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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Culture</title>
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		<title>Mark Tapson on &#8220;Fighting the Culture War&#8221; &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-tapson-on-fighting-the-culture-war-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mark-tapson-on-fighting-the-culture-war-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:16:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241861</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Conservatives need more filmmakers, songwriters and novelists instead of political lecturers.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/klav.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241864" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/klav-233x350.gif" alt="klav" width="191" height="287" /></a><strong>[To order Andrew Klavan&#8217;s Freedom Center pamphlet, <em>The Crisis in the Arts</em>, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/pamplets/products/crisis-in-the-arts-why-the-left-owns-the-culture-and-how-conservatives-can-begin-to-take-it-back">click here</a>.]</strong></p>
<p><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by<strong> Mark Tapson</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter who focuses on the politics of popular culture.</p>
<p>Mark came on the show to discuss &#8220;Fighting the Culture War,&#8221; emphasizing why Conservatives need more filmmakers, songwriters and novelists instead of political lecturers.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second<em> Glazov Gang</em> episode with<strong> Louis Lionheart, </strong>a Christian preacher who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd. Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. For information on his ministry visit his web site: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/louis.lionheart?fref=ts">TruthDefenders.com.</a></p>
<p>Louis came on the show to discuss &#8220;<strong>The Battle Over Islam on the Streets of L.A.</strong>,&#8221; sharing his experience of engaging Muslims about their religion on 3rd St. Promenade:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/AcYxEHAUkDA" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
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		<title>Mark Tapson on &#8220;Breaking Ranks With the Left&#8221; &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/mark-tapson-on-breaking-ranks-with-the-left-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mark-tapson-on-breaking-ranks-with-the-left-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2014 04:00:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[breaking free]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242018</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Freedom Center's Shillman Fellow shares his journey out of the political faith. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/breaking-chains.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242020" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/breaking-chains.jpg" alt="explosed link on a chain" width="290" height="205" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by<strong> Mark Tapson</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is a Hollywood-based writer and screenwriter who focuses on the politics of popular culture.</p>
<p>Mark came on the show to discuss <strong>Breaking Ranks With the Left, </strong>sharing his own personal journey out of the political faith. He also focused on <strong>Fighting the Culture War</strong>, emphasizing why Conservatives need more filmmakers, songwriters and novelists instead of political lecturers.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second<em> Glazov Gang</em> episode with<strong> Louis Lionheart, </strong>a Christian preacher who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd. Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. For information on his ministry visit his web site: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/louis.lionheart?fref=ts">TruthDefenders.com.</a></p>
<p>Louis came on the show to discuss &#8220;<strong>The Battle Over Islam on the Streets of L.A.</strong>,&#8221; sharing his experience of engaging Muslims about their religion on 3rd St. Promenade:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/AcYxEHAUkDA" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>Toward a New Conservative Literature</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/toward-a-new-conservative-literature/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=toward-a-new-conservative-literature</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/toward-a-new-conservative-literature/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:25:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241185</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Politics flows downstream from culture.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/PAM-Crisis.png"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-241249" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/PAM-Crisis-234x350.png" alt="PAM-Crisis" width="234" height="350" /></a><strong>To order Andrew Klavan&#8217;s booklet Crisis in the Arts, <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/products/crisis-in-the-arts-why-the-left-owns-the-culture-and-how-conservatives-can-begin-to-take-it-back">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>“Politics flows downstream from culture,” my friend the late, great Andrew Breitbart was fond of pointing out. This is an insight too many conservatives have yet to take to heart; many are still dismissive of, or pay lip service to, the cultural battleground as a critical front. But thankfully, a few conservatives are getting the message out and leading the conversation.</p>
<p>For example, my friend Andrew Klavan, novelist/screenwriter/essayist extraordinaire, published a must-read Freedom Center booklet earlier this year entitled <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/products/crisis-in-the-arts-why-the-left-owns-the-culture-and-how-conservatives-can-begin-to-take-it-back"><em>Crisis in the Arts</em></a>, in which he discusses why the left owns the culture and how conservatives can begin to take it back (which just happens to be the booklet’s subtitle). “There should be more TV shows and movies and novels,” he writes, which celebrate the conservative values and themes “currently being excised from the arts by left wing censorship and so-called political correctness.”</p>
<p>There is Adam Bellow, the man behind the publishing venture Liberty Island, a platform for conservative writers whose work might not otherwise find a home in the left-leaning literary establishment. He recently wrote a counterculture manifesto at <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381419/let-your-right-brain-run-free-adam-bellow"><em>National Review</em></a> in which he called for more support for a greater conservative presence in the literary world. Mainstream fiction writers, he says, benefit from a “well-developed feeder system” that promotes them, including “MFA programs, residencies and fellowships, writers’ colonies, grants and prizes, little magazines, small presses, and a network of established writers and critics.” But nothing like that exists for writers on the right:</p>
<blockquote><p>This is a major oversight that must be urgently addressed. We need our own writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth. We need to build a feeder system so that the cream can rise to the top, and also to make an end run around the gatekeepers of the liberal establishment.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bellow described the sort of work he hopes to promote at Liberty Island: “good still triumphs over evil, hope still overcomes despair, and America is still a noble experiment and a beacon to the rest of the world.” The fact that this is a need to be filled speaks sad volumes about the current American literary landscape, even in genre fiction like mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi, <em>et al</em>.</p>
<p>But <em>Tablet</em>’s Adam Kirsch <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/178602/tea-party-literature">posted</a> an objection to those values: “The problem is not that these are conservative ideas, but that they are simpleminded ideological dogmas, and so by their very nature hostile to literature, which lives or dies by its sense of reality.”</p>
<p>Really? Goodness, hope, and America as the home of a noble spirit unique in human history are simpleminded ideological dogmas? Are they any more simpleminded and ideological, or less true, than the nihilism, anti-Americanism, and moral equivalence so revered by the left? At least the conservative literary “dogmas” are more compelling to the human spirit than an amoral void. But Kirsch feels that they are out of sync with reality:</p>
<blockquote><p>If you are not allowed to say that life in America can be bad, that Americans can be guilty as well as innocent, that good sometimes (most of the time?) loses out to evil—in short, that life in America is like human life in any other time or place—then you cannot be a literary writer, because you have censored your impressions of reality in advance.</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, Bellow never said that those things are not possible or that they would not be allowed at Liberty Island. Of <em>course</em> life in America can be bad (though it’s better than anywhere else). Of <em>course</em> Americans can be guilty and good sometimes loses to evil. Conservatives know this – we are realists. But Kirsch is skeptical that you can be a “literary writer” if you choose to focus on the positive, if you <em>celebrate</em> the good, the innocent, and life in America. I believe that you can, but the literary establishment simply won’t embrace you for it.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean that conservative literature should read like the novelistic version of a Norman Rockwell painting. In fact, as Klavan says,</p>
<blockquote><p>The single biggest mistake conservative cultural warriors make is this: they expect a conservative culture to look conservative.  It will not… Conservatives should not be afraid to make and praise art that depicts the worst aspects of human nature as long as it does so honestly — that is, in the context of the moral universe in which every choice has its price and every action has its consequences whether internal or external or both.</p></blockquote>
<p>In an insightful <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/politics-and-literature/">response</a> to both Kirsch and Bellow, Micah Mattix at <em>The American Conservative</em> wrote that the latter “makes some good observations… [but] it’s the overemphasis on the political value of supporting popular culture and the arts that sticks in my craw.” The problem with Bellow’s approach, Mattix writes, “is that it would most likely lead to ideologically ‘pure’ but bad work.” He wants more conservatives to “write good fiction and poetry, not in order to win the culture war, but in order to have better fiction and poetry.”</p>
<p>Ultimately Mattix <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/prufrock/ross-douthat-on-conservatives-and-art/">urges</a> conservatives to reject Bellow’s proposal</p>
<blockquote><p>“<em>because it is not conservative</em>. It inescapably treats art or culture as a tool, or weapon, in the struggle for power. This, it seems to me, is a progressive or revolutionary conception of art.”</p></blockquote>
<p>No one likes to be preached to, not even progressives, which is why a heavy-handed “Bush lied” message movie like Matt Damon’s <em>The Green Zone </em>bombed despite being packaged as an exciting action thriller.</p>
<p>The trick, then, is to put aside the ideological jackhammer, focus foremost on the storytelling, and allow conservative values and messages to arise organically from compelling tales grounded in an unflinching moral universe. Easier said than done, of course, but audiences and readers must be – and want to be – seduced, not lectured. That is the way to a powerful, effective, conservative art that can reshape the cultural landscape.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>Professors For Pedophilia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/stephenbrown/professors-for-pedophilia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=professors-for-pedophilia</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2014 04:25:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Brown]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236228</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Europe suffers horrific turn in its cultural landscape.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Academia.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236230" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Academia.jpg" alt="Academia" width="270" height="198" /></a>As Christian religious belief declines in Europe, the continent’s pagan heart comes more and more to the fore, and England, is only the latest European country to witness this growing phenomenon.</p>
