ableism’. And why would we possibly want the ‘able’ to run our government when we can have the ‘unable’ at the wheel?

Who benefits from such an arrangement? The same lefties who are aggressively pushing it.

The hidden hand tends to do the bidding of one side. And to perform it in a consistent manner. The less the top official knows, like Obama, or the less he’s aware, like Biden, the more radical the program that the Left is able to implement in its hijacking of the United States of America.

Who better than a zombie to run a zombie nation?





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

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Wednesday, October 19, 2022

When the FBI Joined Planned Parenthood

By On October 19, 2022 In

 Last month, The Mother and Unborn Baby Care Center, a pregnancy center in Southfield, Michigan, was vandalized causing thousands of dollars in damages. Graffiti left behind reading, “If abortion isn’t safe neither are you, Jane” linked the attack to Jane’s Revenge, a leftist pro-abortion domestic terrorist group that is believed to be responsible for as many as 50 attacks on pregnancy centers and pro-life groups.


Southfield police notified the FBI which refused to comment on the case.


After 18 attacks directly claimed by Jane’s Revenge over a period of six months, the FBI has made zero arrests. But while under Biden the feds have shown no interest in a national campaign of leftist terrorism, the FBI has been swift to come after abortion opponents.


The same month as the Southfield attack, an FBI team of 25 armed agents pounded on the door of of an anti-abortion activist in Pennsylvania who had been accused of shoving a Planned Parenthood escort. A nationwide campaign of domestic terrorism didn’t trigger a single arrest, but a shove brought heavily armed men in over a dozen vehicles to a suburban home.


The FBI has claimed that “the number of personnel and vehicles widely reported as being on scene Friday is an overstatement” and that its tactics were “professional”. The actual professional tactic would have been to ask the gentleman in question to turn himself in.


But under Biden and Garland, the DOJ has engaged in a campaign of political intimidation.


Biden’s DOJ put out a statement about the incident by his nominee, Jacqueline C. Romero, who was touted as the “first woman of color and first LGBTQIA+ person to become U.S. attorney.”


“Violating the FACE Act by committing a physical assault is a serious crime for which the FBI will work to hold offenders accountable,” Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division, who had been featured in Women’s History Month, warned.


The FACE Act, introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy, who had killed a woman some said may have been carrying his child in the first known example of a senatorial underwater abortion, means that the FBI will come pounding on doors over a shoving incident at an abortion clinic, but pregnancy centers can be torched across the country without a word.


On paper, the FACE Act also protects pregnancy centers, but the extremely differing enforcement standards by Biden’s DOJ and the FBI make it all too clear that it does not.


Also in September,  Christopher Moscinski, a Franciscan friar, who was already serving time on state charges for “occupying” the waiting room of a New York abortion clinic, was hit with FACE federal charges by the Biden administration for padllocking the gates of an abortion clinic and then laying “his body in front of the gate, blocking vehicles from entering the health center’s parking lot”. Environmentalist protesters routinely lie down in the street to block traffic. No one sends in the feds after them. They occupy government buildings and they don’t go to prison.


Moscinski’s actions were illegal, but leftist protesters routinely engage in the same kind of behavior, locking and blocking entrances and call it civil disobedience. There are few consequences if any for this behavior. And no pro-abortion protesters rallying outside pregnancy centers have faced FACE Act charges, let alone aggressive FBI aids on their homes.


But Biden’s DOJ keeps using the FACE Act to target pro-life protesters outside abortion clinics while issuing pro-abortion political statements that make its political agenda clear.


Philip Sellinger, another Biden nominee and a leading Democrat fundraiser, celebrated a FACE Act campaign against a street evangelist by declaring, “Access to reproductive healthcare is a fundamental right…  Individuals must be able to access facilities like the Englewood clinic to make decisions about their own bodies.” That was not a legal statement by a US Attorney, but a political statement by an aspiring Democrat politician abusing federal law enforcement authority.


But Sellinger was just echoing Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had responded to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling by attacking the court for having “eliminated an established right that has been an essential component of women’s liberty for half a century” and announcing that the DOJ  “strongly disagrees with the Court’s decision”.


Garland went even further in his insurrection against the Constitution and the Supreme Court by warning that he would employ the FACE Act to “protect healthcare providers and individuals seeking reproductive health services in states where those services remain legal”.


Biden’s own Beria clearly meant only one kind of service. The kind that ends a child’s life.


The DOJ’s Reproductive Rights Task Force has weaponized the FACE Act under Vanita Gupta, a leftist veteran of the ACLU and the NAACP, and racked up charges against anti-abortion protesters. Since the attacks on pregnancy centers are being investigated under FACE Act violations, it is quite likely that they’re being routed to the DOJ’s Abortion Task Force.


And the Abortion Task Force’s response would be to cheer on Jane’s Revenge.


The lack of trust has become so severe that Reverend James Harden, the head of a pregnancy center in New York, has filed suit against the FBI to return surveillance footage from the attack. The FBI took the footage, but has refused to share it with CompassCare: the victimized clinic.


According to Harden, the video shows license plates and other identifying footage. And yet after over 100 days, the FBI has made no arrests and refuses to turn over the video.


“They know who these people are. They’re choosing not to make arrests,” Harden charged.


Meanwhile, local authorities claimed to be worried that releasing the video would play into the hands of right-wing “nut jobs out there with guns and AK-47s, bombing and killing people.”


Late last month, the FBI canceled a visit meant to look into the firebombing of the clinic.


Even while leftist pro-abortion terrorists continue vandalizing and firebombing pregnancy centers, Democrat politicians at the federal and state level have targeted those same centers with legislation meant to shut them down in an effort to achieve the same terroristic goals.


In Los Angeles, Democrats are trying to impose a $10,000 fine for anyone who claims to have been misled into thinking that pregnancy centers also provide baby-terminating services. A similar attempt in California had already been struck down by the Supreme Court years ago.


Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act which tries to use the FTC to target pregnancy centers. Senator Mark Warner and House Democrats demanded that Google go even further in censoring pregnancy centers from its search results.


Jane’s Revenge, or whichever combination of activists are operating under that name, is just the direct action arm of a leftist movement that is coordinating a campaign against pro-life groups. And the Biden administration is using its control over the DOJ and the FBI to implement it, ignoring violence by its political allies while ruthlessly going after acts of civil disobedience.


Under Merrick Garland, the DOJ has become the enforcement arm of the Left. Justice can only return to the Department of Justice when Garland and the other cronies have left the building.





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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