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Thursday, June 29, 2023

The Soros Succession

By On June 29, 2023
Millions of people watched the series finale of Succession, a show based on the Murdoch family succession drama, complete with shots at Republicans, conservatives and FOX News.

The real life succession drama of the Soros family was however greeted with a few media puff pieces including at Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The passage of the $25 billion Open Society network which topples governments, uproots societies and funds the leftist internationale to the next generation of the Soros clan garnered media press releases.

But there’s plenty of succession drama in the family of the leftist billionaire.

As George’s firstborn, Robert Soros might have been expected to inherit the throne. A trader like his father, Robert was temporarily given the reins to Soros Fund Management before having them taken back, and then given back again. Robert’s marriage broke up after he allegedly cheated on his wife, who had cancer, with a nude model. The divorce case dragged on, threatening his finances, and he left to start his own Soros Capital Management.

Robert’s younger brother Jonathan, who had shared the role of chief investor with him, seemed like the likely heir apparent. Jonathan, like his father and unlike his older brother, had a much more ambitious political vision, getting down and dirty with the leftist groups his father backed.

Jonathan even carried the middle name of Tidavar: George’s antisemitic father, who charged Jews trying to escape the Holocaust “whatever the market would bear” and who had dispatched his son to participate in the confiscation of Jewish property to “cheer the unhappy lad up”.

The second Soros son could soon be found mingling at Democrat fundraisers and leftist organization meetings including those of the Democracy Alliance. Like his father, Jonathan had an ambitious program for transforming elections. But in 2021, the Soros finances took a beating, and, after an unstated break with his father, Jonathan Soros struck out on his own.

“We didn’t get on on certain points,” George Soros commented dryly. “That became evident to both of us, particularly to him.”

Of the two sons to whom George was planning to bequeath his empire in 2004, Robert and Jonathan, both were gone. The two heirs had been meant to rule the dual empire: Robert would handle the Soros money and Jonathan the political activism. But George’s relationships with his oldest sons, like most of his relationships with human beings, fell apart.

Soros was running out of sons to take his place and carry on his poisoned legacy.

Raised in what he had described as a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”, George Soros, still in his late twenties, had begun dating his first wife, Annaliese Witschak, a German immigrant from Hamburg. His parents were overjoyed that his girlfriend wasn’t Jewish. With their approval, George Soros married Annaliese and moved out of their apartment and into hers.

But George was a cold and terrible person. By the late seventies, he was very wealthy and his family hated him. Harshly critical of his sons, he showed Robert and Jonathan little in the way of affection. And his marriage to Annaliese broke up after he refused to look for their daughter, Andrea, after she had stayed out too late.

The same day that George Soros left his family, the 48-year-old met a 23-year-old woman playing tennis. “How old are you anyway,” he later demanded. He may not have realized at the time that Susan Weber was Jewish. George’s mother hated her because of that. “My mother was quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish,” he told an interviewer.

George’s mother did what she could to sabotage the marriage, including, in one memorable moment, calling him and screaming, “my son, everyone is going to think you are a homosexual.” But even without her, his second marriage was never going to be any happier. George had been too busy for his children from his first marriage and he had even less time for new ones.

Alex and Gregory were raised by Ping: a nanny from China. A family friend commented that, “he is the kind of father who can interact with a 15-year-old much better than a two-year-old.”

The second divorce left behind two more lost sons. Unlike Robert and Jonathan, Alex and Gregory had not been raised to succeed their absent father and had no talent for it.

Little is known of Gregory, the youngest, who has avoided the spotlight, but Alex grew up a “shy… chubby kid” and was generally overlooked in college. A few years after his parents divorced, Alex began working hard to lose weight and used his father’s wealth to hook up with models and fund massive parties filled with celebrities.

It wouldn’t take much of a psychologist to figure out what was the matter. Alex’s father had collected money and power, while his mother filled the hole by renovating houses and collecting art. Their son had dreamed of “being normal”, but that obviously was not going to happen.

“I was very angry at him, I felt unwanted,” Alex Soros complained. “He had a very hard time communicating love, and he was never really around.”

What connected Alex, like Robert and Jonathan, to their father was money and power.

In 2012, the New York Times ran its first major profile on Alex Soros headlined, “Making Good on the Family Name”.

The third son had discovered that the way to his father’s heart was through social justice and had revamped his trashy parties as fundraisers for political causes. The approach eventually paid off as a decade later, George Soros handed over his political empire to Alex Soros.

Alex Soros has the thinnest resume of his brothers. He lacks the financial acumen of Robert or Jonathan, and shows no apparent leadership skills or larger vision. But that may be exactly why he survived and his half brothers did not. With Robert and Jonathan, a breaking point eventually arrived and they struck out on their own, but Alex lacks the skills or the backbone for it.

“I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood,” George Soros confessed. The radical billionaire had compared himself to a deity over the years. How better to ensure that he could never be overshadowed by his sons than to pick the weakest of them?

That may very well be a major part of the Soros succession story.

“We think alike,” George Soros said of Alex. That is to say, Alex will serve as George’s undead proxy.

George, determined to control his empire even from beyond the grave, may have chosen a feckless party boy who would never challenge him, but just enjoy going to parties and posing with famous people. But there is also another element to the Soros succession story that strikes at the heart of the billionaire’s famously ugly tangled relationship with the Jewish people.

Alex, unlike Robert and Jonathan, is Jewish. And once he dived into political funding, he quickly set himself apart by playing a role in leftist Jewish groups like Jewish Funds for Justice and the Bend the Arc: Jewish Action PAC. His thesis was even titled, “Jewish Dionysus: Heine, Nietzsche and the Politics of Literature”.

“When I was six or seven years old,” Alex Soros related in an essay, George had sat him down and told him about how he watched the Holocaust play out, claiming that his grandfather had “helped save other Jews”.

In reality, Tidavar, otherwise a failure, had charged Jews “whatever the market would bear” and worked with Hungarian Nazi collaborators. George would later agree that he had “helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”

George Soros knew better than anyone else how much his parents had hated Jews. Yet, if we are to believe Alex, he told his first Jewish son a different version of the story in which he and his grandfather were heroes fighting Nazis, instead of collaborating with the looters.

“It was the first real bonding experience I ever recall having with him,” Alex Soros related.

There is something darkly fitting that George only bonded with his son at the advanced age of 7 by distorting his family’s actions during the Holocaust into something a child could be proud of.

George, as was his wont, traumatized his son, but also gave him something none of his siblings had. “As other members of my family remained in a kind of hiding, continuing to conceal their identities, I decided to get a bar mitzvah,” Alex later wrote.

Psychoanalyzing self-hating Jews is generally a waste of everyone’s time and the Soros clan is spectacularly malignant even by those standards. While Democrats claim that any critic of Soros is an antisemite, George Soros has spent much of his life hating Jews and defending antisemitism. And yet, having alienated his non-Jewish wife and sons, he is passing his political empire on to his only visibly Jewish son.

George Soros has lived a long time and he may yet change his mind. Alex may end up sharing the same fate as Robert and Jonathan. For now, Alex is working the party circuit: photos of him posing with Pelosi, Schumer, Obama and countless other Democrat figures the way that he once did with celebrities in the Hamptons define one difference between him and his father.