<p>A major pedophilia scandal is currently rocking British society, in which as many as 20 prominent politicians, judges and other members of the British establishment are suspected of having abused children in the 1980s and 1990s as part of a pedophile ring. The victims were among society’s most vulnerable, being mostly boys from state children’s homes. And such abuse, it is suspected, may have been going on for decades.</p>
<p>“We are looking at the Lords, the Commons, the judiciary- all institutions where there will be a small percentage of pedophiles, and a slightly larger percentage of people who have known about it,” former child protection manager Peter McKelvie told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), calling the predators “an extremely powerful elite” who have been abusing children “for as long as I have been alive.”</p>
<p>This latest episode involving sexual exploitation of children comes on the heels of other, jarring, pedophilia scandals to stun Britain this year. One involved the BBC itself.</p>
<p>BBC star entertainer Jimmy Savile, now deceased, was one of several BBC employees suspected of having molested literally hundreds of children and teenagers, some on BBC premises. Perhaps most shockingly, 28 British hospitals reported Savile may have molested patients on their wards, to which he was allowed access, sometimes even possessing hospital keys.</p>
<p>Another scandal saw artist and “iconic” children’s entertainer Rolf Harris, who once painted Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, found guilty this month of 12 counts of indecent assault on children and teenagers. Harris was described as a “part of millions of British childhoods” and was viewed as “a national treasure.”</p>
<p>One can correctly say pedophilia was not invented in Western countries in our times. But what differentiates the current climate concerning this once very taboo practice from earlier decades is the equally reprehensible movement underway in the West involving some academics, among others, to minimize its devastating effects on children, garner sympathy for the perpetrators and make the practice acceptable to the public. All of which is allowing pedophilia to creep into the cultural debate.</p>
<p>Journalist Andrew Gilligan recently pointed out in England’s <i>Daily</i> <i>Telegraph</i> an example of this gradual, ongoing promotion of pedophilia in mainstream society. Gilligan writes that only last year in July at a conference at the University of Cambridge, one of Britain’s most famous institutions of higher learning, pro-pedophilia positions were put forward. The conference was about classifying sexuality in “a standard international psychiatric manual used by the police and courts” that is produced by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).</p>
<p>One attendee was Ken Plummer, an emeritus professor of sociology at Britain’s Essex University. Plummer had previously stated he was once a member of the Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a British pro-pedophilia group, which advocated lowering the age of consent to ten. But Plummer said he had joined the now defunct PIE only for research purposes.</p>
<p>The results of Plummer’s &#8220;research,&#8221; however, was to produce such disturbing statements as: “The isolation, secrecy, guilt and anguish of many pedophiles are not intrinsic to the phenomenon but are derived from the extreme social pressure placed on minorities.” And another gem: “Many adult pedophiles say that boys actively seek out sex partners …&#8217;childhood’ itself is not a biological given but an historically produced social object.”</p>
<p>Former PIE chief Tom O’Carroll was also in attendance at the Cambridge conference. O’Carroll was once convicted for distributing 50,000 images of child abuse. BBC news stated: “Children, mainly boys and some as young as six, had been filmed and photographed being raped and tortured.”</p>
<p>But the most &#8220;interesting&#8221; academic at the Cambridge conference was Philip Tromovitch, a professor at Japan’s Doshisha University. In his presentation, Trofomich stated:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Pedophilic interest is natural and normal for males. At least a sizeable minority of normal males would like to have sex with children…Normal males are aroused by children.”</p></blockquote>
<p>It is not surprising that, according to Gilligan, Tromovitch and O’Carroll went together for drinks afterwards.</p>
<p>But what is surprising, though, is that persons of O’Carroll’s and Tromovitch’s ilk are even present at such a prestigious international conference alongside such reputable organizations as the APA, discussing important topics like psychiatric classifications &#8212; and at Cambridge University at that. The fact alone that Tromovitch and Plummer have positions at universities is viewed by many as a sign of serious civilizational decline.</p>
<p>There were other, similar enlightening presentations at the Cambridge function, such as “Liberating the pedophile: a discursive analysis” and “Danger and difference: the stakes of hebephilia.”</p>
<p>The APA representatives at the conference tried to have hebephilia (attraction to early pubertal children) listed as a disorder in the manual’s new edition but failed. Gilligan wrote that one American academic attending the conference believed such a listing would be abused in the United States, as convicted sex offenders would not be released after completing their sentences and be detained as “mentally ill” under “US sexually violent predator laws.”</p>
<p>The possibility of these offenders, once released, harming more children appears not to have merited the slightest consideration.</p>
<p>One APA attendee stated, however, that a way had to be found to include hebephilia as a disorder in the manual or that was “tantamount to stating that the APA’s official position is that sexual preference for early pubertal children is normal.” Which is probably what some at the conference want and why the APA proposal was voted down.</p>
<p>The attempt to normalise adult-child sex is not only limited to certain academics and paedophile groups in the West but has had its political supporters as well.</p>
<p>Germany’s Green Party more than outdid the Cambridge conference last year in notoriety for having once pushed for pedophilia’s acceptance. In 2013, shortly before Germany’s federal election, it was revealed the party had, at least in one German state, officially adopted in 1985 a position calling for the abolishment of the German law that criminalised adult-child sex. The party’s tolerance for pedophilia was such that it had a “Queer and Pederast” working group inside the party, promoting this position.</p>
<p>Even the Green candidate for chancellor in last year’s German federal election, Juergen Trittin, a city politician for the Greens in Goettingen in the 1980s, had signed a party platform statement calling for the decriminalization of child-adult sex acts “that occur without the use or threat of force.”</p>
<p>“This formulation makes a mistake. It is simply false. There are no consenting forms of sexual relationships between adults and children,” said Trittin, when forced to address the issue during the election campaign.</p>
<p>Trittin also regretted that it took his party so long to disown its pedophile past. But if it had not been for the revelations, one wonders whether the Greens would ever have recanted their previous child-adult sex position.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the Green Party, despite the revelations’ shock to the German public, still received eight percent of the national vote. In the past, despite its small size, it has played an important part in German politics, having been the junior partner in a federal coalition government with Gerhard Schroeder’s Socialist Party between 1998 and 2005 as well as serving as a coalition partner in several state governments.</p>
<p>And some Greens not only supported their party’s outrageous position, but acted on it. An openly pedophile member of the Green Party’s executive committee for Germany’s most populous state, North Rhineland-Westphalia, formed a commune in the 1980s, visited by prominent Greens, where he and others molested minors living or visiting there. He justified his abuse of the children by saying the Greek philosophers also had their “lust-boys” and sexual contact with their pupils.</p>
<p>“These were sentences that, for me, were quite unusual, facts, as it were, since no one contradicted them,” remembered one former abuse victim last year in a newspaper interview. Now an adult, he was 12 when living at the commune and said he never realized the abuse, which occurred daily, was wrong.</p>
<p>Other Greens attended party conferences where members of invited anarchist communes, called “City Indians,” were openly affectionate with their boy lovers.</p>
<p>“There were also 30-year-olds there; they played with the children,” remembered one Green Party member in an interview with <i>Die Welt</i> last year. “Sometimes I felt rotten there.”</p>
<p>Interestingly, none of these “progressive” politicians at these Green party conferences, whose stated mission is to save the world from capitalist oppression, especially American, ever thought to call the police or a children’s protection service. Ironically, it was also the Greens who, years later, were to scream the loudest and the longest in Germany against the Catholic Church’s child sex scandals. Like many leftists, the Greens are used to pointing out, in paroxysms of outrage, the moral failings of others while ignoring their own. One can only be thankful the Greens never controlled any schools back then.</p>
<p>The unstated end game of those involved in making pedophilia acceptable for public consumption is to eventually have this immoral practice legalized, as in pagan Rome and Greece of antiquity (pedophile groups’ favourite reference point). But rather than from the past, it is from the present, in the form of sympathetic academics and modern “Greens,” that the pedophile movement currently gets its intellectual support, its ideological armor and tools to promote and justify its anti-child cruelty.</p>
<p>It has been pointed out, by Gilligan among others, that professors who sympathise with this deviant behaviour pose more of a threat than pedophile groups themselves, since academics are on the forefront of making child-adult sex at least presentable, if not acceptable to the public, and, perhaps, even eventually fit for polite society. And it is this eroding of moral barriers that could ultimately lead to pedophilia’s legalization.</p>
<p>But what stands out the most in the statements and research of academic sympathisers of pedophilia, like those at the Cambridge conference, is not just the immorality of their positions but also the inhuman lightheartedness with which they trample on children’s souls. There is no realization of the damage their pedophilia madness will do to “these frail beings,” as Victor Hugo once so compassionately called children.</p>
<p>Even in Juergen Trittin’s statement, like those of other Greens, there was never any admission of immorality on his part or on the party’s. They had simply taken a false position.  All of which shows, without a doubt, that the emerging pagan heart of Europe is definitely a heartless one.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Left&#8217;s Fantasies of Cultural Ghettos</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-lefts-fantasies-of-cultural-ghettos/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-fantasies-of-cultural-ghettos</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:52:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[belly dancing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ghetto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Randa Jarrar]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220694</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An agenda of cultural hatred exposed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IMG_1484.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220726" alt="IMG_1484" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/IMG_1484-450x342.jpg" width="270" height="205" /></a>American diners eternally immersed in the 50s where Elvis is always on the jukebox dot the world from London to Tokyo. Rockabilly is bigger in Japan and Germany than it is in America. Replicas of the Statue of Liberty are scattered all over China and a generation of Asian filmmakers influenced by American films has come to Hollywood to make movies that are then redistributed around the world.</p>
