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Tuesday, January 31, 2023

America’s Most Racist Poet is Taught in Colleges Across America

By On January 31, 2023 In
“We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of shit),” Baraka wrote in ‘A School of Prayer’. This was about the nicest thing that he ever said about white people.

“Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats,” the black nationalist raved in.another poem.

In a poem published by his own Jihad Press, Baraka fantasized about a race war, “cracker you may be wood and fire is what you need… n___r you might be fire and need to be burn some wood” and declared that, “Allah speaks in and thru me now.”

In his play, ‘A Black Mass’, Baraka dramatized the Nation of Islam’s myth of a black mad scientist creating white people with the emergence of “a beast” who is “white with a red, lizard-devil mask” and who “hops around, all the while screaming, ‘white, white, white'”.

The play concludes with the narrator warning, “There are beasts in our world. Let us find them and slay them. Let us lock them in their caves. Let us declare the Holy War. The Jihad.”

Amiri Baraka, arguably the country’s most racist poet, who frequently fantasized about the mass murder of white people and Jews, is widely taught in colleges across America. And he’s at the center of the controversy over Florida’s rejection of an AP Black Studies course.

The AP course had included BLM, domestic terrorist Angela Davis, and Amiri Baraka.

The Biden administration called Florida’s decision to reject this vile hatred “incomprehensible”.

Racemonger lawyer Ben Crump, who made his bones extracting millions from the deaths of violent criminals like George Floyd and Michael Brown, has announced that he’s ready to sue.

Karen Attiah of the Washington Post falsely claimed that it was an “advanced lesson in anti-blackness” and tweeted, “Florida and DeSantis are showing us what was under their *ahem* hoods this entire time.”

But Crump, Attiah and the Biden administration actually showed us their ‘hoods’.

The AP course includes any number of materials banned by Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, but the most remarkable of them all may be Topic 4.10 which recommends an examination of “an example of the writings of Amiri Baraka.” Topic 4.27 also recommends reading Baraka.

Even by the standards of black nationalists of his era, Baraka was a deranged racist.

Baraka, born Leroy Jones, passed through the racist Nation of Islam and emerged as a racistt. Baraka invented what he called the Black Arts movement. Its poets and writers, like him, spent much of their time cursing white people, anyone who wasn’t black, and all of America.

“The black artist’s role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it,” Baraka declared.

Occasionally producing what he termed ‘plays’ or ‘novels’, not to mention essays, the Marxist bigot usually stuck to playing the poet because he could pass off his bathroom graffiti as art. The uglier and more hateful his rants, the more white leftists rushed to apologize for him.

A New Yorker article entitled ‘Amiri Baraka’s Life-Changing Jazz Writing‘ cringingly describes how the “lyrical force of his meditations was punctuated by the line ‘Rape the white girls'” and insists that “not for a moment did I think that Baraka was advocating such actions, not even when, toward the end, he speaks of ‘the murders we intend’; I was certain that he was speaking metaphorically”. The author of the piece, Richard Brody, is predictably Jewish.

Baraka, who had left his Jewish wife, hated Jews even more than he hated all white people.

He longed for “dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews” or of “another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady’s mout.”

“I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured,” Baraka wrote in one of his poems. “So come for the rent, jewboys, or come ask me for a book, or sit in the courts handing down your judgements still I got something for you, gonna give it to my brothers, so they’ll know what your whole story is, then one day, jewboys, we all, even my wig wearing mother gonna put it on you all at once.”

“Atheist jews double crossers stole our secrets crossed the white desert to spill them,” Baraka ranted in another poem. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.”

The poem, typical for Baraka, concludes with a genocidal fantasy, “The best is yet to come. On how we beat you and killed you.”

Leftists, of Jewish origin and otherwise, insisted on seeing all that hate as a metaphor.

This culture of denial climaxed in Baraka being appointed as the Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Baraka responded to 9/11 with another of his signature antisemitic rants blaming it on the Jews. New Jersey was forced to abolish the position of poet laureate to get rid of him. But even long after his death Baraka casts a long shadow of hate across academia. And not just in Florida.

The Africana Studies department at Stony Brook University, where Baraka had taught in the 80s, celebrated his legacy. Baraka appears in the University of Georgia’s African American Poetry course, Cornell’s The Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, the African American Literature courses of Middlebury College and the College of Providence, in Brooklyn College’s Modern African-American Literature and Wellesley College’s Black Drama course.

With the growing pressure for ‘representation’, the old dead bigot has even started spilling over into more general courses, showing up in Amherst College’s Avant-Garde Poetry alongside Nazi collaborators Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and Henry Ford College’s Reading in Modern American Poetry next to Robert Frost.

What happened in Florida really reveals how thoroughly Baraka and the racist hate he represents have become embedded in black studies and in literature in general. When black studies and literature courses look for a black poet from the period, they come up with him.

In the age of cancel culture, antisemitism and racism aimed at white people are generally exempt, but Baraka’s other favorite word was “fag”. “Roywilkins in an eternal faggot,” Baraka’s ‘Civil Rights Poem’ begins, referring to the NAACP leader. “His spirit is a faggot.”

Bayard Rustin, an MLK adviser who actually was gay, is taunted as, “here is bayard rusty switchin like a fag, all the toms here they go, all the toms in a row.”

Amiri Baraka’s hatred of gay people, like his racism and antisemitism, has to be ignored.

When Baraka died a decade ago, the obituaries reflected an awareness of his long hateful career. “Amiri Baraka, Polarizing Poet and Playwright, Dies at 79,” the New York Times headlined his end. NPR mentioned his “anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny”.

All of that has been washed away as Baraka’s bigotry has been made respectable again.

Grove Atlantic, the respected literary publisher, offers a “definitive selection of Amiri Baraka’s dynamic poetry” which not only includes his poem claiming that the Jews were responsible for 9/11, but also his call to “rape the white girls”, and a few poems with “fag” right in the title.

This has less to do with Baraka’s popularity, who remains the illiterate murderous bigot he always was, but the degree to which black nationalism has become the linchpin of the Left. Baraka, a black nationalist who loathed the civil rights movement and called its leaders “faggots”, is an obvious symptom of the death of liberalism and its replacement by racism.

The Left made its racist bargain with black nationalists. The Florida AP course is just an anatomy of that bargain, its sections on BLM, on Angela Davis, on black nationalism and its promotion of a genocidal racist reflect how black studies are taught across academia.

Baraka, who spent his life spewing hatred that would have made Goebbels cringe a little, is taught in college courses across America. And his hatred is making its way into high schools.

While there has been a lot of talk about critical race theory, what is at issue here is not any particular theory, it’s the cultural dominance of black nationalism and supremacism.

We may have just celebrated MLK Day, but he lost and the Nation of Islam, which collaborated with the KKK and admired the Nazis, won. Much as liberalism lost and the leftists won. Our political, educational and cultural system is run by extremists and racists. Fighting critical race theory is just the beginning of a long housecleaning to get racism out of our schools.

As long as the author of “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats,” is taught in schools, our educational system resembles Nazi Germany more than America.






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

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Monday, January 30, 2023

Who Was Really Behind the Jerusalem Terror Attack

By On January 30, 2023 In
On Thursday, Jan 26, the Palestinian Authority announced that it was suspending “security coordination” after Israel broke up a Jenin terror cell that had been planning a major attack.