“I’m more political,” Alex Soros told a reporter. George Soros is abundantly political, but Alex’s politics are more conventional. Where his father had a grand vision but limited interest in spending time with politicians, Alex is a social butterfly. Where his father had theories, he has social networks, but that’s true of most politically active socialites.

The Soros networks will continue to do enormous damage but once George is gone, they will lack his ability to leapfrog rivals and nations. Instead they are likely to do more harm in another quarter. Alex’s Jewishness, such as it is, has already led him to fund leftist groups trying to undermine the Jewish community from within. Where his father funded big picture transformations, Alex is living out a fake family history in which his father and grandfather were heroes fighting Nazism, and he believes that is carrying on their legacy by attacking Jews.

Once the chain of succession passed from Robert and Jonathan to Alex, it became entangled in that big lie. The lie about what the Soros family did during the war was at the heart of George’s origin story, to Alex’s relationship with his father and now to the entire Soros network.



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


Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

How U.S. Foreign Aid to Iraq Funds Terrorism Against Americans

By On June 28, 2023
In 2020 and 2021, the United States spent over $600 million on foreign aid in Iraq. That’s down from a high of over $2 billion in 2018 and $4.4 billion in 2016. But it still means that we have blown through over $10 billion on Iraq since 2016. That’s long since we officially withdrew.

Meanwhile, where was Iraq’s money going? Iraq’s latest budget dedicates $2.8 billion to Shiite PMU terror militias including Kataeb Hezbollah: an Iran-backed terror group that has been responsible for the deaths of numerous American soldiers.

At the height of the Iraq War, Kataeb Hezbollah was using Iranian IEDs to kill American soldiers. Kataeb Hezbollah is listed as a foreign terrorist organization which makes it a crime for Americans to fund it. But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from providing massive amounts of foreign aid to Iraq.

While some U.S. conflicts with Jihadists in the region are old news, Kataeb Hezbollah fired rockets at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in 2019, and has bombed U.S. bases in recent years. Kataeb Hezbollah killed two American soldiers in 2020: Army Spc. Juan Miguel Mendez Covarrubias and Air Force Staff Sgt. Marshal D. Roberts.

Politicians and the media have mostly ignored the fact that Americans are continuing to be killed in Iraq, that the Iraqi government is funding their killers, and that we’re funding Iraq.

While Iraq funds Iran’s terror militias, the United States funds the UN Development Programme to “stabilize” Iraq and has invested over $100 million into “conflict, peace and security” funding.

The United States has spent over $1 billion financing the nation’s military while Iraq spends billions financing the Iranian PMU terror militias which are expected to approach a quarter of million Jihadis. The rise of ISIS provided the Shiite regime running Iraq with the perfect excuse for discarding the ISF military built by the U.S. and turning over security to Shiite terror groups.

The foreign policy establishment claims that we need to fund the Iraqi military as a counterbalance to Iran’s PMU militias, but that just allowed Iraq’s government to shift even more defense funding to the Shiite terror groups. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani and his government were backed by the PMU’s and are turning them into an even bigger army.

That’s not surprising since al-Sudani is a second generation member of a Shiite Islamist movement loyal to Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The Shiite Coordination Framework, which is behind the Sudani government, is filled with Shiite Islamists groups with their own militias. For example, the Badr alliance, created by Iran, controls both sizable chunks of Iraq’s military and police forces, as well as one of the larger militias, and has a sizable presence in Iraq’s parliament.

Iraqi democracy consists of Shiite blocs, some Islamists, some fronted by former leaders like Maliki, fighting each other for power and competing for Iran’s favor. Iran has helped them set up militias that, in imitation of Iran’s IRGC and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, also control large portions of the economy, running their own businesses, scoring construction contracts and oil deals.

The foreign policy establishment has refused to acknowledge that Iraq has long since become an Islamic terror state under the political control of Iran and that the only reason it isn’t more of a threat is the constant infighting between the Shiite majority which often turns violent. If Iraq’s Shiite Islamists were ever united under a single leader, like Muqtada Al-Sadr, a perennial player, it will become as much of a threat to the region and the world as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Instead, we keep sinking more money into Iraq in the hope of a better outcome.

Iraq, until recently, was on the list of the top 5 recipients of U.S. foreign aid. And the Baghdad regime continues to come up with new ways to extract money from U.S. taxpayers.

Last month, Prime Minister Al-Sudani claimed that the Islamic terror state was going green and pleaded for foreign aid to save the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which according to media accounts, was blamed on “climate change”. In fact, the Tigris river is a filthy mess because Sadr City’s Islamists pour tons of filth into it. Five million cubic meters of waste are dumped daily into both rivers from sewage to corpses. That isn’t the work of climate change, but of Iraqis.

The United States provided military aid to the Baghdad regime and its military in order to defeat ISIS. But what we were actually doing was intervening in a Shiite-Sunni civil war while disregarding the fact that the side we were backing was just as much our enemy as ISIS.

While military aid has fallen under the Biden administration after the decline of ISIS, much as in Afghanistan, even humanitarian aid easily finds its way into the hands of Islamic terrorists.

Iran’s PMU militias control large swathes of territory, including farmland, own construction companies and demand payoffs from nonprofits who operate in the areas claimed by them. Humanitarian aid, no matter how seemingly benevolent, to people in terrorist areas, funds terror.

It’s a hard lesson that we have failed to learn in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

Like most failed Islamic terror states in the region, Iraq is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. In an effort to crack down on money from Iraq going to Iran, the Treasury Department restricted Iraqi banks from sending dollars to unknown parties. Since much of the Iraqi economy consists of moving dollars to Iran, this has become a real problem.

Despite the existence of the Iraqi dinar, much of the country uses the dollar. And the United States provides pallets of dollars to Iraq that then go on to Iran. Earlier this year, an Iraqi banker warned that if the rules weren’t suspended, “Within one year, most banks will declare bankruptcy”. That says more about what Iraqi banks really do than about our rules.

And yet no amount of economic problems keep the regime in Baghdad from spending billions on its terror militias. That’s a choice and it should not be subsidized by American taxpayers.

Especially when it costs American lives.




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


Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Twice as Many Israelis Died in One Month of Biden as in One Year of Trump

By On June 27, 2023
Each year that Trump was in office, fewer people in Israel were killed by terrorists while every year that Biden has been in office, the number of people killed by terrorists has increased.

2023 looks on track to be the deadliest year in Israel since 2015, under Obama, and the bloodshed is an eightfold increase in Israeli deaths since Trump’s last year in office.

The Biden administration restored Obama’s old policies and doubled down on them. And the death toll in Israel looks the way that it did under Obama. Under Biden, Israelis are dying at similar rates to the way that they did under Obama, but not at all as they did under Trump.

The foreign policy establishment claims that the Trump administration’s foreign policy toward Israel was a failure. And yet during Trump’s last year in office, when all the pro-Israel policies had been implemented, the fewest Israelis were killed in at least a generation.

In one of the least reported events in the region, the violence had all but ended with only three Israeli deaths in 2020. By contrast under Biden, 7 Israelis were killed in just January 2023.

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

What was the secret to peace that had eluded every previous administration? Simple. The Trump administration stopped funding terrorists. And the terrorists stopped killing people.

This is not speculation. All anyone has to do is look at the death toll year by year.

The killings in Israel mostly held steady from Obama’s final year in office to Trump’s first year in office, but fell 18% in 2018 as the Trump administration began to pull away from the old failed policies of the Democrats and the Bush Republicans.