<p>America has always been a machine for mixing and remixing cultures. Americans have Greek, Jewish and French first names, music that combines Celtic and African influences, and movies where British directors hire Australian actors to portray ordinary Americans. Any group trying to untangle that mix and patent their “contribution” would have as much luck as a divorcing couple trying to sort out their individual belongings after sixty years of marriage.</p>
<p>To whom does the lowly hamburger belong? To the Germans whose urban name it carries, the Mongols who invented it, the Russians who introduced it to the Germans or the Wisconsin man who began selling it that way? It doesn’t really matter. What really matters is how the burger tastes.</p>
<p>If the Jews and Greeks began calling in all their cultural debts, we would all be poorer for it.</p>
<p>In recent years, cultural protectionism has gone from being the obsession of beleaguered European states doling out millions in absurd cultural grants to another weapon wielded by professionally outraged minority activists who lay exclusive claim to what they consider their culture.</p>
<p>Minority authors claim the exclusive right to write about minority characters. Minority filmmakers claim exclusive rights to minority stories. Gay associations demand that gay characters must be played by gay actors. Transgender activists demand that transgender characters must be played by transgender actors.</p>
<p>If you want to make a movie about a disabled man, break the actor’s legs first. If you want to tell a story about a half-Indonesian half-Colombian transgendered environmental activist in a wheelchair, you had better find one of those or you’re a wicked racist, ableist, transphobic colonialist appropriator.</p>
<p>We live in a strange world in which the UK, which is rapidly losing its identity to excessive immigration, provides tax breaks to makers of video games based on their ‘Britishness’. Meanwhile Salon Magazine runs a silly article in which Randa Jarrar, an Arab woman, bemoans white women belly dancing as an offense against her “brownness.”</p>
<p>It’s unclear if she would be comfortable with suitably brown women from Latin America taking up belly dancing.</p>
<p>The denunciations of cultural appropriation never work in reverse. No one is going to complain when Egyptian writers plagiarize French novels or half the world churns out even worse imitations of truly terrible American pop music. Katy Perry wearing a Kimono is a hate crime, but the Rockabilly dancers in leather jackets and poodle skirts twirling in Toyko’s Harajuku Park aren’t going to face condemnation.</p>
<p>American caricatures of Japanese or Mexican costumes are offensive, but Japanese and Mexican caricatures of Americans are ordinary. The compass of offense, as usual, only points in one direction.</p>
<p>If Randa Jarrar, who is offended by white female belly dancers, decides to dance a waltz, there would be no talk of cultural appropriation. When Paul Robeson sang an aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute, no European-Americans rose to protest the thoughtless theft of their cultural treasure.</p>
<p>America’s multicultural society is already dysfunctional enough without self-appointed custodians of belly dancing culture drawing red lines and declaring everything that they can lay claim to off limits.</p>
<p>It is particularly ironic that Jarrar, a woman from a culture which comfortably pilfered math from the Indians, religion from the Jews and science from the Greeks is insisting that belly dancing should be the private property of her culture. If every culture that contributed to the Arab world got to call in its chits the same way, Randa Jarrar and her compatriots wouldn’t have a whole lot left except belly dancing.</p>
<p>And maybe not even that.</p>
<p>The fallacy of the cultural appropriationists is to assume that their culture originated in some primal source. That is rarely the case. The American example is only a faster and more vivid demonstration of how cultures blend and mix, passing on ideas, customs and dances.</p>
<p>It is entirely possible that belly dancing actually originated in India. In that case, it’s Randa Jarrar who is the cultural appropriationist. But that’s a facile way of looking at it. Whatever the origins of belly dancing may be, there is little doubt that the Arabs added to it. In the same way the white women that Randa Jarrar moans about will eventually add to it as well. For all I know, they already have.</p>
<p>Successful cultures don’t pout when someone plays with their toys. Instead they incorporate those innovations and build on them. It’s only insecure failed cultures that jealously lay claim to the foods and dances that their ancestors lifted off another tribe a hundred years ago and demand exclusive rights to them in perpetuity.</p>
<p>On college campuses, Muslim activists accuse Jews of culturally appropriating their Hummus and Pita. A variation of Pita was likely the original “unleavened bread” that the Bible describes the Jews bearing out of Egypt during the Exodus, but like belly dancing, cultural possession has become nine tenths of the politically correct law.</p>
<p>The United States has never been bogged down before by arguments about whether the Germans or the Mongols ought to lay claim to the hamburger. America was built on the philosophy that the hamburger was here and that everyone ought to enjoy it and find ways of making it better.</p>
<p>That is what distinguishes successful cultures from failed cultures.</p>
<p>The culture war of those crying cultural appropriation, stamping their feet over white privilege and claiming to be offended by kimonos and belly dancing is a reactionary attack on the cultural exchange that made America into a culturally rich and tolerant nation. The ideal of the culture warriors is a society of ghettos where all culture is locked away in a preserve whose use has to pass a cultural review board.</p>
<p>A culture that is locked away dies. And a culture is not just carried by its people, but also by its friends and its enemies. When Rome destroyed Israel and took away its sons and daughters as slaves, their culture spread across Europe and the Middle East. When Randa Jarrar visits a mosque, the prayers that she recites have their distant origins in religions carried along by Israeli refugees to Arabia.</p>
<p>The Jewish refugees who returned to Israel from Morocco, Syria and Egypt brought along with them Arab songs and poems. And then Arabs listened to bootleg recordings of Ofra Haza singing their songs even as their countries remained in a state of hostilities.</p>
<p>The interplay of cultures isn’t always a good thing, but it is the current along which a society moves. Those who cry cultural appropriation aren’t protecting a culture; they’re carving out a career of killing it. An America of cultural preserves in which we could no longer tell each other’s stories, eat each other’s foods and sing each other’s songs would become a balkanized society with no tolerance and no future.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong>. He discusses <em>Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Belief that Abbas is a Peace Angel</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Helplessness Over the Ukraine</em>, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Crisis in the Arts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/crisis-in-the-arts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=crisis-in-the-arts</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 05:55:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[culture war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217934</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan's new pamphlet reveals why the Left owns the culture and how conservatives can take it back. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/klav.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218044" alt="klav" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/klav.gif" width="350" height="525" /></a><strong>Introduction:</strong> Conservatives tend to see our popular culture as a toxic waste site where traditional values—religion, family, patriotism,  initiative and personal responsibility&#8211; are ferociously mocked 24/7.  They see Hollywood as occupied by nihilistic leftists interested less in entertainment than in ideology and making films that ram radical ideas down our country’s  throat.  They see the arts generally as controlled by people who have contempt for the hopes and fears of ordinary middle class Americans, portraying them as a crass “booboisie.”</p>
<p>And in all these critiques, conservatives are right.  Popular culture is at war with America and with the idea that ours is a good country, let alone a great one.  The question is not whether this war is taking place, but whether we’re going to fight back.</p>
<p>That’s exactly the question Andrew Klavan, the best selling author of over a dozen works of fiction, addresses in <i>Crisis in the Arts: Why the Left Owns the Culture and How Conservatives can Begin to Take it Back.</i> Klavan shows that it is not enough for conservatives to bemoan the left’s hostile takeover of the culture or to withdraw from the culture because they see it as politically hostile and morally vulgar.  Conservatives can win the culture war, but only if they put an army of culture warriors in the field, people who understand that enduring art is not about propaganda but about human striving and the struggle between good and evil. As Klavan writes, “For those conservatives with artistic talent and ambition this is a spectacular moment to take to the barricades… But to take advantage of this moment, conservatives have to come to grips with a situation that they naturally find uncomfortable: to wit, we are now the counter culture.  We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers.  We need to make stuff.  Good stuff. And get it out to the audience any way we can.”</p>
<p><i>Crisis in the Arts</i> is a battle plan for fighting the culture war by a leading conservative who has been behind enemy lines with several <em>New York Times</em> best sellers and who refuses to cede our cultural heritage to people hostile to America.</p>
<p><strong>To order the pamphlet, <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=U0PFUHPBO0MV">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>To read the pamphlet, see below:</strong></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><b>The Trouble With The Arts<br />
By Andrew Klavan<br />
</b></p>
<p>“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  Percy Bysshe Shelley, <i>A Defence of Poetry</i>, written 1821, published 1840.</p>
<p>“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” <i> </i>James Joyce, <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, </i>1916</p>
<p>“Politics is downstream of culture.”  Origin unknown, frequently quoted by Andrew Breitbart.</p>
<p>When conservative activist Andrew Breitbart died in 2012 at the shockingly young age of 43, those of us who believe in liberty lost a rare conservative advocate for the arts.</p>
<p>“The people who have money, every four years at the last possible second, are told, ‘You need to give millions of dollars, because these four counties in Ohio are going to determine the election,’” Breitbart once said in a speech to the National Policy Council.  “I am saying, why didn’t we invest 20 years ago in a movie studio in Hollywood, why didn’t we invest in creating television shows, why didn’t we create institutions that would reflect and affirm that which is good about America?”</p>
<p>Why indeed?  Breitbart understood — what Shelley and James Joyce knew — that the conscience of a race is forged in the soul of a nation’s artists, and it is from that conscience that legislation and politics arise.  By the time a fight becomes political — by the time its outcome depends on an election — it is often too late to win by means of rational argument.  The battle has already been decided in movies and on television, in novels and in popular songs that, over time, create a general sense — an atmosphere — of what is right and what is wrong, what is cool and what is not, what it takes to be, in Joseph Conrad’s phrase, “one of us.”</p>
<p>Conservatives thrill to the cogent popularization of political ideas by talented broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but Breitbart understood that, in the long run, all the good ideas in the world can’t combat the compelling narratives provided by the arts.  Bring out the charts that demonstrate a free market creates more and better jobs than do government programs, prove mathematically that the wealthy spread prosperity more effectively than socialism, write treatises explaining that conservatives give more money to charity than liberals, that many women yearn to leave the workforce to keep house and raise children, that capitalism helps minorities, that most veterans are perfectly sane — it will all count for nothing.  People already know that the rich are evil and the poor oppressed, all businessmen are corrupt, all conservatives greedy, all housewives are desperate, all soldiers go mad at the sight of war and so on.  They know these things because they saw them, again and again, at the movies</p>