On Friday, Jan 27, an Islamic terrorist opened fire outside a Jerusalem synagogue killing 7 Israelis, including Asher Natan, a 14-year-old boy, Eli and Natali Mizrahi, a married couple who rushed out to help the victims, and Shaul Hai, a 68-year-old synagogue sexton.

The shooter, despite being branded a “lone wolf” with no previous connection to terrorism, was described as having advanced shooting skills. And the death rate testifies to that. It seems highly likely that he was selected and secretly prepped to carry out this attack.

On Saturday, Jan 28, a second shooting in Jerusalem injured two other Israelis. Another armed terrorist was taken out by the town’s security team in Kedumim. That may not be the last of it.

There is nothing coincidental about the timing of this surge of violence: the deadliest in years.

CIA director Bill Burns arrived in Israel on Thursday. The same day the PLO announced the end of its security coordination. Secretary of State Blinken is expected to visit Israel this week. Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan came to Israel the week before. The PLO’s suspension of security coordination and the attacks that followed were put on for their benefit. 7 Israelis thus far were killed to help the Biden administration pressure Israel.

Had Israel not taken out the terror cell in Jenin, the numbers might be far higher.

The last time attacks on this scale took place was when 11 Israelis were killed in three attacks in late March 2022. Those attacks also came after the Palestinian Authority had suspended “security coordination” a month earlier and overlapped with the Negev Summit featuring Arab leaders and Secretary of State Blinken.

What is happening is not random terror, it’s carefully calculated terror, executed, as usual, through plausibly deniable attackers who will be rewarded by the PLO’s pay-to-slay fund.

The Palestinian Authority made a show of suspending its mostly worthless “security coordination” before launching terror attacks to show that it can turn the violence on and off.

But not all of the pressure is coming from the outside.

The attacks were launched less than a month after the new Israeli government was sworn in. The Netanyahu government has pledged to reform the leftist judiciary which enables terrorism.

While the Israeli police claim that they responded to the Jerusalem attack in 5 minutes, local residents claim that it took more like 20 minutes with the police initially refusing to come because they believed that the gunfire was actually celebrations from nearby Arab Muslim occupied areas in Jerusalem.

This conveniently undermines Itamar Ben Gvir, a key right-wing coalition figure and major target of the Left, who had assumed authority over the Israeli police and promised to create a strong and responsive force. When Ben Gvir arrived at the scene, angry crowds jeered and chanted, “death to the terrorists” and “death to the leftists”. Some berated a leftist reporter and the media is shrieking that the real threat isn’t coming from the Islamic terrorists who murdered Israelis, but from Israeli “right-wing extremists” who may attack Muslims and, worse still, the media.

This will serve as a pretext for expanding pressure on Netanyahu to push out Ben Gvir and collapse the coalition while also shutting down Ben Gvir’s proposals to make guns easier to obtain for Israeli civilians.

Did the Israeli police authorities delay their response time to undermine Ben Gvir and efforts at police reform while putting further pressure on overstressed Israelis in Jerusalem? There’s no way to know, but the attacks targeted the sorts of people who would generally be likely to vote for members of the Netanyahu government, rather than those who belong to the authorities.

Either way the attack shifts the focus away from judicial reform, which has the potential to break the Left’s grip on the country, and toward terrorism. And that is exactly what the Left wants.

The attack weakened the conservative government’s image with its base. Netanyahu will either launch an inadequate crackdown on the terrorists which will lead to more fighting and further pressure from the Biden administration or fail to do so and lose support from his base.

It’s a Catch 22 that will either sideline the domestic reform agenda or the support for it. Either way the Left wins.

A generation of Israelis has grown up in a state of siege because the terrorists waging war on the country enjoy extensive foreign support from Iran, the EU, and the State Department in the United States, as well as domestic support from the Israeli Left, which uses its official and activist arms to undermine the fight against terrorism in every possible way.

The Left was able to legitimize the PLO and give it control of sizable parts of Israel by crippling previous efforts by conservative governments to defeat the terrorists and expel them from Israel. Long after their terrorist deal fell apart into treachery and rocket attacks on Israeli cities, they still rely on using the terrorists as their “stick” to defeat conservatives and retain institutional power.

The Jerusalem shootings took place far from the stomping grounds of the Tel Aviv ruling class like Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who came out against the death penalty for terrorists enabled the previous government’s dirty Hezbollah deal, claimed that judicial reforms threaten “democracy”, and tried to stall action against the home of the latest terrorist.

The dead in Jerusalem were mainly Mizrahi, descendants of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees, often poorer and more likely to live near Muslim areas and become targets of violence.

They are representative of the ‘two Israels’: the one that seeks a deal with the terrorists and the one that seeks to defeat them. The new Netanyahu coalition was elected by those voters, Mizrahi, Orthodox Jews, people living in development towns and in Judea and Samaria, in Jerusalem and in the not so nice parts of Tel Aviv and Haifa, who want to beat the terrorists.

And they want to roll back the power of the leftists who have enabled a generation of massacres, who imported terrorists into the country, armed them and promised that it would lead to peace and improve Israel’s position in the world, when just the opposite has happened.

These are the real Israelis, the ones who confronted the reporters exploiting their deaths in Jerusalem, and who went to the polls to be heard above the lies of the elites. Their deaths are of far less interest to the elites than the media outrage over judicial reform, cuts in subsidies for Kan’s leftist public broadcasting and an end to an environmental tax on disposable utensils.

That is what is at stake here.

What is going on in Israel is not just warfare, but a culture war between the democratic majority and an entrenched leftist elite that will use any means to protect its power and privilege.

The terrorist massacre in Jerusalem did little to impede the terrorist supporters in Tel Aviv which protested judicial reform by waving PLO flags. That same media which gushes that the leftists in Marxist shirts waving terror flags are the “youth” campaigning for “democracy”, will paint every angry word by young Mizrahis protesting the terrorists as a grave threat to “democracy”.

If an Arab Muslim house is vandalized in a “price-tag” attack, the media will clamor that it is a badge of eternal shame for the entire country and requires a war against the “extremists”.

Anyone who follows Israeli politics has seen this cynical farce play out any number of times.

The new Israeli government was elected by desperate people in the hopes of finally breaking the cycle of appeasement and terror, of fake political scandals and third parties, of an unelected judiciary that claims supreme power in the name of “democracy” and of police and prosecutors who connive to remove any elected officials who defy their power. That is to say, of the Left.

These people, courageous and beleaguered, hanging on in bad neighborhoods and outposts in Judea and Samaria, are the real resistance. The terrorists in Jerusalem and around the country came for them. They killed innocent people on behalf of the Islamic terrorists inside the nation, and of the Biden administration and the Left, as part of their shared mission to destroy Israel.





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

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Sunday, January 29, 2023

How the Atlanta Riots Were Funded

By On January 29, 2023 In
Even after an ‘Atlanta Forest Defender’ shot a Georgia state trooper in the stomach and his comrades set off race riots in the city, the leftist group at the center of it all is still fundraising.

This comes months after the leftists threw Molotov cocktails at police and nearly burned an elderly driver to death. Multiple members of the ‘occupation’ have been arrested on domestic terrorism charges. And yet the IRS and Georgia’s Secretary of State have done nothing.

Even Twitter suspended ‘Scenes from the Atlanta Forest’, an account calling for a “Night of Rage” and “reciprocal violence to be done to the police and their allies”, but the IRS has yet to take action to stop the ‘Atlanta Forest Defenders’ from taking in tax-deductible donations.