That was also the year that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replaced Rex Tillerson and a Republican congress cut foreign aid to the PLO terrorists and the effects were obvious.

In 2018, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act: named after an Iraq War veteran studying in Israel who was stabbed to death by a terrorist in Jerusalem. The Taylor Force Act cut off a good deal of foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority which limited its ability to fund terrorist attacks.

In 2019, President Trump went even further with a nearly total cutoff of aid to the Palestinian Authority. And the number of terror victims in Israel declined by nearly a quarter.

Not only Israeli deaths were sharply reduced, but casualties among the ‘Palestinian’ terrorists and their human shields fell by more than half from 2018 to 2019.

In 2020, the first year that the cutoff was truly felt, only 3 Israelis were killed.

And only 30 casualties were experienced by the terrorists and their populations.

The Trump and congressional Republican cuts to foreign aid to the PLO terrorists and their political entity had sharply reduced the violence and saved lives on both sides.

Fewer Israelis and Arab Muslims living under Palestinian Authority rule were killed in 2020 than at any time since Obama took office. It wasn’t peace, but it was the closest thing to it.

What should have become a model for moving forward was instead ridiculed and discarded.

When Biden took office, he violated the Taylor Force Act and massively ramped up foreign aid and political support for the terrorists occupying parts of the West Bank and Gaza. And the number of deaths shot up from 3 to 17. Since then deaths from terrorist attacks have increased every year under Biden: nearly doubling by some accounts from 2021 to 2022.

As many Israelis were killed in the first two months of 2023 as in all of 2018. By April, as many Israelis had been killed as in all of 2017: the deadliest year under the Trump administration. As of now, more Israelis have been killed in 2023 than in all of 2018 and 2019 combined.

These numbers show what happens when you fund terrorists and when you stop funding them.

Beyond the raw casualty figures, the number of significant terrorist attacks increased 59% from 2021 to 2022. The number of shooting attacks shot up fourfold by over 200% (while stabbing attacks declined) indicating terrorists who were better armed and prepared.

But even as the bodies piled up, the Biden administration has doubled down on death.

In 2022, Biden met with PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “when I came to office, I reserved the policy — I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.” And promised over $300 billion more.

Money is the engine behind the violence and the Biden administration is providing the cash.

The PLO’s ‘Pay-to-Slay’ or ‘Martyrs Fund’ program rewards terrorists, regardless of their formal affiliation, including ISIS and Hamas members, with salaries and payments for their families.

Terrorists are paid based on the length of their prison sentence. That means successful killers can earn $2,000 to $3,000 a month in a part of the world where the average salary is around $700 a month. It’s five times more profitable to be a terrorist than a teacher.

“We will neither reduce nor prevent [payment] of allowances to the families of martyrs, prisoners and released prisoners, as some seek, and if we had only a single penny left, we would pay it to families of the martyrs and prisoners,” PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas had insisted.

“You sent a report to Congress that officially certified that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO… have not met the legal requirements for ‘terminating payments for acts of terrorism against Israeli and US citizens,’” Senator Ted Cruz challenged a State Department official.

“They are paying for terrorists to murder Americans and to murder Israelis. And nonetheless, this administration is bringing those terrorist leaders to Washington, is bringing them to cocktail parties to wine and dine political leaders.”

“We are working to bring pay-to-slay to an end,” Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf insisted.

The way to end pay-to-slay is to stop sending money to terrorists. Any foreign aid sent into areas controlled by terrorists, whether in Afghanistan or the West Bank or Gaza, finances terrorism. And if you doubt that, just count the money and then count the bodies.

The Trump administration proved that cutting off money to the terrorists ends the violence and the Biden administration demonstrated that restoring the money also brings back the violence.

Peace in the Middle East is not a dream. Just stop funding terrorists and it can be a reality.





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


Thank you for reading.

Monday, June 26, 2023

The Left Can Have Islam or LGBTQA+. Not Both

By On June 26, 2023
Regenbogen, Vienna’s ‘rainbow’ gay pride parade, began with the announcement that three Muslim teenagers with roots in Bosnia and Chechnya, were arrested for planning an attack using axes and knives. The alleged Muslim terrorists were reportedly supporters of ISIS.

Dominik Nepp, the leader of Austria’s conservative Freedom Party, blasted a “completely misguided red-green-pink mass immigration policy that promotes radical Islam in Vienna and throughout Austria.”

“Perhaps at some point the self-proclaimed left-wing moralizers will realize that they are inviting exactly those groups to our country that are in fact their greatest opponents and represent exactly the opposite of what they always preach.”

There’s little chance of that. Austria, like America, still lives in a fantasy world in which the black flags of Islam can co-exist with the rainbow flag, but the fantasy is rapidly coming apart.

Not long ago, the media was hailing Hamtramck as a model with its first all-Muslim city government. Now it’s shocked when the Michigan city banned pride flags on public property.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” former mayor Karen Majewski complained. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”

Majewski has no reason to be surprised. Neither does the media. She broke a city council tie in 2021 between Muslim and non-Muslim city council members in support of the LGBTQ flag.

Asm Kamal Rahman, the president of the local NAACP and a member of the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights, had compared homosexuality to bestiality and pedophilia.

After hailing the all-Muslim council in a city overrun by Yemenis and Bangladeshis as a sign of progress, the realization has arrived that Democrats can have Islam or LGBT, but not both.

How is a party based around building coalitions of minorities supposed to choose?

Islamic teachings were always incompatible with the sexual politics of its new leftist allies. Muslim Brotherhood groups, eager to capitalize on their newfound status after 9/11, avoided directly addressing those issues. CAIR signed letters and appeared at events alongside gay rights groups like HRC. Muslim candidates running for public office even invoked sexual identity

Rep. Ilhan Omar has an entire page dedicated to the “fight for LGBTQIA+ rights”. But local Muslim officials, like those in Hamtramck, are breaking away from the rainbow coalition.

Muslims vocally protested at a school board meeting in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn, like Hamtramck, has a nearly 50% Muslim population. And that appears to be the tipping point. At a quarter of the population, Muslims generally toe the liberal line in public, while approaching the halfway mark, the masquerade ends and Democrats have to make some difficult choices.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s biggest gay rights group, has a page promoting homosexuality’s compatibility with Islam. The Institute for Social Policy & Understanding (ISPU), under Dalia Mogahed, a former Obama adviser and Islamist ally, with an office in Dearborn and backing from Rep. Rashida Tlaib, however released a survey claiming that 0% of Muslims are lesbian or gay.

Even while the visual language of wokeness seen in innumerable ads and stock photos depicts women in hijabs next to gay and transgender people, the reality on the ground is very different.

When Omar Mateen, an Afghan Muslim terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, a cover-up was launched that persists to this day in which the annual anniversary of the Pulse massacre is marked each year as a testament to homophobia, not Islamic terrorism.

While Omar may not have even known that he was in a gay nightclub before he began killing people, other Islamic terrorists have set out to target gay pride events in the United States.

Elvin Hunter Bgorn Williams, a Muslim convert who joined ISIS, discussed driving a “semi-truck” through “the gay pride parade in downtown Seattle”. Amer Alhaggagi, a Berkeley High School graduate, a Yemeni Jihadi whose lawyer called him an “all-American boy”, had declared, “I’m going to place a bomb in a gay club, Wallah or by Allah.”