<p>Breitbart’s passion for reforming the arts made him lamentably uncommon in a conservative movement that too often succumbs to the self-righteous pleasures of philistinism, that too often wallows in the easy satisfaction of condemning the artistic creations of the left while never daring to try to match them with original content of its own.  While right-wingers grump at onscreen sex and nudity, or decry the rise of the anti-hero, or lament sympathetic mainstream depictions of gays, or sniff at scenes of violence and blasphemy and triumphant wickedness, the left marshals these eternally popular and, in fact, legitimate tools for dramatizing the human condition and utilizes them to sell nihilism, statism and socialism to the impressionable young.</p>
<p>“I don’t go to the movies anymore!” I often hear conservatives say.  “They’re all garbage.  What do I need them for when I can stay home and watch the classics on my big screen TV?  John Wayne and Bette Davis — now there were movie stars for you!  And modern novels?  Why should I read all that foul language when I can go to my bookshelves and take down Dickens or Jane Austen any time I want?  That’s good enough for me!”</p>
<p>No one expects conservatives or anyone else to patronize works of art they don’t enjoy or that offend their sensibilities, but you can’t win a fight by ceding the field.  Conservative cultural ostriches are essentially abandoning those contemporary artists who might, at least in part, agree with them.   With no audience to support them, creators with conservative, patriotic, religious or libertarian views are left to the mercy of dishonest and calculated attacks by the powerful leftist reviewers in the so-called “mainstream” venues.  Their works are judged by the very people who have labored for the last sixty years to insure a virtual left wing monopoly over Hollywood, the publishing industry and other distributors of artistic content.</p>
<p>The simple fact is:  You can’t tell the arts to get off your lawn.  They aren’t going anywhere.  They will continue to create the attitudes of the future — the conscience of the American race — while you hide your eyes in a self-righteous huff.</p>
<p>And cultural philistinism is not just a problem among rank-and-file conservatives.  It is — even worse — endemic among our intellectuals.  Consider conservative think tanks.  As a vaccine against the virus of leftism that has been sweeping through our universities since the sixties, conservatives have created a network of research organizations where liberty-loving Big Brains can gather to study, write and speak.  David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute, Hoover Institution are all justly famous centers of conservative thought.  Intellectuals at these places have done indispensable work on foreign policy, jurisprudence, municipal governance, constitutional law and more.  But none of them centers its work on the arts and popular culture, not one.  It was Breitbart’s dream to start such a cultural think tank; he told me so.  He wanted to build a place in Los Angeles where aspiring right-wing movie makers and novelists could gather for fellowship and support.  He didn’t live to see that dream through.</p>
<p>So as things are?  If you want to hear an interview with the hot new musician, or a discussion about a brilliant new novel or an assessment of which new cable TV series is really breaking ground, you have to turn on NPR and swallow some government-funded socialism with your culture.  <i>The Wall Street Journal’</i>s Saturday Review section, God bless it, is the only major review venue that will even give a fair shake to conservative-minded work.  There are no major awards for patriotic authors and filmmakers.  There are precious few grants that will support young or struggling artists of an openly conservative bent.  Even the rare right-wing or patriotic film festival that springs up now and again always ends up favoring non-fiction documentary work, which is cheaper and easier to produce than narrative film.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the left uses its considerable media power to shower politically sympathetic artists with praise and attention while doing its best to denigrate and blacklist the right.  Powerful review venues like <i>The New York Times</i> laud even bad films and novels for their pro-left views while ignoring or attacking any work with openly right-wing sympathies.  And while a brilliant leftist actor like Sean Penn can win the Oscars he deserves even though he’s a brain-dead supporter of Communist tyrants, outspoken conservative talents like actor Kelsey Grammer, TV producer Joel Surnow and writer/director Cyrus Nowrasteh have all been snubbed, hounded or even censored for their political positions.  Nicholson Baker can write a novel imagining the assassination of President George W. Bush and win praise but if even a rodeo clown makes a rude joke about Barack Obama, he is chased out of the business.  You can’t get barred from a project in Hollywood or New York for being a left-winger; you can be quietly, and even not so quietly, excluded from many projects for being on the right.  Any artist who cares about his career knows which political side his bread is buttered on.</p>
<p>As a result, politically outspoken art is preponderantly left wing.  Indeed, American history has been virtually rewritten at the movies.  The real-life assassination of cold warrior president John F. Kennedy by a Communist was transformed into a murder-by-right-wing-conspiracy in the Oscar-winning Oliver Stone film <i>JFK</i>.  Bill Clinton’s adulteries were fictionalized as an age-appropriate, non-adulterous romance attacked (for some reason!) by evil right wing zealots in <i>The American President </i>— a film whose late 1995 release was timed perfectly to aid Clinton’s re-election bid.  As I write this, the number one box office hit is<i> The Butler </i>which dishonestly denigrates the impressive civil rights achievements of Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon while neglecting to mention that almost all opposition to truly effective civil rights advances came from Democrats.</p>
<p>And, in what was surely one of the movie industry’s most shameful interludes, the George W. Bush-era American wars against our Islamist enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan were greeted by Hollywood with a parade of anti-war, anti-American propaganda. <i>The Valley of Elah</i> showed soldiers driven to homicidal insanity by participation in the Iraq conflict; <i>Green Zone </i>showed the war in Iraq to be the result of right wing lies; <i>Lions for Lambs</i> depicted the soldiers sent to Afghanistan as heroic fools misused by evil Republicans;<i> Rendition </i>showed an innocent American Muslim being kidnapped and tortured with the blessing of the CIA; the massively popular and equally idiotic <i>Avatar </i>was a thinly disguised tale of American troops wiping out native cultures, presumably like those in the middle east — and on and on.  Even films that depicted American heroism like <i>The Hurt Locker </i>and <i>The Kingdom</i> were morally ambiguous when it came to America’s role in the wars.  And <i>Taking Chance</i>, a beautiful and deeply moving HBO movie that took no position on the war but lauded our warriors as heroes, was roundly lambasted by so-called “mainstream” critics as jingoistic.</p>
<p>What made all this so very despicable was that, for the first time in Hollywood’s history, these powerful vehicles of anti-American propaganda were produced and released <i>while our soldiers were in the field in harm’s way, fighting and dying </i>at the hands of low, hateful, tyrannical Islamist enemies.  While Hollywood certainly did its best to disparage the Viet Nam War, almost all of the major anti-war films of that era came out <i>after</i> the American political left had helped engineer our defeat.  By the time <i>Apocalypse Now</i> or <i>Platoon </i>hit the screens, the war was over, our soldiers safely home.</p>
<p>I visited Afghanistan briefly during the war and happened to witness firsthand how Taliban propaganda undermined American efforts to win local hearts and minds toward democratic governance.  I found it heartbreaking to think that these murderous Islamist lowlifes were getting cinematic encouragement from left wing millionaires tut-tutting U.S. efforts at their cozy tables at the cafe in West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont.  To be clear, there is nothing wrong with citizens opposing their government’s wars — that’s an important part of the democratic process.  But it is wrong — very wrong — to produce powerful propaganda that undermines our military’s efforts while a war is in progress.  The freedom to make art does not absolve you from the responsibility of using its power morally.  Hollywood’s unbroken leftist attacks on our war effort could not have gone unanswered if conservatives had had a more prominent and outspoken role in the movie industry and the cultural media.</p>
<p>Now, some moviegoers may point out that there were wonderful conservative films produced in this era too.  <i>The Dark Knight</i> trilogy, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> trilogy and <i>Toy Story 3</i> come immediately to mind.  These movies showed both the necessity and moral complexity of battling evil and stood up for individual independence versus tyrannical statism.  And unlike the anti-war films, which were nearly all third-rate bombs, these were excellent and hugely successful pictures which might well endure as classics.</p>
<p>But note another obvious difference.  None of these films dealt with history head on.  The Dark Knight movies, about comic book hero Batman, came closest, referring to their fantasy villains as “terrorists,” and depicting a socialist movement very much like Occupy Wall Street.  In the immediate sense, however, it’s fair to say that conservative principles were generalized in these films and applied only in their thoroughly make-believe worlds.  As I once joked, Batman had to wear a mask in <i>The Dark Knight </i>because if anyone found out he was really George W. Bush, the picture would not have gotten made.</p>
<p>At the movies — in the arts — conservative reality almost always comes disguised as fantasy whereas leftist fantasy comes disguised as reality!  Conservative works put forward true principles.  Leftist creations rewrite specific history.  Conservatives are giddy with pleasure and relief when a popular novel or film doesn’t thoroughly trash capitalism or sexual morality or faith in God.  Meanwhile, the left wing writers of TV shows like <i>Law and Order</i> tear true stories from the headlines every single week and rewrite them to impose pro-left, anti-right values on their narratives.  To cite but one example of many:  in 2005, brain damaged Terri Schiavo was judicially starved to death at the request of her husband while evangelical Christian pro-life groups fought to save her.  That same year, <i>Law and Order </i>produced a fictional version of the case in which an evangelical Christian engineered the murder of a Schiavo-like character’s husband.</p>
<p>No matter how one feels about the issues of the case, the transformation of life-affirming evangelicals into murderers unfairly represents the right-wing Christian point of view.  After all, only one person was killed in the real-life case, and it was Christians who battled to save her.  A similar political transformation takes place on the show virtually every week, and always in one direction — leftward.</p>
<p>If you don’t think leftists know the importance of using popular art to rewrite history, consider that the very rare films that look at historic reality from an even slightly conservative point of view are hounded from pillar to post by powerful left wing interests.  Cyrus Nowrasteh’s massively popular TV mini-series<i> The Path to 911</i> — which accurately portrayed Bill Clinton’s politically-motivated failure to take out bin Laden before he struck so catastrophically on 9/11 — has, unprecedentedly, not been released on DVD because of pressure on the Disney Corporation by the Clinton gang.  Joel Surnow’s mini-series <i>The Kennedys</i> — only slightly critical of that sometimes criminal lefty political clan — was hounded off the popular History channel by Kennedy friends and relegated to a far more obscure cable station.  And, of course, when Mel Gibson’s beautiful <i>The Passion of the Christ </i>ignited a wave of faith-based excitement among evangelicals&#8230; well, what happened to Jesus in that movie was nothing compared to what left wing critics did to Mel!</p>
<p>Perhaps some will point out that left wing attempts to rewrite history are almost all commercial failures.  But that, I’m afraid, is to miss the point.  No one may have watched <i>Green Zone </i>or<i> Lions for Lambs</i> when they came out.  But those movies will be available for home viewing forever.  History grows old but art goes on living.  To this day, Oliver Stone’s completely wacky version of the Kennedy assassination is all the history of that era some young people know.</p>