In Atlanta, small business owners are sweeping away broken glass and police have recovered explosive devices from some of the rioters. Yet the ‘Atlanta Forest Defenders’ are still raising money through Open Collective: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fundraising platform that Front Page Magazine had previously exposed for providing fundraising for assorted ecoterrorists including the ‘Just Stop Oil’ vandals who glued themselves to ‘The Girl with the Pearl Earring’ painting.

That is despite the fact that Open Collective’s terms of service prohibit illegal activities.

The Open Collective Foundation has received funding for digital infrastructure grants from the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society and Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network.

Meanwhile ordinary people have been suffering through another wave of leftist terror.

In November, an elderly man passing by the area was attacked. When he stopped his truck, “these people started coming out of the woods in camouflage stuff and blocked me in.”

Then they set the truck on fire.

“It seemed to me like they were going to burn the truck with me in it.”

Nobody’s fundraising for the man who lost his truck and now suffers from a medical condition, but the IRS is continuing to enable this domestic terrorist campaign. In Atlanta, rioters had marched chanting, “If you build it, we will burn it.” The riots show that they mean it.

A previous affidavit for the arrest of Atlanta Forest Defenders describes them as “participating in actions as part of Defend the Atlanta Forest (DTAF), a group classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as Domestic Violent Extremists”. It went on to describe a variety of crimes including, “throwing molotov cocktails, rocks and fireworks at uniformed police officers; arson of public buildings” and “shooting metal ball bearings at contractors”.

Members of the ‘occupation’ charged with domestic terrorism were ordered not to maintain “contact with Defend Atlanta Forest on social media”. Despite that, neither Georgia nor the IRS, have revisited the legal status of Defend the Atlanta Forest, its fund and its fiscal host.

While the Forest Defense Justice Fund is not a nonprofit, its fiscal host, the Network For Strong Communities, is a 501(c)(3). Beyond the Atlanta Forest Defenders, Network For Strong Communities also acts as a host for Atlanta Resistance Medics. Manuel Paez, the leftist who shot at a state trooper and was killed in turn, was a member of the Atlanta Resistance Medics.

The ‘medics’, similar to other riot support groups, provide aid to rioters during street violence. The group’s blog suggests that protesters “always be prepared to face tear gas every time you go to a protest” and advises that the “key to avoiding arrest is to always know where all the police are — and more importantly, to know where they aren’t.”

An article about the alleged shooter described the group’s “leaderless nature, its focus on direct action, as well as its anarchist and Marxist leanings”.

“Don’t burn The Communist Manifesto!” the shooter exclaimed at one point after finding a copy of the book in a fire pit. “I mean, Marx isn’t perfect, but he’s OK.”

That’s whom the media and the rioters have been mourning.

One of the initiatives of the Network for Strong Communities is the Atlanta Solidarity Fund which bailed out protesters and rioters: including those charged with domestic terrorism.

Another is Copwatch: which provided training for the Atlanta Forest Defenders.

The publicly listed leadership for the group consists of Adele “Earthworm” MacLean, a local activist affiliated with Cop Watch House and Food Not Bombs, both operating under the NSC umbrella. Marlon Kautz, who serves as its CFO, is a member of Cop Watch, works with the Solidarity Fund, and is the owner of the Teardown House which is the NSC’s registered address.

The house, decorated with graffiti reading “Black Lives Matter”, “No Cops”, “Build Up Resistance” and “Smash the State”, has been featured in a number of articles.

“We build infrastructure for community solidarity and popular struggle,” Kautz has said.

Kautz, a self-identified anarchist, and MacLean, who has been named as his partner, moved to Atlanta and bought the house to “create infrastructure” for activism.

After a decade of this, they finally hit the big time and are all over the national news.

Meanwhile Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has yet to do anything about NSC. The organization was briefly dissolved by his office for failing to pay its fees, but is now listed as being in compliance.

The IRS, which determined that NSC, was a “public charity” has failed to revisit that finding even in the wake of the ongoing violence tearing apart Georgia.

As discussed in David Horowitz’s and John Perazzo’s important booklet: “Internal Radical Service”, the IRS has allowed leftist nonprofits to abuse the tax code by financing violence and terror. While conservative nonprofits are subject to ruthless IRS scrutiny, the organization has failed to hold leftist nonprofits accountable after even the most grotesque abuses.

There’s no way to understand what happened in Atlanta without following the money trial. And there’s no way to stop them without ending the abuse of 501(c)(3) nonprofits by the Left. That’s why the David Horowitz Freedom Center is continuing to track the leftist money behind the violence and expose its enablers at the federal and state level. And until the IRS does its job, we are going to hold it accountable for the violence it’s enabling in Atlanta and across America.





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

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Survival and Sensibility in Israel

By On January 29, 2023 In

 After weeks of hysterical liberal tantrums against the new conservative Israeli government, Muslim terrorists struck killing Israeli Jews of all ages: seven of them near a synagogue. 


And after a moment of silence for the dead, who include a 14-year-old boy, the demands that Israel make deals with the terrorists, the claims that the government is "extremist" for trying to stop the terrorism, for trying to reform a judiciary that is biased toward the terrorists, will resume.


Along with the protests and official boycotts.


The part of the Torah that the 7 dead Jews in Jerusalem never had a chance to hear was Parshat Bo which describes the final plagues on Egypt.


Pharaoh began the enslavement and genocide of the Jews by enlisting Jewish collaborators. There are Jewish taskmasters to manage the Jewish slaves and even the midwives are enlisted to kill newborn children. When Moshe rises up and kills an Egyptian who is beating a Jewish slave, it is the slave himself who tells on him. Egypt has succeeded in getting the Jews to oppress themselves, to inject slavery into their souls and it will take some of the greatest miracles the world has ever seen to change that.

Yet this time Pharaoh is wrong. The midwives do not collaborate with him. They do not kill Jewish children, instead, "VaTehayena Et HaYeladim." They let the children live.


The failure to collaborate with the murderers of your people should not be a big deal, yet it is, whether in ancient Egypt or in contemporary America, from J Street conferences to If Not Now protests, to elements of the so-called pro-Israel community who had been clutching their pearls over the new Israeli government some of whose members have committed the sin of actually calling for the death of terrorists. 


"VaTehayena Et HaYeladim." Let the children live. Put their survival ahead of your sensibilities.


That is all that is being asked of the fussy American liberals, some who are anti-Israel, but claim to be pro-Israel, and some who are pro-Israel, but not to extent of supporting the Israelis doing anything about terrorism, get out of Israel's way. Let the children live.


Today Jewish children in Israel are being murdered and the liberals occasionally make some weak charade of caring even as they pester Israel to go back to surrendering to the terrorists. Their level of outrage over mass murders like this is far quieter than their outrage at the existence of the present Israeli government or some politically incorrect remark by Israelis reeling from another act of horrifying brutality.


VaTehayena Et HaYeladim. Let the children live. That is all that is being asked of liberal Jews today. 


You have a problem with a state that has to exist by force, don't live there. Someday you'll learn the hard way that every state has to exist because men are ready to do violence to keep it safe and free. Slather your humanism, your bleeding heart social concerns on the whales, the trees, the shrubs, anywhere but on us. Stop pressuring Israel to negotiate. Stop sending money to the New Israel Fund and J Street and other groups whose goals are the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. 