The media treats Muslim terror attacks as meaningless outliers, but it’s harder to dismiss events in Dearborn and Hamtramck the same way. Or to ignore the fact that Muslims and the LGBT movement have incompatible values and agendas. And the Left can’t claim to champion both.

The Democrats believed that they could build a ‘rainbow coalition’, a majority of minorities that would swamp the nation, overthrow the old America and replace it with their new alliance. The strategy appeared to be working as long as the minorities were united by their opposition to a majority. But the cracks are spreading, and not just among Islamists and gay rights activists.

Urban Democrats are being forced to come to terms with the fact that they may not be able to secure the support of both black community groups and Asian voters at the same time. Latinos are displaying a growing tendency to go their own way. Even the Jewish electorate, once a reliable rubber stamp, is turning conservative and religious in strongholds like New York City.

Immigrants, once seen as a vanguard of demographic transformation, are securing cities and states for the Democrats, but those groups whether Latino, Muslim, Asian or even African, are proving to have their own agendas that are at odds with a party that claims to be diverse, yet has become politically monocultural, imposing a ruthless ideological discipline that has purged non-black religious conservatives, traditional feminists, immigration restrictionist environmentalists and working class whites in pursuit of the ideal leftist collective.

But the new immigrants are much more likely to hold traditional values on matters of sexual morality: to be opposed to abortion, pride parades and everything white lefties love so much.

Muslim Democrats, like Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib, who built their national political power to implement an anti-American agenda based on this big intersectional lie, are caught in the middle.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, whose district includes parts of Hamtramck, responded to the gay pride flag ban by tweeting, “I can’t imagine how it feels for our LGBTQ+ neighbors in Hamtramck to watch their own elected reps decide their existence doesn’t matter. This is painful to see in a city that has always fought for equal justice for all. This action divides our communities.”

Hamtramck legalized animal sacrifice in homes, and made Eid a paid holiday, as did Dearborn. Despite their protestations, Muslim elected officials in cities on track to have an Islamic majority are representing their community and not anyone else’s. They are the most obvious example that the notion of multicultural “communities” that transcend identities through collective solidarity is a myth. And so is the entire majority of minorities coalition that claims “brown people” or the “oppressed” have anything in common beyond a hostility toward white people.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan lashed out at Hamtramck by declaring, “The City of Detroit proudly raises our Pride Flag at the start of every Pride Month.” And it will until it has a Muslim majority.

Democrats have dismantled tolerance and opened the door to a gold rush by members of its coalition to impose their most extreme agendas on the public with no regard to everyone else.

A leftist majority will force pride flags and LGBT pornography in schools on everyone. A Muslim majority will force sharia on everyone. That is what happens in a country that has abandoned both its traditional consensus on values and its respect for individual beliefs leaving regions with a choice between female genital mutilation and transgender masectomies, between marrying 7-year-old girls and grooming first graders.

America has three choices, either imposing sharia or sexual identity politics, or returning to what we were before we had to choose which group of extremists to allow to abuse our children.





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


Thank you for reading.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Eco-Terrorists Crowdsource Harassment and Terror

By On June 25, 2023
Some leftist groups beat around the bush about what they stand for and what they do.

Not ‘Climate Defiance’ which is running a fundraiser to ‘Make Complicit Climate Cowards’ Lives F____g Miserable’.

The ecoterrorist group which boasts of having “fully shut down Joe Manchin’s keynote” and “made pipeline lover Amy Klobuchar flee the stage at her own book launch party” is also pretty clear about what donors can buy by funding the environmentalist group.

For $100, you get “photography for one direct action” while $1,000 buys you a “whole keynote speech shutdown, soup-to-nuts”.

Funding for this illegal activity is being processed by Stripe and PayPal. Both companies have a history of suspending conservatives, but have no objection to allowing leftists to directly subsidize harassment of elected officials. When contacted for a comment, they did not reply.

But Climate Defiance’s operations also share a funding platform with the DNC.

Climate Defiance announced its fundraiser for a “a bold action to blockade the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 29th to call attention to President Biden’s failed campaign promise to stop drilling on Federal Lands” on the Action Network.

That same month, Declare Emergency, another eco terrorist group, made headlines by vandalizing Degas’ Little Dancer sculpture case at the National Gallery of Art. Even though the two perpetrators were indicted by a federal grand jury, no action was taken against the group despite its flyers being left at the scene and Declare Emergency urging others to follow suit.

Declare Emergency has retained its 501(c)(4) status despite this criminal activity. Tax code regulations clearly state that illegal and criminal activity voids any such status, but as the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s IRS investigations have shown, leftist eco-terrorists, actual terrorists and pedophiles have been able to retrain C3 and C4 status no matter what their crimes are.

The eco terrorist group linked to the Degas attack, like Climate Defiance, fundraises through Action Network. And they are not alone. Freedom Center investigations have shown that Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, the DSA and Communist Party USA and Antifa all fundraise through the Action Network. As does the Democratic National Committee.

The Action Network, like Climate Defiance and Declare Emergency, is a 501(c)(4) and it shows the entanglement of the Democrat establishment with the far Left even when its extremists are targeting Senate Democrats and the White House for not adopting their full radical agenda.

The eco terrorists aren’t just funneling money through 501(c)(4)s, but have received funding from an actual 501(c)(3) organization that has to meet the gold standard of charitable activities.

Eco-terrorism and any kind of illegal actions are very definitely not on the list.

Climate Defiance, currently crowdsourcing the harassment of elected officials, received a grant from the Climate Emergency Fund. The Climate Emergency Fund is a 501(c)(3) backed by, among others, Aileen Getty, a Getty Oil heiress, Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the deceased senator, and leftist director Adam McKay.

Its support for eco terrorism has never been subtle and the Freedom Center had previously exposed its funding of attacks on paintings in Europe by Just Stop Oil. Like Climate Defiance and Declare Emergency, Just Stop Oil engages in ‘direct action’ and made headlines by splashing tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting in London’s National Gallery.

The Climate Emergency Fund has been linked to the funding of numerous ecoterrorist activities around the country, including the Atlanta Forest Defenders, who were described in an arrest affidavit as a “group classified by the United States Department of Homeland Security as Domestic Violent Extremists” after violent riots and assaults that ended in at least one death.

But Climate Defiance, a listed CEF grantee, is further testing whether the IRS will cover for leftists or enforce the law by directly targeting.Senator Manchin, Senator Klobuchar and brags of having shut down “keynote addresses by Biden’s two top climate advisors”.

The Biden administration and the IRS could easily put a stop to this if they choose to. The violations are blatant and pulling the Climate Emergency Fund’s nonprofit status is as straightforward as it gets. The tax code and precedent make it abundantly clear that illegal activities and protests are incompatible with tax-exempt status for charities.

The Fund has lied to the IRS by falsely claiming in its 990s that it “supports only nonviolent, legal activities”. Even the briefest glance at its grantees and partners, and its own rhetoric, makes it clear that it supports organizations engaged in illegal activities.

And that was obvious even before Climate Defiance began crowdsourcing “Make Complicit Climate Cowards’ Lives F____g Miserable” which offered donors the opportunity to donate $1,000 to fund the shutdown of an event by public officials.

Why won’t the Biden administration stop this even when its own personnel are being targeted?

The American Left is the tail that wags the Democrat dog. The Biden administration would rather be slapped around by its own political extremists than take action against them. Biden’s Justice Department tried to go after mothers protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists, but doesn’t have anything to say when actual leftist domestic terrorists target it.