<p>Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson got it just right.  The so-called “scandal” involving his wife Valerie Plame — a meaningless bagatelle ginned up to a headline by a left-wing media out to destroy President George W. Bush — was re-written as a heroic left wing fight against a corrupt Republican administration for the 2010 Sean Penn vehicle<i> Fair Game.</i>  When an interviewer pointed out that the film would probably die at the box office, Wilson responded, “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”  Exactly.</p>
<p>This freedom to rewrite history in novels, movies and television shows while critics aid and abet the distortion of the truth — this left wing monopoly over not only the arts but the critical infrastructure that supports the arts — this is not the left’s fault.  They are only doing what leftists traditionally do:  creating narratives to replace the facts and browbeating and blacklisting the opposition into silence.</p>
<p>No, this situation is the right’s fault, our fault.  We have allowed it to happen.  It is just as Andrew Breitbart said:  we focus our money and our intelligence and our attention on abstruse policies and last minute election number crunching while letting the longer game of conscience-creating culture go unattended.  For conservatives, the present political situation is always an emergency that has to be attended to right now.  If Obamacare passes, the Constitution is finished.  If illegal immigrants win amnesty, the nation is doomed.  If the military budget is cut, the world will spiral into chaos.  All these statements may well be true, but while we are rushing off to stick our fingers in the latest hole in the nearest dyke, the very ground beneath our feet is being steadily eroded by both popular and highbrow culture.  The left had our emergency attitude in the 1960’s and 70’s when they took to the streets — and they lost the White House to first Richard Nixon and finally Ronald Reagan.  They learned from that mistake and began the famous “long march through the institutions,” that transformed our culture even as we celebrated our political victories.</p>
<p>The right’s response to the left’s takeover of the arts has been panic, red-faced outrage, and stay-at-home philistinism.  We have taken on the roles of cultural censors and scolds, longing for an idealized 1950’s that wasn’t real in the first place and, in any case, will never return.  Such attitudes can, at best, inspire rearguard actions destined to failure.</p>
<p>Less obviously — but just as surely in my opinion — an active conservative art scene that strikes back with nothing but family-friendly entertainments containing good solid values and pro-American flag-waving will likewise ultimately result in conservative cultural irrelevance.  Don’t get me wrong; it would be great to have more of such content available.  But ideas, like money, trickle down from the top, and the best thinkers want and need art that represents life in all its moral ambiguity and complexity.  Sexuality, violence, darkness, perversion and evil are central aspects of the human condition and a culture that doesn’t represent them will finally cause a reaction and be rejected as hypocritical and dishonest.  Remember, the young Americans who so viciously attacked their country and its values in the 1960’s and 70’s grew up watching <i>Leave it to Beaver</i>, Doris Day and the later John Wayne!  When confronted with imperfect American reality, they threw a nationwide tantrum attacking the good with the bad.  The generations that <i>built</i> the fifties grew up in a much less saccharine artistic atmosphere.</p>
<p>How then can conservatives gain a greater voice in our culture and what would a more conservative culture look like?  It is easy to respond to such questions with red meat cant that wins the frowning, nodding approval of right wing audiences.  “Less nudity!  More family fare!  More patriotism!  More God!”  Such answers give conservatives a satisfying sense of righteous indignation, while guaranteeing long-run failure that will leave the arts in the hands of the left so they can do with them as they will.  I would like to propose an approach that is more counter-intuitive to a conservative sensibility but also more strategic and more likely to succeed.  Most importantly, it is more in sympathy with the endeavor of the arts themselves and therefore less likely to do damage to and impose restrictions on the free play of imagination, creation and appreciation that are the arts’ great gifts and among the true pleasures of being alive.</p>
<p><b>What is Art?</b></p>
<p>“Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”  Leo Tolstoy, <i>What is Art?</i></p>
<p>“If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”  Advice to storytellers, variously attributed.</p>
<p>One of the most frustrating and confusing experiences for conservatives is going to a work of art or pop culture and finding themselves enjoying as entertainment what, politically, is a slap in the face — or what Big Hollywood’s John Nolte calls “a sucker punch.”  The recent Oscar-winning film <i>Argo</i>, directed and starring the talented and appealing left-winger Ben Affleck, was a thrilling history-based tale of escape with an all-American hero.  It was also a dishonest rewrite of history that blamed U.S. and British meddling for the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, carefully buried and sanitized Democrat president Jimmy Carter’s fatal incompetence during the crisis and eradicated the role of Ronald Reagan’s election in bringing the crisis to a conclusion.  For me, the fact that it was a good movie made its bad history all that much harder to swallow.</p>
<p>But in fact, it is silly and pinched to fight the allure of art for the sake of politics.  No one wants to resist the sentimental tale of love and sacrifice in the hit film <i>Titanic</i> simply because the movie’s historical inaccuracies are purposely crafted to convey a simplistic socialist message.  Likewise, even the most sane and responsible young person might find herself singing along with a Katy Perry song that glamorizes and sanitizes teenaged drunkenness and promiscuity.</p>
<p>It’s not wrong to want the art we enjoy to reflect our values — it’s simply ineffective to battle a catchy tune and clever lyrics with a moralizing frown of disapproval.  Da Smooth Baron MC had a point:  you actually <i>can’t</i> fight the rhythm.  The left has triumphed in the arts because they know how the arts work.  Before we can fight back, we have to understand what art is and what it’s attempting to do.</p>
<p>Too often, political and religious people approach the arts as a means rather than an end.  Art, they believe, exists to transmit messages — good messages rather than bad, their messages rather than the opposition’s.  They see storytelling, songwriting, picture painting and the like as “the spoonful of sugar,” that makes the medicine of wisdom go down.</p>
<p>This is a reductive approach and doesn’t explain the mysterious power of culture.  For one thing, many great and enduring works of art are, like life itself, open to several, sometimes contradictory, interpretations.  Indeed, the greater a work of art, the more it seems to foil any attempt to reduce it to a single “inner meaning.”  As a simple example, consider the enduring image of Big Brother from George Orwell’s <i>1984</i>.  Originally intended as the symbol of an oppressive Communist state, it is nowadays often used by Communist sympathizers to represent the overbearing incursions of right wing snooping.  As annoying as this may be to us conservatives, we all realize that any oppressive government on either side can justly be accused of acting like Big Brother.  Like all true art, <i>1984</i> is greater than its own intentions.</p>
<p>Consider too the eagerness with which people consume entertainment.  They line up around the block to see a popular movie.  They engage in intense, sometimes obsessive, speculation about the next episode of a cherished television show.  From time to time, a novel will spread through one or another segment of the population like a more or less benevolent flu.  Art and discussions about art are human universals, endemic to every society.   We take this for granted, yet it’s actually quite odd when you stop to think about it.  As someone who has worked in the arts and loved the arts my whole life, I often find myself asking:  why am I compelled to tell stories that aren’t true about people who don’t exist — and why should the audience listen to them?</p>
<p>The reductive notion of art as mere fable or parable does not account for the depth and power of our need for it.  Neither, in my view, does Tolstoy’s idea that art is a vehicle for transmitting feelings.  Or that is, Tolstoy doesn’t really address the question of why we want — why we<i> need</i> — to experience the feelings of some artist we have never met.   Nor does he explain why some trashy art can evoke all kinds of emotions while the greatest art is sometimes not full of feeling at all but rather has a certain cold quality about it, its power akin to the sternly perfect beauty of mathematics.</p>
<p>No, art’s power to convey wisdom and its ability to communicate feeling make up only a small part of its overall purpose.</p>
<p>Art is a method of recording the ineffable inner experience of being human.  There are no words that can directly describe what it is like to be self-consciously alive.  Only symbols, stories, pictures and music can do it.  The simplest person, when asked to convey the internal experience of an event, will either respond with something meaningless and emotionally incomprehensible (“It was the greatest thing ever!”) or will resort to figurative language and metaphor.  “It was like waking up on Christmas morning and seeing presents under the tree!”  “It was like getting lost in a dark wood!”  “It was like being called upon to avenge a murder and being paralyzed with indecision!”  This is where stories — and pictures and songs — begin.  They are the answers to the question:  What’s it <i>like</i> to be a human being?</p>
<p>The deeper, richer, and more complex the artist’s answer to that question, the more universal and enduring his work of art becomes.  The play <i>Hamlet</i> is a brilliant evocation of what it was like to be a thinking person at the historical moment when the once-universal moral truth of Catholicism was shattered by Reformation — but it is <i>so </i>brilliant, that it more or less predicts every emotional-philosophical dilemma that will arise from that intellectual cataclysm for the next five hundred years.  Its depiction of the internal human moment is so complete that it becomes a depiction of all the moments that led up to it and all the moments that will come after it as well.  It is the inner life of the modern West dramatized in a four hour play.</p>
<p>We need this.  We need to tell and to hear the story of man’s inner life — to write it down, paint it, film it, play it on the harpsichord or synthesizer — because it is our human nature and our human privilege to preserve what we learn and pass it on and build on top of it.  No other animal can do that.  It is possible no other animal has such a story to tell.  I do not think my dog knows what it’s like to be a dog.  But, whether she does or not, she does not seem to be able to explain it to the dog next door.  Animals seem to pass on only that information that travels through their genes and so animals can only grow and adapt through physical stimulus, through evolution.  People write things down and preserve them and can therefore build on the ideas and learning of their predecessors.  We write down how to make a wheel so our children won’t have to reinvent it.  We make art so that man’s vision of himself might deepen over the centuries.  A life without art is emotionally illiterate, an animal life that will, at best, be wasted reinventing the wheel of human wisdom.</p>
<p>So the purpose of art is not to edify or instruct, though it can instruct and often does edify.  The purpose of art is not even to delight, though, if it’s art, it will delight because that’s its nature, that’s the way it works.  The purpose of art is to record and transmit the internal human experience.  Great art does this greatly, bad art does it badly, pop art oftentimes does it sentimentally and superficially — but it is what all art is trying in its own way to do.</p>
<p>This may seem like distant philosophical speculation but, in fact, understanding art’s purpose has practical implications and applications.  It helps us to understand what a work of art is doing well and what it is doing badly, and how a work of art that is somehow “good” (has a catchy tune or an affecting story) can also be used for bad purposes (lying about history or romanticizing debauchery). It also helps clarify what conservatives should want from the culture, and what they can do to get it.</p>