And stop being outraged that Israelis want a government that will fight terrorism instead of gratifying your sensibilities.


No government capable of assuring Israel's future will meet the delicate sensibilities of American liberals.


Israelis should not have to choose between the good opinion of Silver Spring and the Upper West Side and their survival.

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Friday, January 27, 2023

Democracy is a Threat to Democracy

By On January 27, 2023 In
Democracy, like the polar bears, the bald eagle and the 99-cent pizza slice, is threatened.

We know that’s true because the media, the least democratic body outside of North Korea, tells us this all the time. And we know that it must be true because apart from its daily panics over some political, medical, environmental or economic crisis that will later turn out to be imaginary or overblown, the media has an unbroken track record of honesty and truth that almost equals that of Bill Clinton.

So who better to warn us about the threat to democracy than an undemocratic body whose membership disproportionately tilts toward a handful of elite schools and who get their marching orders from major corporations, who have been caught making up stuff so many times that they make George Santos seem like the soul of integrity. (This hasn’t stopped the media from outraged posturing that a member of Congress who is not named Joe Biden would dare to build his career on a pack of crazy lies.)

America isn’t a democracy, but if we were the media would be in the running for the gold medal of democracy threats. The media ruthlessly interferes in elections by acting as the attack dogs of a partisan political party, without ever officially registering their platforms as PACs, spewing the most nakedly brazen lies while calling for the censorship of their political opponents for spreading “disinformation”.

Between its pre-election hit jobs and rigged polls, the media grotesquely distorts elections in a way that no amount of “disinformation” on social media could possibly hope to compete with in a century.

The vox populi, in the form of surveys, regularly ranks the media’s trust rating below that of the love child of Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton. The media might have tried to rig them, but even Chicago doesn’t have a single dead ballot harvester who would say a single good thing about the media.

But it’s always the least democratic forces that warn of threats to democracy.

The media brings on experts, a group even less representative than the media, to explain that Republicans and anyone who isn’t a leftist, pose a serious threat to democracy. Especially if people elect them to public office. Then radical billionaires like George Soros of Pierre Omidyar convene sessions at the think tanks that breed those experts on how to fight “populist” threats to democracy.

And those threats usually involve people democratically voting for candidates who aren’t Democrats.

That’s also known as populism, which the media portrays as the next worst thing to organized religion.

But if there’s anything less democratic than a Nazi-collaborating billionaire convening Ivy League grads to discuss how to stop people from voting for candidates they disapprove of, it would have to involve the Castro family. It’s always the people and institutions who are the real threat to democracy who bluster about the threat to democracy. But how better to threaten democracy than in the name of democracy?

After generations of elites declaring class warfare on behalf of the poor by advocating for the elimination of the middle class, the elites switched to calling for the elimination of free elections in order to protect and fortify democracy from the people going to the polls. The exciting new version of democracy involves elites paying ballot harvesters to find the votes to elect the politicians they support.

This twisted version of privately-funded elections has the same relationship to democracy as Doordash and UbetEats do to homecooked meals. Or to the other elite project of replacing women with men in the name of feminism. Just think of the new privately funded and publicly manipulated elections as the democratic equivalent of Steve showing up to the female swim team with a pink bow in his hair.

Just because it ‘identifies’ as democracy doesn’t mean it’s anything more that oligarchy in drag.

Threats to democracy don’t just happen in America. Every time a conservative party wins an election in Europe, Australia, Canada or even Pitcairn Island, it’s a threat to democracy. In Israel, the media is warning that the plans of the new democratically elected conservative government to allow democratically elected legislatures to occasionally overrule the decisions of a high court whose members are democratically chosen by the court is a threat to democracy.

Our media and theirs have sympathetically reported on “pro-democracy” protests by activists wearing the red shirts of Marxist organizations and waving the terrorist flags of the PLO whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was last elected almost two decades ago. Now that’s real democracy for you.

Much as the Left has redefined free speech to mean censorship, censorship to mean schools not handing graphic sex novels to 10-year-olds, feminism to mean denying the existence of women, and science to mean anti-technology cults convinced that technology is destroying the planet, it has redefined democracy to mean the elimination of elections, not to mention the political opposition.

Democracy as a practice is being forced to make way for democracy as a value. Like the difference between science as a value and as a practice, democracy as a value impersonates, hollows out and finally nullifies the practice of democracy as a threat to the value of democracy. Transforming a practice into a value identifies it with an ideology. And makes maintaining the power of that ideology becomes more important than the practice of science, democracy or anything else.

The purpose of power, as a dead white Englishman named Orwell once observed, is power.

Every system, no matter how authoritarian, claims to be rooted in the same noble ideals as democracy as a value: the welfare of the people, the stability of society and the upholding of our standards.

The “threat to democracy” agitprop is fundamentally no different than the agitprops that the USSR. Nazi Germany and Communist China justified their respective tyrannies. Suppressing democracy in the name of democracy, the freedom of mankind, the will of the people, or national greatness are just variations on the same excuse.

The easiest way to spot a real threat to democracy is to find the nearest expert warning of threats to democracy. His solution to those threats will invariably involve restrictions on speech, centralized control over elections, and targeted ballot harvesting to find enough votes to nullify actual voters.

According to him, just letting people speak their minds and vote is a threat to democracy because then people like him, who truly believe in democracy, won’t be able to maintain a monopoly on the marketplace of ideas and will occasionally run the risk of losing elections.

And then people might be able to democratically decide who is the real threat to democracy.





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, January 26, 2023

What the Latest Arrest Says About FBI Corruption

By On January 26, 2023 In
On Saturday, the FBI arrested one of its own. Charles McGonigal, who used to head counterintel for the Bureau in New York and investigated Trump over Russiagate, was busted at JFK Airport and has been charged with violating the sanctions placed on Oleg Deripaska.

Deripaska, a Russian oligarch allied with Putin, has his name scrawled on parts of Russiagate. Before Christopher Steele was brought on board to produce the infamous dossier aimed at Trump, the British ex-agent had been working on a project for Deripaska to go after Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who would also prove to be an FBI target.

In the tangled relationship that is an apt metaphor for Russiagate, the Russian billionaire appeared at times to be an FBI asset and at other times employed FBI personnel.

McGonigal is reportedly one of a number of ex-FBI agents who became freelance consultants, like American versions of Steele, under investigation. And connections between ex-FBI officials and the Russians have gone even higher than McGonigal. Louis Freeh, Bill Clinton’s former FBI director, represented a number of Russian oligarchs and his deceased predecessor, Director William Sessions worked for a top Russian mafia figure linked to Putin.

We may very well find that the retired FBI officials who haven’t gotten contracts as commentators for cable news have gone to work for the Russians. And McGonigal may be the first of a number of FBI figures who were tasked with fighting Russian influence who instead learned enough to go to work for the Russians.

If McGonigal is guilty, it’s because he was following in the footsteps of retired FBI directors and top elected officials. Deripaska had previously managed to purchase the services of former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole to “persuade U.S. officials his client isn’t a criminal” and of a firm linked to Hillary’s communications director and Bill Clinton’s deputy press secretary. When you can buy both sides of the 1996 presidential election, why quibble at a mere FBI official? Russia may be a mafia state, but unfortunately we’ve become one too.

A long list of American political elites had taken Deripaska’s money. And the FBI had been corrupted into serving the political interests of that elite rather than protecting the homeland.