The Climate Emergency Fund is also funded by the Democrat donors that Biden and his party are not about to offend. That includes Aileen Getty, who has provided generous support to Obama, Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Raphel Warnock and others. In an op-ed after the National Gallery attack, Getty defended the vandalism of a classic painting and admitted that “I proudly provide funding to the Climate Emergency Fund” which makes grants to vandals including “Just Stop Oil”, but claimed that she does “not fund these groups directly” and does not control them.

That has always been the familiar excuse of the funders of terrorist groups around the world.

While Democrats and their media continue to posture about an insurrection, their donors and their platforms are funding an actual insurrection that includes eco terrorists targeting Congress and even occupying Pelosi’s office. This continuing green assault is made possible by the complicity of the IRS in allowing 501(c)(3) charities and 501(c)(4) platforms and activist groups to continue funding vandalism, riots and attacks on elected officials.

The real Complicit Climate Cowards are in the IRS. Those complicit climate cowards are the reason why art is under siege and events are closed down. The IRS has ignored the law, allowed eco terrorists to abuse the tax code, to destroy culture and intimidate elected officials.

The vandalism of paintings, the disruption of events and the attacks on Congress could be stopped very easily. The IRS could end it in a month if it enforced the law, but the same organization that sends chills down the spines of ordinary taxpayers is terrified of using its nearly limitless power to hold even the worst leftist nonprofit abusers accountable.





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


Thank you for reading.

Obama Brings Back the Race Card

By On June 25, 2023
In ‘Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America’, a book edited by Jamie Glazov and containing vital essays by different conservative thinkers, I went back in time to Obama’s 2004 DNC speech in which he celebrated that, “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And then I contrasted those inspiring words with the ugly politics of racial division that he used to tear apart the nation.

Obama recently revisited those words on a CNN podcast with former consigliere David Axelrod. “I think may be the best speech you ever gave,” Axelrod told his old boss, quoting those lines. “I believe in these lines. You believe in these lines, but they feel almost sepia colored now because of what we’ve seen since. And the question is, what happened?”

Barack Obama dismisses “a bunch of post-racial fantasies” and then states that “those lines are aspirational and always have been”. To paraphrase Axelrod, of a lot of lies that Obama told, this may be the worst of them. The DNC lines were in the present tense and addressed to the moment. Obama began by claiming that “there are those who are preparing to divide us” and declared, “I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America – there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Then he contended that pundits like “to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States… but I’ve got news for them, too… we are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

None of this is aspirational. It claimed to be a present day description of the country and its current issues, right down to there “are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it.” Any notion that it was some future aspiration could only exist as a secret equivocation living in one of the many chambers of Obama’s mental double life.

That Obama lies with shameless facility about things that are easy to check and that, unlike his successor, he doesn’t have the excuse of dementia or stuttering, isn’t new. And yet this particular big lie is important because it’s at the root of the damage that he inflicted on us.

Obama was telling the country that he did not believe it was racist. His agenda is now just the opposite. On the Axelrod podcast, he lashed out at Senator Tim Scott for using that message.

“I listened to Tim Scott, who’s running for president, and half of it sounds a lot like us. Half of it sounds a lot like what you were talking about in the speech in 2004 and in all of our speeches from that point on, which was, I am living proof that we are making progress as a country. I wouldn’t be here but for that progress,” Axelrod told Obama.

“I haven’t spent a lot of time studying Tim Scott speeches,” Obama sneered, in his trademark petty way. ” I think there is a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, everything’s great, and we can all make it.”

Obama attacks Scott for being willing to “validate America”. What was Obama doing then if he wasn’t validating America? The obvious answer is that he was invalidating America. And that may be the best possible description of Obama’s cultural and ideological legacy. After emerging as a trojan horse promising to validate America, he spent his career destroying its validity.

“Those quotes you made about, you know, from my speech in 2004 about there’s a United States of America, that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present,” Obama complained. Barack Obama has never even made an honest accounting of his own past, let alone his presidency, yet he keeps demanding that Americans account for things.

Barack Obama, the millionaire son of wealthy parents, invokes the myth that black people suffer “crippling generational poverty that is a consequence of hundreds of years of racism in the society”. In fact, generational poverty is a choice in each generation. Black children are three to five times more likely to be poor when they’re being raised by a single parent. The household wealth of a two parent black family is more than three times that of a single black family.

Obama knows this. Much like his DNC speech, he used to say these things.

“If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men,” he told a black church in Chicago in 2008.

“You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, a number that has doubled — doubled — since we were children. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves.”

Then he continued by dismissing all the excuses that he now invokes, “yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more after-school programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities. But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child — it’s the courage to raise one.”

Government and the welfare state were not going to fix the black community, fathers were.

There are some political hacks and leftist ideologues who don’t know what the truth is. They sincerely repeat lies because they don’t know any better and can’t think their way past them.

The infuriating thing about Obama was that he told the truth when it was politically convenient. And then, having won over white liberals and moderates, he pivoted to weaponizing race to divide Americans by treating black people like the perpetual victims of a racist country.

In 2023, Obama absurdly insists that black people can’t get jobs or buy houses, and that they’re still suffering from living in a perpetually racist country. Minority Republicans who want to offer a message of hope are dismissed for not “addressing some of the deep inequality that still exists in our society that tracks race and is a consequence of our racial history.”

Barack claims that there’s discrimination when it comes “to buying a house”. Which real estate agent, the one selling him his $8 million D.C. mansion or his $11 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, objected to a half-black man buying the homes? The only people who protested Obama buying property in their neighborhood were Chicago black residents pushing back against his grandiose Obama Foundation construction project wrecking the area.

Nearly two decades after his famous 2004 post-racial DNC speech, Obama is even more of a racist hack addicted to the politics of racial division. He laughs at minority Republicans giving speeches that say, “look at me. I’m a Asian Indian-American woman. And my family came here and we worked hard. Clarence Thomas has probably gave the same speech at some point, I guarantee in some commencement, as did Alan Keyes, the first guy that I ran against.”

Scott replied to Obama by asserting, “let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power. The Left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth.” In this, he’s correct.

The power of the Democrats in general and Obama in particular is intimately tied up with invalidating America. As a post-racial president, Obama knew that his power would be limited, but as a crusader against a racist country, he would have the moral, if not the legal, authority to destroy all the infrastructure of an imaginary systemic racism and usher in a new world.

Obama sneers at minority Republicans for refusing to embrace unlimited power. The race card is unlimited and he has kindly lent it out even to old white guys like Joe Biden.

In ‘Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America’, I wrote that, “Barack Obama was, first and foremost, a community organizer. It was central to how he thought and acted. America was just a larger community to organize through the familiar tactics of division. As a candidate, Obama had preached healing and unity, but as a national leader, his overriding agenda was to convince some that they were the oppressed and others, oppressors.”

“What happened?” Axelrod asked Obama. What happened is that Obama didn’t want to unite us, he wanted to rule over us.

Obama started out claiming that, “there’s not a black America and white America”. And that’s true, there wasn’t until he brought them into being, dividing us in order to conquer us.







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

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, June 22, 2023

Why the Left is Losing the Transgender Debate

By On June 22, 2023
In 2021, 62% of Americans opposed men in dresses playing on female teams while 34% supported it. In 2023, a sizable 69% majority is opposed and only 26% are in favor.