<p><b>When is Art Conservative?</b></p>
<p>The single biggest mistake conservative cultural warriors make is this:  they expect a conservative culture to look conservative.  It will not.  If the purpose of culture is to record and convey the internal human experience in its entirety, it is going to record and convey a good many things of which we disapprove.  There is simply no getting around the wickedness, corruption, greed, lust and sheer troublemaking goofiness lodged in the hearts of the best of us — and therefore, there is no getting around their entertainment value or their legitimacy as subjects for art.</p>
<p>Conservatives should definitely fight back against an artistic establishment in Hollywood and New York that refuses to elevate good values.  There should be more TV shows and movies and novels that talk about happy families, decent businessmen, edifying religion, manly men and womanly women — all of which are currently being excised from the arts by left wing censorship and so-called political correctness.</p>
<p>But having said that, conservatives should have no problem with the art of darkness — if it is also the art of truth.  Conservatives should not be afraid to make and praise art that depicts the worst aspects of human nature as long as it does so honestly — that is, in the context of the moral universe in which every choice has its price and every action has its consequences whether internal or external or both.</p>
<p>Take the HBO television series <i>The Sopranos, </i>for an example.  It is a great show, revolutionary and brilliant.  It would be easy and understandable for a conservative to take umbrage at the characters’ ceaseless barrage of foul language, their gleeful violence and empty, even sometimes abusive sexuality.  But that would be to miss the exquisite complexity of the show’s moral vision.  <i>The Sopranos</i> captures the joy of power and the temptations of violence but it also shows the brutal soul-destroying effects of the mobster life.</p>
<p>In one installment, entitled “From Where to Eternity,” Jesus Christ actually responds to a prayer.  He grants a wounded gangster his life after first vouchsafing him a vision of the hell to which he’s undoubtedly bound.  Another gangster in the episode is haunted by the spirits of the men he killed.  The threat of eternal judgement hangs over everything.  And yet, despite the evidence all around them, the gangsters ignore the moral promptings of the spirit.  They go on killing and even celebrate the rewards they’ve won through their murderous and dishonest lifestyle:  “God has been good to us!”  It’s stunningly real, tragic and affecting.</p>
<p>Without moralizing, without bringing its bad characters to anything like justice, the writers present a vivid and true depiction of the way people behave and the consequences of that behavior.  Whether you believe in Christ or not, whether you see hell as real or metaphorical, the series gives us a double vision of how evil is, on the one hand, exhilarating and seductive, and how, on the other hand, it turns a person’s soul to ashes.  There is, undoubtedly, rollicking entertainment to be had in watching the characters do nasty things to one another, but the overall effect actually serves to deepen the viewers’ moral vision of this complex and often wicked existence.</p>
<p>Think of it this way:  a work of art is a world unto itself.  It is responsible to the real world not in its individual symbols and events but only in its overall effect.  Some evangelical Christians made the mistake of attacking the delightful Harry Potter novels because Potter is a wizard and wizardry and magic are against Christian teaching.  But Potter’s wizardry existed in a completely fantastical world that did not play by the same rules as the real world.  In the context of <i>that</i> world, his fictional wizardry not only exemplified excellent moral values, it also laid the foundations for faith.  The novels are deeply Christian when judged, not by their individual incidents, but by their overall effect.  By condemning them, the evangelicals lost a hugely popular teaching tool.</p>
<p>Again, no one is required to consume art that offends his sensibilities.  That isn’t the point at all.  People who are offended by cursing or violence or sex shouldn’t watch television shows like <i>The Sopranos</i>.  I like scary stories and I’m told<i> The Walking Dead</i> is a wonderful TV series about a zombie apocalypse.  But I mostly watch TV at night and I don’t particularly want to see animated corpses devouring human beings before I go to bed, so I take a pass.  But I don’t mistake my personal tastes for aesthetic or moral judgment.</p>
<p>Left to themselves, and without censorship from left or right, the arts in a free nation are naturally going to contain anything and everything that transmits the human experience.  There will be excellent family fare, works of high-minded nobility and soaring expressions of religious feeling — but there’ll also be plenty of rattling good stuff that’s wild, sexy, violent, crazy and culture-critical.  On first glance, these latter traits may seem to go against everything conservatives believe in — self-discipline, restraint, sanity and a respect for tradition — but they have to be judged in the context of the work of art’s created world.</p>
<p>To me, conservative art is any art that honestly acknowledges the moral universe.  There is such a thing as good and evil — if there were not there could be no action that was better or worse than any other.  Who has experienced the world that way?  No one.  Not even the relativist college professors who teach such garbage to the young can truly believe it in fact.  We all know that love is better than hate, freedom better than slavery, independence more essential to the soul than safety.  Relativism — the sine qua non of modern leftism — is simply a lie.</p>
<p>But while good and evil are real, the human heart is not in harmony with them and never has been.  To paraphrase Saint Paul, we do not always do the good we want to do, and the evil we don’t want to do, we keep on doing.  Because we are fallen creatures then, there is, in human life, a price for every choice we make and a consequence for every action.  Marriage may be moral, but it is attended by frustrations.  Adultery may be a thrill but it savages the people we love most.  Criminals are evil but good men sometimes envy their freedom.  Slavery destroys the soul but liberty is fraught with peril.  Art needs to explore these tensions and we shouldn’t be afraid when it does.  After all, the founders of America did not create the Constitution because western culture had given them a simplistic happy-face view of human nature.  They had read the classics.  They understood mankind.  The document they created is a machine for delivering freedom not to the cast of <i>The Donna Reed Show </i>but to us, self-interested, corrupt, often stupid and wicked citizens that we are.</p>
<p>It is an honest view of human beings at odds with the moral universe that creates the conservative dedication to moral discipline, firm limits on the powerful, care for tradition and, most importantly, reverence for the individual’s inner world and free choices.  We do not need to be afraid of art that depicts the world honestly.  It is only leftist lies we need to fear, because the truth — even the ugly, immoral, and thoroughly entertaining truth of human nature — is on our side.</p>
<p><b>Reclaiming the Culture</b></p>
<p>If we stop worrying about the unpleasant actions and events that take place in some art, if we stop fanning our faces over the evil characters who live in some imaginary worlds, if we stop bothering ourselves about the sex, the cursing and the violence on our movie and TV screens, we begin to see that the real trouble we face in the arts is two-fold:  blacklisting and lies.</p>
<p>First, blacklisting.</p>
<p>The left uses its grip on Big Media to attack conservative culture.  Even a well-loved production like <i>Downton Abbey</i> was called out by the press when its conservative leanings were descried.  Less high profile works don’t stand a chance against pre-emptive reviewer attacks.</p>
<p>The left uses its domination of the movie and book and art industries to keep conservatives out — ask any conservative who’s been interrogated, insulted or outright silenced for “Creating while Conservative.”  All three have happened to me personally.</p>
<p>The left even uses political clout to chill the freedom of conservative expression — as when California Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened investigations against <i>Zero Dark Thirty </i>for its political incorrectness and thus, very likely, ruined its chance to win an Oscar.</p>
<p>We need to fight back.</p>
<p>For those conservatives with artistic talent and ambition, this is a spectacular moment to take to the barricades.  Big Media is tottering under the assault of new technologies.  With electronic publishing and social media, books can be self-published and self-promoted.  With the new video cameras, professional-looking films can be produced on the cheap and distributed online.  YouTube, iTunes, smart phones, tablets, blogs — all provide opportunities for new kinds of work and new ways for that work to be dispensed.</p>
<p>But to take advantage of this moment, conservatives have to come to grips with a situation that they naturally find uncomfortable:  to wit, we are now the counter-culture.  When it comes to the arts, Radical Leftists are The Man.  We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers.  We need to make stuff.  Good stuff.  And get it out to the audience any way we can.</p>
<p>And those in the audience need to support the stuff that gets made.  We don’t have to hold our noses and praise artistic garbage because we agree with its politics; but we might stop preening ourselves on our blessed integrity and stop looking for ways to shoot down good work in order to show just how fair-minded we are.  The film <i>300 </i>was a wonderful piece of conservative pop culture, a brilliant use of video game style storytelling that celebrated the defense of western values at the battle of Thermopylae.  I read conservatives criticizing the very over-the-top fantasy elements that made the movie a massive hit.  I even heard some conservatives complain about the bare chests of the Greek warriors as if that made the film homoerotic.  (Heaven forfend a film about ancient Greece should be homoerotic!)  Did these right wing critics want the left to love them for their objectivity?  To hell with the left.  We need many more successes like <i>300</i>.  Buy a ticket, applaud, go home.  That’s all you have to do.</p>
<p>Finally, for those conservatives with money, this is also a moment of opportunity, a moment when leftist censorship can be rolled back.  Breitbart was right:  we do need a movie studio.  We also need publishing houses that don’t just turn out right wing screeds but also produce literature.  Equally important, we need an infra-structure welcoming to the arts:  critical journals, culturzal podcasts, radio and TV to counter NPR and Public Television, awards, award ceremonies, grants, appreciation.  Artists work for love as much as money.  Conservatives give them exactly none.  We need to appreciate honest works that go beyond family fare and patriotic jingoism and Judeo-Christian piety.  Next time you wonder how our culture went so wrong that a corrupt mediocrity like Barack Obama could win a second term as president, remember:  it happened at the movies while you were giving your millions to political consultants.  Play the long game; support the arts.</p>
<p>That’s blacklisting.  Now, lies.</p>
<p>The best defense against lies is not censorship but the truth.  The best defense against dishonest art is honest art.</p>
<p>It’s wonderful when terrific films like <i>Toy Story 3 </i>and <i>The Dark Knight</i> express values conservatives can support.  But there’s simply no reason we can’t make art about real life as well.</p>
<p>One doesn’t have to be jingoistic or simplistic to tell a story wholeheartedly supporting war against Islamo-fascism.  Why are there so few?</p>
<p>As I write this, <i>Law and Order</i> is planning a rewrite of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case.  I’m willing to bet it furthers the left wing narrative that this was a crime involving race when all the facts say otherwise.  What story is the right telling about the case?  Let me guess:  none.</p>
<p>Republicans have supported most civil rights legislation; Democrat policies have ravaged African-American communities:  tell good stories about that.   (I did in <i>The Identity Man</i> — and, in an otherwise positive review, the <i>Wall Street Journal </i>scolded me for sounding a political note in a thriller novel!  For shame.)</p>