When it came to Deripaska, the FBI’s priorities were helping Hillary Clinton win an election.

Even while Deripaska was suspected of, according to the New York Times, “extortion, bribery and even murder”, he was able to spend time in New York while the FBI tried to solicit information from him about Trump’s Russian connections. Instead of ‘flipping’ Deripaska, the Russian oligarch allegedly flipped the head of FBI counterintelligence operations in New York who would have likely led efforts to gain information from him on Trump.

Deripaska had apparently employed quite a few former government officials like Jonathan Winer, a former top Kerry aide, who lobbied for the Russian oligarch and who also promoted the Steele dossier. The Russian oligarch claims to be the victim in all this. As does Igor Danchenko: the alleged source for much of the Steele dossier and the subject of a failed prosecution effort by Special Counsel Durham. And yet even defenders of the Steele dossier have been forced to argue that it was ‘tainted’ by Russian intelligence. And that means the FBI was tainted too.

But the FBI was tainted as a secondary effect of being politicized by tainted figures.

The Clintons, who had initiated Russiagate, as usual had led the way. In 2009, Hillary Clinton arrived bearing a ‘Reset Button’. The button, pilfered from a hotel swimming pool, was meant to symbolize the desire of the Obama administration for a new relationship with Russia. All it really symbolized was that the Clintons, like the Russians, would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. And the real relationship launched with that button was between Russia and the Clintons.

This was the same year that Deripaska hired a firm tied to the Clintons. The head of that firm, who would also work for the Russian foreign ministry, would later show up working with Steele and a Justice Department official involved in Russiagate to help the Russian oligarch.

In 2010, a Russian investment bank paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to deliver a speech and Putin called to offer his personal appreciation. Meanwhile the Russians were slowly swallowing Uranium One while investors wrote their checks to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary Clinton, who would later reinvent herself as a hawk, conveniently opposed sanctions on Russia.

In 2015, McGonigal was CC’d on a briefing given by the FBI to the Clinton campaign warning that the Bureau had information that a foreign government was “attempting to influence Hillary Clinton through lobbying and campaign contributions”. Rather than investigating potential criminal activity and national security violations by the Clintons, the FBI instead gave them a ‘heads up’ that there was suspicious behavior taking place.

McGonigal had been working on Russian counterintelligence matters since at least the 90s. He had close ties to former FBI Director James Comey. When Trump fired Comey, McGonigal, speaking in an official capacity, called him “one of the most loved leaders that we’ve had” and stated that “many of us who were nominated for leadership positions by him will forever hold him in esteem as we progress through our FBI careers.”

Comey, along with other FBI figures, had signed off on Hillary Clinton’s actions. And there was every reason to believe that the Clintons were the ones who were actually tied to Russia.

Russiagate was a masterstroke that took one of Hillary’s greatest legal vulnerabilities and turned it around so that the country has spent the last six years debating Trump’s ties to Russia while at the same time justifying illegal surveillance and prosecution of her opponent’s associates.

But that victory was ultimately pyrrhic. Hillary still lost the election and her corruption, like that of the Biden family, provided an opening for foreign countries looking to buy influence in America. Beginning with the Clinton era, a generation of FBI officials have alternated between working for the Clintons and the Russians while compromising our national security and domestic politics.

A corrupted FBI leadership did the dirty work of the Clintons, who were looking to redirect the blame for their Russian ties, and then in some cases decided to cut out the middleman by working directly for the Russian oligarchs.

In Washington D.C., retired generals go to work for defense contractors, retired IRS officials teach corporations how to avoid paying taxes and retired FBI officials go to work for the Russians. And aspiring presidents, like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, open nonprofits that allow them to legally take cash from foreign countries while prepping their future administrations.

FBI officials are just copying what they’ve seen top elected officials get away with doing.

Russiagate and what happened to the FBI can’t be understood apart from the routine corruption of a city whose public servants work for the government in order to trade on that knowledge. The grand hypocrisy of Russiagate was that this corrupt political class used its Russian and international connections to smear Trump with their own crimes. Trump wasn’t working for Moscow, but sometimes it seems as if it’s hard to find anyone in Washington D.C. who isn’t.






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

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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Director of Movie Co-Starring Sex Predator Smears Justice Kavanaugh

By On January 24, 2023 In
There was big news at the Sundance Film Festival, formerly the haunt of Harvey Weinstein, a new documentary smearing Justice Kavanaugh, once again, as a high school sex predator.

The folks at Sundance know all about sexual predators. Don’t take my word for it. Take it from this Washington Post op-ed, “Everyone at Sundance knew what Harvey Weinstein was.” But after the requisite political pieties, Hollywood is back to doing what it does best.

Changing the subject and smearing Republicans with projections of their own filth.

The Hollywood Reporter, splashily announced that Doug Liman, “the sought-after features director behind titles like Swingers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Bourne Identity — spent all of 2022 making his documentary debut about the government investigation into now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” The documentary will be, ironically, titled, “Justice”.

The publication understandably neglects to mention that Harvey Weinstein gave Liman his big break by snapping up “Swingers” for $5.5 million in a mafia style event. “A Weinstein underling showed up at Liman’s house, tapped on the window, handed Liman his cell phone. Weinstein was on the line.” Liman got rich while Vince Vaughn, who actually starred in it, got paid scale.

Now Liman has thoughts about what Justice Kavanaugh was doing in high school. His partners, Story Syndicate, coming off big hits, “Harry & Meghan”, “Fauci” and “Mayor Pete”, plus a doc touting Stacey Abrams, have some more leftist agitprop nonsense here. The Syndicate’s Dan Cogan would like everyone to forget about “The Hunting Ground”: the Weinstein Company’s documentary, which used fake statistics and a scene from a prank video as proof that there was an epidemic of campus rapes. The actual rape epidemic involved Harvey Weinstein.

But it’s 2023 and Liman would like to talk about what happened in 2018, not 2017.

“I can’t stress enough how personally significant the Supreme Court is and how important it is that we vet the people who sit on it,” Liman whines. “We were promised an investigation that never happened.”

Weeks of desperate media efforts to dig up increasingly implausible smears weren’t enough.

“It shouldn’t be this hard to have an open and honest conversation about whether or not a Justice on the Supreme Court assaulted numerous women as a young man,” Liman whines.

Before Liman began conducting an investigation of Kavanaugh and the Supreme Court, perhaps he should have had “an open and honest conversation” about the co-star of his other fictional movie, “The Instigators,” which co-stars Casey Affleck. Ben Affleck’s even less talented brother was sued for sexual harassment by two women. One of them claims that he crawled into bed with her while she was asleep, the other that he “violently” grabbed her to force her to stay in his hotel room. He settled out of court.

Doug Liman’s two projects involve partnering with an alleged sexual harasser to make a movie and making a documentary accusing a Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct.

This is the height of hypocrisy even for the planet’s most hypocritical industry.

“I don’t have a political ax to grind,” Liman claims of the cinematic smear campaign.

Liman’s political axe is almost as hidden as Harvey Weinstein’s habit of attacking anything in a skirt. He shot MoveOn ads and his dad was leftist activist Arthur Liman who served as the chief counsel for the Democrat effort to take down the Reagan administration with the Iran Contra affair. And Doug Liman has suggested that a character in his Bourne anti-American movie series was modeled on Oliver North. His brother, Judge Lewis J. Liman, is a federal judge.