Within two years, support for ‘transgender female athletes’ fell from a third to a quarter.

While those numbers are important, the real turnaround in the latest Gallup poll has come among Democrats. While majorities of Republicans and Independents were always opposed to men who claim to be ‘transgender’ usurping womens’ sports, Democrats supported them.

But now no more.

In 2021, 55% of Democrats supported men playing on female teams and in female competitions while 41% opposed it. Now 48% of Democrats are opposed and only 47% are in favor.

These are not isolated numbers. They’re part of a pattern that shows how the Democrats are losing the transgender debate not only nationally, but among members of their own party.

Transgender fanaticism led the Democrats to embrace positions too extreme for their party.

A Washington Post – KFF poll from last month found that while Democrats generally supported promoting transgender identity in high school and even for sixth graders, opposition rose sharply to 46% over proposals to groom fourth graders. A solid majority of Democrats opposed exposing kindergarteners and third graders to transgender topics.

This was bad timing since Biden’s campaign video attacked Republicans for ‘banning’ a book featuring a 10-year-old boy performing a sex act. At the Pride Month rollout, the Biden administration announced that the Department of Education would be targeting schools that pull sexual materials from libraries for creating a “hostile environment” for LGBTQ people.

Biden had claimed that banning the sexual mutilation of children is immoral. And the media, having decided that it already won the debate for most ages, is pushing toddler sex changes. An ABC News report profiled a little boy whose parents decided to treat him like a girl when he was only three years old. Nobody has even polled on that question, but the numbers won’t be good.

While Biden and the media may imagine they’re winning the debate, they’re actually losing.

In 2017, a Pew poll showed that only 54% believed that men and women were born as they are, while 44% thought that people could swap sexes. By 2022, 60% knew that men and women are born, only 38% believed they could be made over with a little makeup, an outfit and some drugs.

Washington Post interviews with people who switched positions on transgender issues found that a consistent theme was their concern for children.

“My concern with transgender is mostly with the children,” one woman said.

“Is that going to help these young people get a good job or a good spouse? Why would you introduce that subject to children when it has no life skills?” an older black woman asked about pushing transgender issues in school.

“It’s hard enough to learn as is without other things thrown at you,” a black man suggested.

The Left had previously won sexual morality debates by claiming to advocate for the victims and conservative opponents lost because they could not show meaningfully whom it harmed in a simple and direct way that people could understand. That’s why opposition to abortion, despite all the social changes, has had such staying power among Americans. It’s clear ‘whom it hurts’.

It’s also where the Democrats have stumbled in the transgender debate. Opponents had largely lost the debate until, with the emergence of female athletes like Riley Gaines, feminist victims of cancel culture like J.K. Rowling, and talk of indoctrinating children, the real victims appeared.

The transgender debate now pits two conflicting victimhoods against each other, blunting the usual leftist tactics and making it difficult for them to steamroll the opposition. Are boys being maneuvered into pretending to be girls or teenage girls getting mastectomies suffering because they’re victims of conservatives restricting destructive behaviors or of an LGBTQ movement that has coerced minors into destructive life-altering decisions before they are mature enough?

Are men who want to compete against women the victims, or are the women they displace and injure the true victims?

The Left derives its power from simplistic and often false narratives of victimhood. But these stories are incredibly difficult to counter because they play on empathy with the oppressed.

That’s why any issue, from open borders to crime to terrorism to global warming, is retold in the familiar narratives of the oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives all too often try to rationally counter these narratives and make their case based on the facts or the larger context. Where the Left always remembers to ground its ideological arguments in personal narratives and human interest, conservatives struggle with talking about people instead of issues.

And yet the shifting transgender debate shows how effective personal narratives are. And how important it is to convey to the public who is getting hurt by policies that conservatives oppose.

Most Americans were willing to go along with the transgender movement because even though they struggled to understand it and found its premises suspect, they wanted to be nice. And the polls still reflect that desire to empathize and protect a seemingly oppressed group. While most Americans oppose exposing children to transgender materials or forcing women to compete against men, they’re supportive of laws protecting transgenders or using their chosen pronouns.

The easy way to understand this is that most Americans don’t want to hurt anyone.

When asked to choose between hurting transgender feelings or using their pronouns, or passing special laws to protect them, they weigh the question of “whom does it hurt”. Likewise, when asked to choose between female athletes and 280 lb hulking men, or between children and sexual identity activists, they once again ask “whom does it hurt” and protect the vulnerable.

The transgender battle is far from over. Faced with setbacks, the Left goes looking for more victims, employing personal narratives to turn the tide. But there are larger lessons for conservatives looking to fight back. Most people are not ideological. With traditional morality crumbling, people use a combination of gut instincts and anecdotal stories to decide issues.

The Left excels at politicizing the personal and personalizing the political. Its mass media messaging ensures that when people think about the police, they think about George Floyd, when they think about open borders, they think about a little baby clutched in the arms of its mother and when they think about abortion, they think about a ‘headless baby’ in the womb.

These personal stories, false and misleading as they may be, work on the average person.

The transgender debate is being lost because when people think about the issue, they think about Lia Thomas and Riley Gaines, they think about children being asked what gender they are in kindergarten, and they’re able to answer clearly and compellingly, “whom does it hurt?”

Leftists embraced the furthest extreme of the sexual identity politics movement, splitting the Democrats and even dividing feminists and the gay rights movement, but most importantly they exposed themselves as not the advocates of victims, but the ones who are hurting 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.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Trump is Charged Under a Law Meant to Suppress Political Opposition

By On June 21, 2023


A year after the start of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson addressed his message to Congress and warned that the “gravest threats against our national peace and safety” did not come from “other governments”, but from “within our own borders”.

“Citizens of the United States,” Wilson continued, “born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.”

Wilson, a notorious racist and a supporter of the KKK who had contempt for a wide variety of other peoples, likely had German immigrants, but not just them, in mind when he called for what would become the Espionage Act so that “we may be purged of their corrupt distempers.”

“I need not suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with,” Wilson concluded.

While there were indeed pro-German terrorist conspiracies in those days, including the Black Tom bombing which damaged the Statue of Liberty and a plot to infect the country’s horses, the Espionage Act of 1917 went far beyond prosecuting criminal activities. Wilson had sought, but not received, the power to censor the press, he did get the power to censor the mail.

Most of those prosecuted under the Espionage Act were not terrorists, but political opponents of the war. They included leftist socialists like Charles Schenck whose Supreme Court case birthed the misleading cliche about “shouting fire in a crowded theater”, as well as Robert Goldstein, a filmmaker whose crime was making a movie, ‘The Spirit of ’76’, about the American Revolution.

Also prosecuted under the Espionage Act were members of the Watch Tower Society for their religious pacifism. This was described as almost “the only time in American history when almost all the leaders of a denomination were in jail”.

When former President Trump was indicted under the Espionage Act, he was being targeted by a law that from its very inception had been created to suppress the political opposition. While elements of the Espionage Act were watered down over the years and only media hacks still quote “shouting fire in a crowded theater” as if it were standing law, that hasn’t really changed.

Widely loathed by liberals and leftists, who were justly often the targets of it, the Espionage Act was mostly used against actual spies during the Cold War. That changed dramatically under Obama who dusted it off and used it to go after reporters and whistleblowers. A decade ago, the Obama administration used the Espionage Act to target FOX News reporter James Rosen.