<p>The left produces film after film, book after book, TV show after TV show demonizing conservative politicians, lying about conservative ideas, hagiographizing sleazy Democrats and rewriting history to edit out the terrible damage their policies have done.  We don’t need to answer propaganda with propaganda but there’s no reason our stories can’t include the historical truth — no reason except the fact that liberal venues will attack us and idiot conservatives will fret we’re getting “too political.”  Yet the alternative is to accept the spread of the left’s empire of lies.</p>
<p>We need to counteract another sort of lie in the arts as well:  let’s call it the lie of consequence.  Some works of art, especially popular art, are a record of our daydreams.  There’s nothing harmful in that per se.  Most men understand that if we really lived like James Bond, the broken bones and STD’s would render our medical expenses ruinous.  Most women know that an S&amp;M relationship like the one in <i>50 Shades of Gray</i> would be more degrading (and painful) than it was worth.  Yes, young boys need to be advised that fighting a Russian spy on top of a moving train can be hazardous to their health and young girls should be told that a relationship that begins with a beating is unlikely to end in a fairy tale romance.  But the fact is, we all have fantasies that are anti-social, improper, ridiculous and unkind and there’s nothing wrong with airing them out now and again.  They’re part of the human condition and I suspect that trying to suppress them only gives them more power over us.</p>
<p>But there are cultural works that use our fantasies to entice us into the worst of ourselves.  Rap music that glamorizes murder and the abuse of women; torture-happy horror movies that lovingly portray the vivisection of living people; sexual pornography that hypnotizes us out of our humanity and can actually be addictive and life-destroying.  While it has been one purpose of this essay to try to convince my fellow conservatives to eschew knee-jerk condemnation of artistic images that might at first offend them, I will not try to disguise the fact that I find these misuses of the arts I love to be pathetic and despicable.</p>
<p>As a matter of strategy if nothing else, however, I can only recommend that we respond to these emanations of original sin with criticism rather than censorship, and concern rather than outrage.  Rappers who make money bragging about “killin’ them bitches” and “dustin’ some cops off,” are cheap braggarts and liars, selling self-destruction as triumph.  We are told that they are expressing the rage of the black streets.  Who cares?  An inarticulate shriek would do the same.  Art — the honest record of the inner life — always operates truthfully in its context.  These songs don’t.  The fact is: middle-class white kids bop to this garbage — and then, if they’re lucky, they go home to see their law-abiding parents treat each other with respect and so learn better.  A poor kid, especially a black kid in a community where intact families have all but vanished, is in far more peril of being swept on the rhythm of this self-aggrandizing filth into the dustbin of a wasted life.  Nice going, soul-man.</p>
<p>The same charge of dishonesty can be brought against torture horror, that beguiles you into dehumanizing its victims, and porn, that beguiles you into dehumanizing yourself.  (Feminist author Erica Jong once said that after watching pornography for ten minutes, she wanted to have sex; after watching for twenty minutes, she never wanted to have sex again as long as she lived.  That’s a clever and accurate description of how pornography works.)  Lots of kids get a shrieky thrill from a bloody horror romp, and most men sneak a peek at naked lady pictures from time to time, so over-reaction is always a counter-productive danger.  I’m against censorship on principle and also because I think it’s generally useless in the internet age.  But thoughtful and passionate criticisms and dissections of the lies inherent in these genres can be powerful and can filter down to those who need to hear them.  In the arts, to paraphrase St. Paul again, everything is permissible but not everything is helpful.  When works of culture are anti-human, it’s important to say so and explain why.</p>
<p>And, of course, this is where the makers of wholesome entertainments play a role.  Depictions of men and women happy in relationship, depictions of families that are sources of strength rather than merely factories of neurosis, stories and songs that lift up the better angels of our nature may not appeal to the coastal critics and other self-proclaimed sophisticates, but they are important reinforcements of what we know to be true:  faith, family and industry may seem restrictive — they may <i>be </i>restrictive — but they are, in fact, the surest paths to freedom and happiness.</p>
<p>In the end, however, critical attacks and negative reactions, while sometimes necessary, will always be our least effective tools.  The arts can only be reclaimed by those who love them.  Because the job of the arts is to say as much as possible — to say everything — about what it’s like to be human, attempts to silence or curtail them will always be antithetical to the endeavor and likely to backfire.  The arts are a positive enterprise, and positive action — creation, appreciation, support and praise — are the most powerful weapons a culture warrior possesses, and the ones that conservatives tend to use the least.  The left censors and blacklists right wingers, but that’s because they’re in the wrong and can’t abide disagreement.  Conservatives should welcome all voices, because we’re in the right and will win most arguments — and where we lose arguments, we should be willing to reconsider and change our minds.</p>
<p>The vision that inspired the American experiment in liberty was a vision created and preserved and handed down through works of western art and culture.  It was a complex vision of man as a flawed creature in a moral universe striving toward the freedom for which he was made.  The voice of that creature speaks to us over centuries in works as dark and bloody as the Greek tragedies and as bright and delightful as the American musicals, in symphonies and bagatelles, in doggerel and epic verse.  Uncensored, that voice, intentionally or not, consciously or not, will always cry out for the very things conservatives most believe in:  personal independence and lasting love, a good life today and a better life tomorrow, faith in a God who is no stranger to our suffering and who will yet become the father of our joy.</p>
<p>The arts, even at their least, are one of humanity’s most noble enterprises.  They have been highjacked by adherents of a low and oppressive ideology.  We should take them back.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Muslim Rape Culture</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/muslim-rape-culture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslim-rape-culture</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Feb 2014 05:36:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Taliban and their views on women are now here.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/islamr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217864" alt="islamr" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/islamr.jpg" width="280" height="269" /></a>No one knows the real name of the <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/muslim-refugee-gropes-women-blames-cultural-differences-avoids-jail/">Port Hills Groper</a>, the Muslim refugee who stalked and attacked over a dozen women jogging in Port Hills, even though he was arrested, tried and sentenced. Instead the New Zealand court gave him “permanent name suppression” to protect his status in his Muslim community.</p>
<p>Judge Jane Farish, who had told a Maori rapist who had lured an Australian tourist into a dark street and beat her while trying to tear off her clothing “If I had my way I would release you today,” let the groper off with community service because his actions were caused by “cultural ambiguities.”</p>
<p>The Muslim groper had blamed his serial assaults on “a misunderstanding of cultural differences” claiming that he had just been trying to be friendly. In his Middle Eastern Muslim culture, friendliness apparently consisted of forcibly groping female joggers while telling them “Happy New Year.”</p>
<p>In neighboring Australia, Muslim cultural misunderstandings have become a big problem for women.</p>
<p>Esmatullah Sharifi, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/australian-judge-finds-muslim-cultural-differences-valid-excuse-for-rape/">an Afghan refugee</a>, offered an Australian woman a ride home and then put his right hand around her neck and his left hand over her mouth and raped her. Sharifi’s lawyers claimed that due to cultural differences he was confused about the nature of consent.</p>
<p>This wasn’t Sharifi’s first misunderstanding of the difference between rape and sex. He had already been sentenced to 7 years in jail for raping an Australian teenager on Christmas Day in 2008.</p>
<p>The sentencing judge rejected Sharifi’s excuse, but a court of appeals judge found that claiming cultural differences was a valid basis for an appeal.</p>
<p>This wasn’t the first case of Muslim cultural misunderstanding assault in Australia.</p>
<p>Last year, an <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-cleric-who-groped-aussie-women-claims-cultural-misunderstanding/">Egyptian Muslim cleric was arrested for groping women</a> on a beach. The spokesman for the Dee Why Mosque said that by groping a grandmother pushing a stroller and an underage girl, Ahmed Alkahly had been “showing love and compassion but had misunderstood the cultural differences between Australia and Egypt.”</p>
<p>In Muslim Egypt, 99.3% of women and girls have been sexually harassed. What is ordinary behavior in Egyptian Muslim culture is a criminal act in Australia where women are considered to be human beings.</p>
<p>Almahde Ahmad Atagore made his own effort at showing love and compassion by sexually assaulting seven women and girls. The youngest of his victims was only 13 years old. Afterward he laughed.</p>
<p>Atagore’s lawyers blamed cultural differences and Judge Margaret Rizkalla agreed, telling the Libyan Muslim rapist, &#8220;It seems you were very ill prepared to deal with cultural differences.&#8221;</p>
<p>That was 3 years ago. Atagore will be eligible for parole this year.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/gang-rapist-claims-right-to-assault/2005/12/09/1134086806845.html">In the Ashfield rapes</a>, four Pakistani brothers raped eighteen women and girls. Their father urged that his sons be pardoned because they “did not know the culture of this culture.”</p>
<p>One of the brothers appealed his sentence arguing that he had committed the rapes based on cultural differences with how Pakistani girls behaved. The older brother said in court that only now that he had gained a &#8220;better understanding of Australian culture&#8221; did he finally realize that rape was wrong.</p>
<p>Explaining why he had raped one girl, he said, “She was not related to us and she was not wearing any Purdah, like she was not… covered her face, she was not wearing any headscarf.”</p>
<p>Purdah refers to the practice of keeping women isolated and locked up at home. The Hijab and the Burka are <a href="http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2010/05/banning-burqa-to-protect-women.html">forms of mobile Purdah</a>; clothing that acts as a symbolic &#8220;partition&#8221; keeping women &#8220;fenced in&#8221; even in public.</p>
<p>The father of the rapist brothers said of the victims, &#8220;What do they expect to happen to them? Girls from Pakistan don&#8217;t go out at night.”</p>
<p>And when enough Pakistanis migrate to their country neither will Australian girls; especially now that at least one of the brothers has already been released.</p>
<p>The cultural differences between the Muslim world and the Western world behind these rape cases were highlighted when Australia’s Grand Mufti<a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/edited-transcript-of-sheik-hilalis-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111112425808">, the infamous Sheikh Hilaly, had said</a>, in response to an earlier Muslim gang rape case, that in sexual matters, “it&#8217;s 90 per cent the women&#8217;s responsibility.”</p>
<p>Quoting al-Rafihi, the Grand Mufti said, “If I came across a rape crime. I would discipline the man and order that the woman be arrested and jailed for life.”</p>
<p>Then the Grand Mufti went on to compare rape victims to uncovered meat. “If you take uncovered meat and put it on the street, on the pavement, in a garden, in a park or in the backyard, without a cover and the cats eat it, is it the fault of the cat or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.”</p>
<p>“If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she&#8217;s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don&#8217;t happen.”</p>