The director decided to self-finance a hit film on a Supreme Court justice. And if Kavanaugh were to be forced to step down, Doug’s brother could be nominated for the position.

How did Doug’s brother end up as a federal judge? Lewis J. Liman’s nomination was pitched to the Trump administration by Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Doug Liman has hosted a number of fundraisers for Schumer. You don’t need to be Jason Bourne to figure out this one.

Someone should make a documentary.

But never mind, Doug Liman wants to talk about how Justice Kavanaugh’s high school days in 1982 were not sufficiently investigated by a crack team of experts like Amy Herdy, an “investigative veteran” whose “credits include the college campus sexual assault doc The Hunting Ground”. It’s all over folks. The crack team who didn’t notice that the head of the production company behind the documentary was the one raping everyone is on the case.

“Thanks to this fantastic investigative team and the brave souls who trusted us with their stories, Justice picks up where the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh fell woefully short,” Liman claims. Not to mention the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and a billion dollars worth of media talent who couldn’t come up with anything more than Christine Blasey Ford who claimed that she can’t fly on planes except for all the times she flies on planes.

“Justice“, Liman’s documentary, claims that it has interviews with “friends of Ford’s” which is a lot like those UFO documentaries which, having completely plumbed the well of that 2-minute clip of the drunken mental patient explaining where the Little Green Men probed him, bring on his friends to testify that he sat kind of funny at the bar for a week afterward.

“What Doug and Amy were getting to was a lot of new information, and also a stunning look at the absence of diligence for one of the most important jobs in our country,” Liz Garbus, the other half of Story Syndicate, claims.

Speaking of a lack of due diligence, Garbus had interned at Miramax.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Liman kept the agitprop smear movie secret “for the safety of those working on the film”. Was the production terrified that Justice Kavanaugh would show up in Brooklyn and hit someone with a brogan?

It was Kavanaugh who faced an actual assassination attempt by a leftist nutjob last year. That attack happened because the media colluded with a court insider to leak the Dobbs decision. The Biden administration refused to enforce the law against harassing justices in their homes.

Perhaps someone should make a documentary about that.

But this isn’t the first time that Liman has played this same dishonest game.

When dramatizing the story of discredited antisemitic activist Valerie Plame, Liman’s movie, “Fair Game”, threw in fake scenes of them in danger because they were exposed for what they were by the Bush administration. American audiences were not told that the movie was being produced by a Muslim government that at the time was aligned with Islamic terrorists.

“It was important for me to create a film that lets people come to their own conclusions about the truth and to hear voices that were silenced in 2018 that should not have been silenced in 2018,” Liman claims of his latest effort into the sub-basement of leftist agitprop.

Is there anyone who would doubt that he had spent all this money to make a movie about Justice Kavanaugh whose goal is to let “people come to their own conclusions”?

“Justice” will, according to Liman, let people “hear voices that were silenced in 2018 that should not have been silenced in 2018.” The new definition of “silenced” is being platformed by every media outlet and site in the country, by Senate hearings and by Hollywood. Finally, the director of episodes of the TV series, “I Just Want My Pants Back’ will tell the real truth about what happened in Georgetown Prep in 1982. Then maybe Liman can tackle the question of what happened when the co-star of his new movie allegedly crawled into a woman’s bed in 2010.





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, January 23, 2023

China’s Tax-Deductible Operation to Influence American Students

By On January 23, 2023 In
Senators and law enforcement officials have expressed concern about the presence of the Confucius Institute on college campuses. The Trump administration demanded that it register as a foreign mission. It has been the subject of congressional investigations, a defense boycott, warnings from cabinet members, and scrutiny at the highest levels of government.

And yet multiple Confucius Institute branches are fundraising in the United States and the D.C. office, the Confucius Institute U.S. Center, remains a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the IRS.

The Confucius Institute’s office on Embassy Row, just off Dupont Circle, less than a dozen blocks from the White House, is part of a global presence that stretches from D.C. to China.

And it’s one that has many government officials worried.

The FBI has expressed concern about the CCP front group. 2021’s National Defense Authorization Act blocked Defense Department funding for campuses where Confucius Institutes were embedded. That concern has not extended to the IRS which has targeted conservative nonprofits, but has shown no interest in an enemy front group’s nonprofit status.

To the IRS, conservative politics disqualify a nonprofit, but not foreign influence or Communism.

It is too busy scrutinizing $600 Venmo transactions by Americans to bother taking a closer look at an operation by our leading geopolitical enemy trying to manipulate American students. An organization whose presence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, warned “has never been more concerning,nor more consequential.”

Liu Yunshan, the Chinese Communist regime’s propaganda boss, declared that, “We should do well in establishing and operating overseas cultural centers and Confucius Institutes.”

The Confucius Institute was described as as “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.”

Assistant Secretary David R. Stillwell of the State Department warned that, “Confucius Institutes who work for the Hanban, who work for the Communist Party, cannot masquerade as benign academic activities institutions.” The State Department in 2020 was tracking “around 500 Confucius classrooms; these are K through 12. Each is affiliated with a university-based Confucius Institute. Right now, we’re tracking 75 Confucius Institutes operating in the U.S.”

Even as the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department were coping with the Confucius Institute and its branches, the IRS was too busy fighting conservatives.

And as a registered nonprofit, the Confucius Institute was able to take in tax-free donations so that enemy propaganda was being subsidized by American taxpayers.

The Confucius Institute is not alone. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), often described by Iranian dissidents as the “Iran Lobby” and accused of taking its orders from Tehran, is also a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The Muslim Brotherhood built a vast network of 501(c)(3) nonprofits that spin off other nonprofits despite the fact that it is a foreign enemy organization.

But the IRS tolerance of the Confucius Institute is particularly glaring because multiple national security and foreign affairs arms of the government have warned about the Chinese organization. And while Democrats have obstructed oversight of the Confucius Institute, there has been some bipartisan criticism and support for more serious measures against the Institute.

Nor is it the only example of Chinese foreign influence.

The Committee of 100, which accused Republican candidates of racism before the 2022 midterms, is a 501(c)(3) that has been linked by some media outlets to organizations controlled by Communist China and its political allies. There are other nonprofits that have been accused of functioning as community groups while spreading Communist propaganda.

But it’s the Confucius Institute that remains the focus for many activists because of its large scope and its presence on college campuses. And because its status remains unique.

During the Trump administration, the State Department’s fact sheet actually noted that, “The Office of Chinese Language Council International (Hanban), an organization affiliated with the PRC Ministry of Education, has historically served as the Beijing-based parent organization of the Confucius Institute U.S. Center and, through it, supports many of the individual CIs. Filings with the Internal Revenue Service indicate that CIUS is directly funded by Hanban.”

How is it that the State Department can use IRS documents to show that the Confucius Institute is backed by the Chinese government, yet the IRS can’t seem to locate its own information?

Universities which profit from Confucius Institute cash have been the loudest defenders of the organization. The Brookings Institute, which is a neighbor of the Confucius Institute in D.C. and has a history of ties to foreign governments and influence operations, defended it. And Brookings remains one of the loudest voices in the Democrat foreign policy establishment.

The IRS leadership knows that an investigation of the Institute would not be welcome.

The Biden administration had dropped Trump’s proposed oversight of the Confucius Institute while the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act provided for a waiver for Department of Defense funding for colleges hosting the Communist group. Last year, Zhongsan Liu was convicted of fraud in a campaign to bring Chinese Communist recruiters working for their government to come to the United States. The case had ties to the Confucius Institute in Boston.