The Espionage Act allowed Obama to use warrantless wiretapping to bust leakers who were in many cases acting as whistleblowers and trying to expose his administration’s misconduct.

The abuse of the Espionage Act against reporters foreshadowed Russiagate. Having realized how useful the package of national security tools could be against political opponents in the press, the Obama administration decided to go ahead and use them against Trump.

When Obama and Clinton associates in the Justice Department targeted Gen. Flynn for conducting preemptive diplomacy for the incoming Trump administration, they explored using the Espionage Act and the Logan Act. The current charges against Trump are not an unexpected development, they’re what Russiagate was always about.

Power corrupts. And once the Obama administration realized that it could use the Espionage Act to kill unfavorable stories in the media, it was obvious that its members would not stop until they had escalated to using it directly against political opponents from Gen. Flynn to Trump.

Leftists used to hate the Espionage Act, like all forms of government power, until they were able to take control of it. And then, instead of being targeted by it, they wielded it and, with the inevitably corrupt predictability of human nature, used it to settle political disputes.

There are any number of parallels between Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden. Both men were parochial narcissistic racists who ran as moderates only to rule as radicals. And their public profiles seemed so absurd that their opponents had a bad habit of underestimating them.

In a foreshadowing of what could happen to Biden, Wilson became non-functional in office and the country was temporarily run by his wife, yet he went on dreaming of a third term in office.

Wilson, like Biden, might have also been thinking of using the Espionage Act to cover up his own corruption.

For nearly a decade, Wilson had been conducting a secret affair with another woman. Fearful of discovery, he sent her thousands of dollars, a fortune by today’s standards, and drafted a partial admission of guilt. Wilson had called for the Espionage Act earlier that year which would give his administration the authority to censor the mail. It would have been a convenient means of suppressing revelations about his affair that might have damaged his reelection campaign.

Fortunately for Wilson, former President Theodore Roosevelt, his 1914 election opponent, had dismissed the idea of exposing the affair. “No evidence could ever make the American people believe that a man like Woodrow Wilson, cast so perfectly as the apothecary’s clerk, could ever play Romeo,” Roosevelt, a barrel-chested man of action, had sneered.

By 1916, Republicans, stuck with the uninspiring candidacy of Charles Evans Hughes, appeared ready to take off the gloves and were trying to aggressively get hold of Wilson’s letters. The version of the Espionage Act that allowed Wilson to censor the mails, but not the press, may have been a compromise to protect the use of the ‘nuclear option’ of the affair.

Biden, likely unknowingly, followed in Wilson’s footsteps by deploying claims of foreign election interference to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story during the election.

The abuse of national security by Democrats to go after the political opposition is not a new phenomenon. It’s been underway for over a century with the Espionage Act.

Charging Trump under the Espionage Act is no accident: it’s a proud tradition. It’s also a deeply corrupt and illegal attack on the Constitution. But that’s the function that the Espionage Act has served for over a century under Democrats. Corrupt megalomaniacal Democrats like Wilson, Obama and Biden use claims of national security to illegally investigate their opponents.

And whether it’s Wilson’s affair with a married woman, Hunter Biden’s harem of Uber prostitutes, or Joe Biden’s money from China, the Espionage Act is a red flag for presidential corruption.

National security is legitimate when it protects Americans from foreign enemies, not when it’s used, as Wilson and Biden have, to target Americans under the facade of 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.

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

The Army Needs a Few Good (Trans) Men of Color

By On June 20, 2023
Front Page Magazine’s exclusive report that Biden’s nominee for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Brown, had signed off on a 43% quota for white male officers made waves. In interviews, I warned that quotas had become more fundamental to the military than winning. And it’s been that way for a while. That’s why we have a very diverse woke brass that is incapable of winning wars, yet argues for abortion and transgenderism.

The Biden administration’s obsession with making diversity, equity and inclusion into the center of every military program has put more pressure on the woke brass to deliver results.

The U.S. Army missed its recruiting goals in the previous fiscal year by 25% or 15,000 soldiers. Next year recruiters expect to miss by at least 10,000 which suggests that it will be even worse. But the Army is far more concerned with missing its far more crucial equity recruiting goals.

The Army needs to recruit minorities: not the same old boring white men like Washington, Eisenhower or Audie Murphy. That’s why its recruiters are making videos in different languages through FLRI or the Foreign Language Recruiting Initiative. Beyond Spanish, the program focuses on Chinese, Russian, Tagalog, and numerous other languages.

Army flyers begin with “No Habla Ingles?” No problem. You can still “reciba dinero” and get “education gratis”. So long as you have a green card and a pulse, you’re in.

No Habla Ingles, an inability to speak English, or a nationality from two of the country’s major enemies, aren’t a problem. An AP story on the Air Force recruitment of foreign nationals notes that “in many cases the immigrants are not immediately put in jobs that require top secret clearance” implying that in some cases they are immediately put into such jobs.

The Army however isn’t just looking for warm bodies, but bodies of the right color.

That’s why active duty personnel are being barraged with requests to update their REDCAT information. REDCAT stands for Racial Ethnic Designation Category and was created to track conformity with identity politics quotas. Ever since racial and ethnic quotas were made a goal, recruiters and IPPS-A, the Army’s human resources system, have been pushed to bring REDCAT numbers into line with quota goals. And IPPS-A has been hectoring personnel to update their race and ethnicity data in the hopes of finding more hidden minorities in the ranks.

Some messages insist that “updating/adding REDCAT data is voluntary” while others demand that soldiers “personally update race, ethnicity and religion”. In pursuit of REDCAT quotas, a message from the United States Army Special Operations Command urges soldiers to “select the ethnic group code that includes the most accurate description of ethnic background or combination of ethnicities in their ethnic background.”

Anyone who can find any Cherokee or Latinos in their family tree is welcome to do so.

This is part of the ‘Tracking and Managing Diversity in Army Recruiting Efforts’. Since not enough diversity has been found, there’s a frantic search for diversity that may have been overlooked. Forget winning wars against China, this is about winning the war on racism.

And that’s the real woke war that the military is being tasked with fighting.

The cynicism of military racial quotas can be spotted in a message that notes, “if Soldiers opt out of even reviewing their data, the data that was converted will still exist, whether accurate or not.” It will also make it possible for convenient errors to creep in. Any soldiers with a last name that sounds Hispanic will shortly be listed as such, even if their last name is Italian. A whole lot of white men and women whose last name is Greene, Davis or Jackson may accidentally end up black. Such mistakes happen and there will be too many of them for anyone to check.

The REDCAT numbers will show that the U.S. Army looks more “like America” than ever.

At the Virginia National Guard, past recruitment was aimed at making the Guard “match the demographics of the state within 1% of the REDCAT” and when that failed, developing a “target for underrepresented groups each FY by comparing census data” and then “if the demographics are not within the 1% target develop three (3) COAs to attain the objective by 28 February of each year.”

Rather than getting the best people or even adequately qualified people, the goal is to match the force to the census data in a completely senseless exercise so that the people they do get are 20% black, 7.2% Asian, and 0.6% American Indian, or develop a plan to get those Asians.

That’s what deciding that the military should “look like America” really means in the ranks. You can’t have too many white men, but too many black men could also become a problem. If the goal is to match the census, then you can’t have too few minorities or too many. Come on in Jiang, we haven’t met our Chinese quota yet, sorry Jose, we have too many Hispanics already.