The status of the Confucius Institute demonstrates the extreme dereliction of the duty by the IRS to police foreign influence nonprofits. The Secretary of State and the Attorney General both warned of the Institute during the Trump administration. The FBI Director expressed his concern. The Justice Department has brought a case involving it, Congress has used defense spending to force it off college campuses and the IRS has documented the Confucius Institute’s ties to the Chinese government and yet it still refuses to do anything about its nonprofit status.

It’s busy chasing gig workers delivering pizza.

Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, a pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, had exposed the abuses of the tax code by radical nonprofits. But not only does the IRS tolerate blatant violations by domestic leftist groups, it’s even willing to turn a blind eye to the activities of foreign leftists up to and including an enemy regime.

Allowing the Confucius Institute to function as a nonprofit allows China to gain access to Americans. After all the disproven claims of “foreign influence” on social media, the Biden administration and its allies have shown little interest in foreign influence in our classrooms.

And the IRS, by refusing to do its job, is enabling China’s funding of enemy propaganda in America. The failure by the Internal Revenue Service to act against other leftist nonprofits has damaged the economy and society, it has also cost lives, but the refusal of the IRS to act against the Confucius Institute treasonously threatens American national security.





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, January 21, 2023

A Nation of Victims is Doomed to Fail

By On January 21, 2023 In
America has become a nation of ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’. Everyone is getting over a ‘trauma’ or ‘processing’. They demand special privileges because of the suffering of their ancestors. They trot out studies which prove that they are somehow disadvantaged. They gorge on self-help books and deploy therapy terminology to accuse everyone else of mistreating them.

Our society has turned into a cross between a Marxist academic conference and therapy session where Marxist terminology like “systemic racism” and therapy talk like “gaslighting narcissist” form key parts of the grammar of perpetual victimhood.

Politics has been reduced to victimhood advocacy and we are worse off for it.

Victims are not good people. Postmodern influencer culture conflates ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, but they are two very different things. Survivors are people who pick themselves up and go on. Victims give up and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing except blaming everyone else.

After the slaves were freed, some made long journeys to major cities, others built families and worked hard to provide for them. They persevered despite lynchings and racism. Over 150 years later, some of their descendants claim that nothing can be expected from them because they’re suffering from Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome even though the only place they’ve seen slavery is on television. That’s the difference between survivors and victims.

After the Holocaust, Jewish people who had seen their entire families killed in front of them remarried, had children and started their lives again. Often they didn’t even talk about what they had experienced until decades had passed. Others helped build a nation out of the desert sands. Now some of their great-grandchildren claim they’re so fragile they need safe spaces.

The same is true of all Americans. We are all the descendants of survivors. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought in wars, persisted through economic turmoil and didn’t give up. Whatever happened to them, they didn’t see themselves as the victims. They were strong, not because they postured on social media, but because they got up whenever they were knocked down. They had their grievances and resentments, but they didn’t build their lives around them.

Survivors are motivated by love and duty. They understand that there is more to life than their own pain. They redeem their suffering by making their lives matter. That is the essence of the human ideal. It’s how nations and families are built. And it’s how our nation is coming apart.

Victims are driven by hate. Their pain is performance. It’s what makes them special and the only purpose left to them. The more they feel, the angrier they get. And they want to be angry. There are victims who have actually suffered, but the majority in our culture are ‘identity victims’ or ‘therapy victims’ whose victimhood is based on the terminology of academic Marxism or shrink sessions: who have suffered nothing except a lack of emotional fulfillment.

These creatures, who once handed out radical fliers at campus cafes and poisoned family reunions, went ‘viral’ through social media and generated legions of sympathetic followers. Their perpetual outrage at being victims drives our culture and our politics. Incapable of talking about anything other than themselves, they have ‘built their brand’ into the model for our society.

America went from a nation of courage, allegiance and responsibility where people made commitments to something larger than themselves, used their pain to build better things, to a society of wallowers competing over who has the biggest pain and the least responsibility.

The difference between survivors and victims is that survivors have a larger purpose, while victims have made victimhood into their purpose. And they want it to be our purpose.

Politics has become a dysfunctional therapy session, an intersectional debate over whose pain is superior, and who is just faking it, as if nations are defined by individual pain rather than cultures of aspiration. New victimhood causes proliferate every day while the old ones fight it out. Whose pain is superior, feminists or transgender men? Trauma is our national resource now and there’s only so much of it to go around. Those who have the most are at the top.

Victimhood grants a moral superiority that liberates the victim from moral responsibility.

If you’re an official victim, you can rampage around cities, looting, beating and burning, with few legal and certainly no moral consequences. Beyond economics, replacing ‘equality’ with ‘equity’ takes us from an equality of moral obligations to an equity of moral outcomes. And race riots, canceling people, and rigging college admissions are just ways of achieving ‘moral equity’.

Behavior that is objectively wrong, violence, hate, harassment and terrorism, becomes right if the perpetrators are victims who claim to be striving for a society of moral equity. But the truth about victims is that they never want to stop being what they are. If they did, they would become survivors. Victimhood is convenient and comforting. Victims never have to learn to do better. They spend all of their time telling others to do better so that xer’s feelings aren’t hurt again.

Victimhood views failure as a conspiracy, rather than a choice, and nations and societies that embrace victimhood quickly turn into failed states. America used to get things done. Now we no longer win wars or can even stock supermarkets. There are a thousand points of failure and they begin with a culture that is hostile to achievement and supportive of victimhood.

Our educational system promotes those who refuse to learn, government subsidizes professional victimhood and corporations overlook those who work in favor of those who don’t, but are more likely to sue or throw a public tantrum. Trillions are spent with no return and nothing gets done because the real product is the virtue signaling of victimhood.

Victimhood is an excuse for failure and so we’ve become an unserious society. Victims are incapable of thinking about anything except themselves and our culture has become stuck in the same narcissistic loop of personalities. Everyone wants to be a celebrity, to feel special, and to play the victim when the social media collective fails to give them the due that they deserve.

The loudest voices are those who complain rather than inspire, who give up rather than get ahead, who explain that the game is rigged so everyone should join them in staying home.

Victims make a fetish of their pain. They are ‘in touch with their emotions’ because they inhabit them all the time. They are so busy selfishly feeling their feelings that they can’t be bothered to care about the impact on anyone else. Just as eskimos have many words for ‘snow’, victims have many ways to describe their pain. Their unhappiness is ‘trauma’, talking to people is ‘unpaid emotional labor’ and they spend all their time ‘processing’ or feeling their feelings.. Watching Netflix is ‘self-care’ to recover from all the ‘trauma’ of all their ‘unpaid emotional labor’.

Even their most ordinary activities are part of the fantastic drama that is their existence. Every breath they take is a labored ‘resistance’ to a vast systemic conspiracy out to destroy them.

And while such woke performative antics are more common among social media millennials than in everyday life, the underlying conviction that our emotions matter more than our responsibilities, that anger exempts us from morality, and truth takes a backseat to ‘my truth’ has spread throughout our culture with disastrous results on our functioning and our future.

A society is inspired by its leading figures and its culture is shaped by its stories. Victimhood has become our story. It pervades our classrooms, our fiction, our new myths and our discourse. It has left us in a state of arrested development because we have become incapable of moving forward. Instead of building new things, we rehash past history, purge ‘problematic’ figures and assign blame for the failures of the present to the dead history of the past.

Victimhood is obsessed with the past. Unlike survivors, victims never want to move forward. They want to remain tethered to the moments that defined them. America was always a nation that looked forward, that imagined the impossible and then realized it. Now, like many backward societies, it has become stuck in the past, rewriting its history to make its founding more evil, churning out excuses for today’s failures in the endless root causes for infinite victimhood.

No wonder most Americans, for the first time in history, no longer believe in a better future.

America was a nation of survivors. It can only endure as a nation that looks to the future. A nation of victims is doomed to fail. It fails because that is the only way its victims can succeed.






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, January 19, 2023

The Unsustainable Left

By On January 19, 2023 In
“Today, the Democratic Party may be the most ruthlessly organized and efficient political entity in the world,” the Wall Street Journal‘s Editor-at-Large Gerard Baker wrote. “We can denounce the activism and deplore the outcome, but we can only marvel at the political efficiency with which it has been achieved.”

The Democratic consolidation is the product of ideological, economic and cultural forces. The Left seized the commanding high ground of the entertainment industry and the educational system to cultivate generations that were culturally primed to accept its ideas.

The current state of affairs that Baker bemoans, in which Democrats have captured white college graduates and Republicans now hold the working class, were triumphs of culture over economic interest. The Left did not win a debate of ideas, it formed a tribe of elites. Behind the violence, the radicalism and the posturing are the daughters of CEOs and the Ivy League.

The Democrats became the party of elites. That elitism has been thinly disguised by an ideological identity politics coalition of white elites and minority activists.

Democrats as a party retain the rigidly organized machine that Baker describes as an “impressive willingness to band together” so that “in 2009 and 2010 many of them voted for ObamaCare well aware that it could cost them their political futures. Like kamikaze pilots cheerfully climbing up into their Zero fighters at dawn, they knew they had an obligation larger than their own survival, a duty that superseded their doubts.” That was because they knew that they owed their allegiance and their careers not to their voters, but to the movement.

Dissent has virtually vanished among the members of the party, and its allied organizations, including nonprofits and the media, but there are signs that the coalition is crumbling.

The Latino voters who were supposed to turn Texas and Florida blue have been acting like a swing constituency. In Florida, DeSantis even won the Puerto Rican vote that had been engineered to transform the state. In New York, Lee Zeldin’s close showing and the GOP’s House Majority was powered by Asian and Orthodox Jewish voters.

A New York Times article described how “Democrats are trying to determine how they can stem — and, if possible, reverse — the growing tide of Asian American voters drifting away from the party.”

The two policies that are alienating Asians, legalizing crime and dismantling educational standards, are championed by the black politicians who form the core of the Democrat minority bloc.

“Why should I support Democrats who discriminate against me? We see Democrats are working for the interest of African Americans and Latino communities against Asian communities,” one Asian voter told the paper.

State Senator John Liu, a career leftist, expressed the same idea cloaked in woke jargon. “Many of the social justice issues in this country are still viewed from a Black and white lens, and Asian Americans are simply undetected by that lens and therefore feel completely marginalized.”

The Democrats are even experiencing some turbulence among black male voters and gay voters who are, in small part, becoming more comfortable voting Republican.

Like the Asian and Orthodox Jewish vote in New York City, this has more to do with the inherent instability of the Democrat coalition than a newfound Republican genius for minority outreach.

The ‘rainbow coalition’ and the majority-minority vision for a takeover was built on denying the tensions between different groups. Intersectionality, meant to create a victimhood hierarchy, instead further alienated different members of the coalition with competing demands.

The coalition has become a house of cards that is always threatening to overturn.

When LGBTQ activists demand sexualized material in schools, Muslim activists protest at school board meetings. Black Lives Matter rioters demand an end to police and prisons, and Asian voters decamp. Transgender activists call gay men and lesbians transphobes and they head for the door. White woke elites demand lockdowns, Latinos shrug and vote them out.

A more accurate view of the Democrats is that they are rigidly organized at the top, but coming apart at the bottom. They have persevered by controlling the narrative, introducing distractions and juggling different demographics and causes to goose turnout their way.

But this game of political Jenga can’t last forever. A simultaneous defection by two minority groups in the wrong areas of the country or by one group and white college voters would be systemically devastating to the viability of the Democrats as a national political party.

The Moneyball dictatorship backed by Big Data, ballot harvesting, media propaganda and innumerable other tactics is a highly sophisticated operation that has so thoroughly corrupted the electoral system into an oligarchy that it has become indistinguishable from a tyranny.

Every effort is made to prevent voters from understanding that. And the vast majority don’t have an inkling as to how the machine works. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not increasingly aware that the Democrats have become the party of wealthy and powerful elites.

The white working class was the first to realize it. The machine blamed their defection on racism using Obama as its human shield. But the most salient fact about Obama was not that he was black, it was that he was the child of wealthy radicals whose worldview had been shaped, despite his memoirs, by his time in the Ivy League and the institutional elite Left. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, fellow members of that same set, have been met with shrugs by the country.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Instead of reclaiming the white working class, his original function on the Obama ticket, Joe Biden has overseen the growing gap between the elites and the working class. His signature policies like electric car subsidies or student loan debt dismissal pander to the Obama class.

Worse still, the party suffered record Latino and Asian defections as it focused on black voters.

“Ruthless organization” and the ideological consolidation that governs the Democrats has its limits. The Left got this far because it understood that the objective of the battles was to win a war. Now it is taking pride in surviving battles even as its ability to win the war is coming into question. The growing alienation of minorities may have had only a limited impact in 2020 and 2020, but it’s an existential threat to the long-term survival of the Democratic Party.

If this were the result of a Republican strategy, then the Democrats could counter it, but Republican outreach to minorities, outside of New York, Florida and Texas has been weak. The general state of minority outreach lacks resources, organization on the ground and sustained commitment, while communicating to minority voters in the crudest possible cliches.

The real problem is that the Democrat coalition carries the seeds of its own destruction.

The rigid ideological consolidation at the top has paved the way for a radical agenda that may seem logically streamlined on Capitol Hill, CNN or at the Aspen Institute, but looks like an endless civil war down at the bottom. And what Democrats are discovering is that most minority voters, unlike black people and secular Jews, are not especially committed to them.

They aren’t yellow dog Democrats. They vote that way for transactional reasons.

The majority-minority strategy is built on the myth that members of minority groups identify as Democrats on a cultural level. The evidence is ample that the majority of them do not.

The cultural cult that has usurped a historic national party boasts mostly white upper class members. These are the same people who can decide to deplatform you, cut up your credit cards or fire you, but they still wield far less power than those of most oligarchies. In their echo chambers, they have overestimated their strengths and ignored their systemic weaknesses.

And that has always been true of the Left.

Like all radical ideologies, the Left is unsustainable. It has a great aptitude for developing belief systems, spreading ideas, converting new members, seizing power and maximizing control. All of that is well underway in America. But its great strength of ideological convictions is also its fatal flaw. Like most fanatics, it cannot believe anything other than that it is destined to win because it is on the right side of history. It does not understand that power, no matter how it is monopolized and guarded, is ultimately cyclical and that people eventually tire of their rulers.

Even if the Republicans never defeat the Democrats, the Left is paving the way for its defeat.





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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