But the one thing you can never have too little of is identity politics virtue signaling.

The woke military brass celebrated Pride Month with drag shows and rainbow flags across bases from Japan to Texas. Taking part in LGBTQ pride parades and drag shows is another duty.

Commanders are not only required to examine “the unit’s demographic racial and ethnic designation categories” for “at least twice a year”, but they also have to review “member participation in ethnic and special observances”. We may not win any wars, but as long as everyone shows up to hold a rainbow flag and applaud Bob twirling in a tutu, it’s all good.

Who needs a few good men when you can have a few good trans-men of color? And who cares if they speak English? No Habla Ingles? No problemo! Having HIV is not a problem. Being from an enemy nation is not a problem. Being a man who believes he’s a woman is not a problem.

Being white, especially a heterosexual male, is a very big problem. We need a military that looks like America and white heterosexual men look nothing like 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.

Thank you for reading.

Monday, June 19, 2023

While We Were Watching Airports, Islamic Terrorists Won Our Children

By On June 19, 2023
Cole James Bridges went to a high school in Clarkesville, Tennessee and worked at a Papa Johns pizza place near Akron, Ohio before joining the United States Army. Mateo Ventura was a high school student in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Within a week of each other in June 2023, Bridges pled guilty to plotting to help ISIS kill American soldiers, while Ventura was arrested for trying to provide aid to the Islamic State.

Bridges and Ventura, 20 and 18 years old, like Trevor Bickford, 19, of Maine, who was hit with federal charges this year for attacking NYPD police officers with a machete in Times Square, and Xavier Pelkey, 18, also of Maine, who pled guilty in April after trying to recruit two underage teens for a terrorist attack in Chicago, show the rate at which ordinary American teens are converting to Islam and plotting terrorist attacks.

While we made everyone take their shoes off at the airport and labored to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Iraq, Islamic terrorists won the hearts and minds of our children.

Our national security establishment feverishly imagined vast Al Qaeda attack plots while ignoring the real attack. An attack so deep and so wounding that it is far more devastating than September 11. It was an attack aided and abetted by the government, our cultural establishment and entertainment industries which urged Americans to learn about and embrace Islam.

Teenagers like Bridges, Ventura, Bickford, Pelkey and many others did. While Muslim immigrants still make up a significant percentage of Islamic terror plots, they increasingly come from American teenagers who converted to Islam. And, unlike past Muslim terror converts who followed a familiar path from drug dealing to prison to terrorism, these are our boys.

Except they’re not ours anymore.

Bridges lyrically spoke of the Islamic terrorists of ISIS as “brothers who have been fighting to establish a khilafah” or caliphate, and “have inspired me a lot, they’re (sic) love for Allah.”

Ventura wanted to fight a “war on kuffar” or non-Muslims.

Bickford carried an Islamic text and had underlined the words, “fight in the Name of Allah and in the Cause of Allah. Fight against those who do not believe in Allah. Wage a holy war.” He wrote in his journal that he wanted a traditional Muslim burial and did not want to be buried “in the land of the kuffar”. If he died while killing Americans, he did not want to be laid to rest in America.

Pelkey, who changed his name to Abdullah, wrote that he wanted to “burst thru the door of Jihad in america and strike fear in the hearts of these kafirun nothing pisses these american kuffar off and scares em more than a term they use ‘homegrown terrorist.’”

Their plans for Islamic mass murder, Bridges wanted to attack the 9/11 memorial, Pelkey was going to burst into a synagogue separate the adults from the children, and then kill the adults, have received what little attention a broken country has to spare for the kind of story that people don’t even pay attention to anymore. We are so busy fighting each other that we hardly even look up when the next generation converts to Islam and signs up with Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Americans used to associate Islamic converts with black nationalist groups, but this is no longer the case. Latinos, like Bridges (raised by a stepfather, his mother’s last name was Gonzalez), are the fastest growing population of converts, but a quarter of converts to Islam are white.

In the UK, young white Muslim converts like 19-year-old Matthew King, whose mother turned him in after an attack plot on British soldiers, or Lewis Ludlow, who changed his name to Ali Hussain and pled guilty to scouting out targets like St Paul’s Cathedral and Madame Tussauds, are also becoming more commonplace.

There are certain common denominators among Muslim converts as there are among school shooters. Bickford was being raised by a stepfather while Ventura had been bullied in school. Bickford’s father had died of a drug overdose, and Pelkey was living with his mother and an autistic younger brother.

Like most cults, the new mosque recruits are lost and looking for somewhere to belong. Missing fathers and a general sense of alienation are a common theme. America no longer provides a sense of identity and even institutions like the U.S. Army don’t offer any real purpose. Falling through the spreading cracks of an imploding culture, they join gangs, movements and Islam.

What too few Americans understood after the September 11 attacks was that this was a culture war. Foreign Muslim terrorists could kill us by the thousands and perhaps even one day the hundreds of thousands, but even at expanding immigration rates it would take generations for them to demographically conquer us. Unlike Europe, America has a more robust birth rate, in part because of migration from south of the border. We would have to conquer ourselves.

The Bush administration responded to 9/11 with an ambitious effort to democratize the Muslim world, unaware and uncaring of the Muslim world’s parallel effort to Islamize America. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the failure of the Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS, collapsed the project to democratize the Muslim world. But the Islamization of America is succeeding.

What does Islam offer that we don’t? Patriarchy for fatherless boys, the illusion of belonging to a global Islamic Ummah, the promise of a system of moral order with the creation of the Caliphate, and the escape from a culture that no longer stands for much except comic book movies and politics.

Pop culture and politics have become the religions of a declining nation. In the midst of the culture war, many Americans from both sides have developed hostility and contempt for their own country. Others retreat to imaginary pop culture universes to debate the ins and outs of their devotion to Marvel, Star Wars or Taylor Swift with the intensity once reserved for theology.

Americans are becoming less patriotic and religious and the falloff is most pronounced among the young. It is no coincidence that Islamic recruitment of American teens is booming in areas where traditional organized religion is declining. Is it surprising that Maine, the third least religious state where barely a quarter described themselves as Christians, produced two Islamic terror converts? A decade ago, only 34% of people in the state believed religion was very important. But just because people abandon traditional churches, doesn’t mean that teenagers and twenty-somethings will give up on religion. They will find people who really believe.

And the Jihad really believes.

We are not just losing the military and demographic wars, but the even more important cultural war. America’s political and cultural establishment embraced Islam. And this is the result.

All the episodes of ‘24’ envisioning complicated plots of mass murder were off the mark. What happened instead was that the plotters got on planes, landed and moved here. They set up mosques and schools, they became reporters, executives and members of congress. Like their leftist allies, they fought the war from the inside and we did not so much lose as surrender.

A generation of young men, born after 9/11 and the end of the War on Terror, were urged to learn about Islam, the way they’re encouraged to learn about sex changes. Some castrated themselves and pretended to be women, others joined ISIS instead.

When life looks senseless and meaningless, each day filled with mechanical routines and hollow entertainments, the human soul needs to reach for something that promises more.

America is not becoming irreligious, it is losing its religions and finding new gods. Some of those gods tell their followers to kill the infidels, attack the 9/11 memorial and kill until America is Islamic.

As we take off our shoes at the airport, a new generation is losing its soul.





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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