<p>It’s no wonder that Pakistani girls don’t go out at night.</p>
<p>In Muslim culture, women face a choice between Purdah and rape. And now so do women in Western countries who come face to face with Muslim rape culture.</p>
<p>Back in the UK, Muslim cultural differences are also becoming a problem for women and an excuse for multicultural judges.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/muslim-who-raped-13-year-old-uk-girl-spared-jail-because-he-didnt-know-it-was-wrong/">Muslim pedophile in Nottingham</a> was given a suspended sentence after he claimed that he had attended a Muslim school where he was taught that women are worthless.  Adil Rashid told a psychologist that his Muslim school had taught him that, “Women are no more worthy than a lollipop that has been dropped on the ground.”</p>
<p>The lollipop is a common teaching tool in Muslim culture. Muslim girls are told that they should wear a Hijab <a href="http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/archive/why-some-muslim-women-dont-wear-hijab/">because no one wants an unwrapped</a> lollipop. An <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/16/AR2008081602063.html">Egyptian ad campaign</a> about sexual harassment contrasted <a href="http://plancksconstant.org/blog1/2010/11/the_myth_that_veiling_protects_women_from_assault.html">a chastely wrapped lollipop</a> with an uncovered lollipop swarming with flies.</p>
<p>Lollipops may be new, but the idea in Islam is old. The Hijab and the Burka have nothing to do with female modesty or dignity. Not according to the Koran.</p>
<p>“O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies that they may thus be distinguished and not molested,” Allah tells Mohammed.</p>
<p>The context of Koran chapter 33 verse 59 is even grimmer if you put it in the context of verse 50 which allowed Mohammed’s army to enslave and rape captured women and the use of the <a href="http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/khurshedCh/hijab.htm">Burka to distinguish between wives</a> and slaves.</p>
<p>Qadri’s Irfan-ul-Quran translation comments on 33:59 that “It is more likely that this way they may be recognized (as pious, free women), and may not be hurt (considered by mistake as roving slave girls.)”</p>
<p>When Mohammed captured Safiyya bint Huyayy, a Jewish teenager, during his campaign of ethnic cleansing against the region&#8217;s Jewish population, he told his followers, &#8220;Tomorrow if you see her covered with a veil then she is my wife; if you see her without a veil then she is a slave girl.&#8221;</p>
<p>That is the cultural difference between the Muslim world and the Western world.</p>
<p>There are no “free women” in Islam. There are women who belong to one man and there are women who belong to all men. There are wives and daughters or women who can be enslaved by any man.</p>
<p>Women can be covered meat or uncovered meat, but they cannot be considered people. When they are raped, the deciding question is whether they were at home or outside, whether they were covered meat or uncovered meat, whether they were acting like good Pakistani girls or bad Western women.</p>
<p>The Taliban aren’t just in Afghanistan and Pakistan anymore, they are everywhere in the West that Pakistani, Afghani and other Muslim migrants settle. Expecting them to respect the rights of Western women is asking them to turn their backs on their culture and religion and that is as likely to happen in Muslim settlements in the UK, France and Australia… as it is in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>The Taliban and their views on women have come to the West. And Western judges are choosing to respect Muslim rape culture over the rights of women.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Study Says Movies Make You Liberal</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/study-says-movies-make-you-liberal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=study-says-movies-make-you-liberal</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2014 05:22:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Films]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Left picks up the propaganda battle where the Nazis and Lenin left off. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ag.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-214399" alt="ag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ag.jpg" width="214" height="317" /></a>Conservatives have long known and complained that movies and television shows are shot through with overt progressive messages, although the Hollywood left downplays that concern as paranoid. But they may not be aware that even seemingly apolitical entertainment can contain subtle left-leaning messages, and those messages are effective at nudging audiences – even conservatives – to the left.</p>
<p>The science is settled. According to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sentimental-films-can-influence-political-attitudes-and-make-you-more-liberal-scientists-say-9028375.html">research</a> published in the December edition of <i>Social Science Quarterly</i>, viewers who are “not prepared” to be critical about what they see onscreen are more likely to experience a temporary politically “leftward shift” when watching Hollywood movies with an “underlying liberal message.”</p>
<p>A team of political scientists at the University of Notre Dame set out to investigate the power of political messages in popular films. Dr. Todd Adkins, the lead author of the <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12070/abstract">study</a> “<i>Moving</i> Pictures? Experimental Evidence of Cinematic Influence on Political Attitudes,” <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12070/abstract">wrote</a> that: “Media effects research has generally ignored the possibility that popular films can affect political attitudes,” an omission he described as “puzzling” for two reasons:</p>
<blockquote><p>First, research on public opinion finds the potential for persuasion is highest when respondents are unaware that political messages are being communicated. Second, multiple studies have found that entertainment media can alter public opinion. Together, this suggests that popular films containing political messages should possess the potential to influence attitudes.</p></blockquote>
<p>That concept is a no-brainer. The left has understood the power of film to sway audiences at least as far back as the Nazis. Lenin once said that “for us, the cinema is the most important of the arts” – important, of course, in terms of propagating their agenda. Over the decades, the less culturally savvy conservatives increasingly ceded that arena to them; the result is that the left owns the culture, and whoever owns the culture dominates the political arena as well.</p>
<p>Considering what a divisive political issue healthcare currently is in the United States, the authors of the study wondered if subjects watching films with pro-healthcare reform messages would become more liberal on the issue. To test the theory the authors <a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-109934.html">surveyed</a> 252 students at Notre Dame – 54% of whom regard themselves as conservative – on their political views, randomly assigned them one of three films, then questioned them again.</p>
<p>The movies had either a strong and explicit political message (<i>The Rainmaker</i>, in which healthcare is a central part of the storyline), a subtle political message (<i>As Good as it Gets</i> starring Jack Nicholson, in which healthcare is less prominent, but still plays a role in the story), or no political message (Tom Hanks’ <i>That Thing You Do!</i>, which has nothing to do with healthcare). <i>The Rainmaker</i>, for what it’s worth, stars Matt Damon, arguably Hollywood’s most politically outspoken big star, considering his support for radical historian Howard Zinn, his many public statements about income inequality, and his appearance in overtly political films like the “Bush lied, people died” action thriller <i>The Green Zone</i> and class warfare sci-fi flick <i>Elysium</i> (both box office bombs).</p>
<p>The tests revealed that viewers of both <i>As Good as it Gets</i> and <i>The Rainmaker</i> did indeed become experience a “leftward shift in attitude” on the healthcare topic, <i>regardless of their stances beforehand</i>, and this change persisted for two weeks after viewing the films. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but Adkins and his group found that such movies “possess the ability to change political attitudes, especially on issues that are unframed by the media,” and that “such influence persists over time and is not moderated by partisanship, ideology, or political knowledge.” He concluded by recommending that more study on the political influence of popular movies “is clearly warranted.”</p>
<p>Why was even the movie with a subtle message so effective? Because the audience subjects weren’t on their guard: “Viewers come expecting to be entertained and are not prepared to encounter and evaluate political messages as they would during campaign advertisements or network news,” said Adkins. “In an age where the biases of network news and talk radio programs are accepted facts, the movie theater may prove to be one of the last sources of cross-cutting exposure to political messages.”</p>
<p>This is not an argument for conservatives to avoid theaters for fear that they might unwittingly be steered left; too many on the right have already washed their hands of Hollywood as it is, and disengagement is not how you win a culture war. Instead, this should be an argument for conservatives to make themselves more aware of how Hollywood uses pop culture as a Trojan horse to manipulate and indoctrinate. Awareness enables resistance. Be aware of what a movie’s political position is, even in a seemingly apolitical film, and how it is being presented.</p>
<p>This study is also an argument for realizing that such political messaging can cut both ways. Powerful storytelling can compel audiences to embrace the values of the right as well as the left. Nobody likes to be preached to, not even the left. People are seduced and changed by great stories. That must be our mission: compelling storytelling, not political lectures.</p>
<p>The cultural battle is the critical one. Unless and until the right starts thinking in terms of waging a vigorous cultural campaign, we will continue to lose presidential elections. Winning that critical conflict requires that we get into the fray, understand and embrace pop culture, and commit to reclaiming it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Midas Touch and the Leftist Touch</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dennis-prager/the-midas-touch-and-the-leftist-touch/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-midas-touch-and-the-leftist-touch</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:25:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[destroy]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Midas]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The inherent similarity they both share. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/King_Midas.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211040" alt="King_Midas" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/King_Midas.jpg" width="209" height="178" /></a>The Midas touch is named for the mythological Greek King Midas who is said to have been able to turn everything he touched into gold.</p>
<p>The left has the opposite ability: to turn virtually everything it touches into rubble. Sometimes it happens quickly; sometimes it takes generations. But it is inevitable.</p>
<p>Almost the only time this is not true is when the left takes a position that is shared by non-leftists. But whatever the left transforms in its direction is damaged, and often destroyed.</p>
<p>Name the institution or the value transformed by the left and that institution or value is ruined.</p>
<p>Here is a partial list:</p>
<p>—Education</p>
<p>Since the left came to dominate universities, schools of education and, increasingly, high schools, each has becomes inferior to what it was prior to left-wing influence.</p>
<p>Universities have become to the left what seminaries are to religions — a place to indoctrinate students. Truth is derided as a false construct and is no longer the goal of most university professors (outside of math and the natural sciences). Schools of education teach left-wing doctrines and brand-new notions of teaching that are almost always inferior to what existed earlier.</p>
<p>—Art and Music</p>
<p>The left-wing influence on art and music has been almost entirely destructive. Notions of greatness in art have been deconstructed, if not ridiculed. There is no pursuit of excellence or of spiritual or moral elevation, and no aim to inspire. Indeed, the opposite is more often the rule. The ugly, the deliberately offensive, the moronic and the scatological are celebrated: The 24-foot sculpture of a dog lifting its leg and peeing in front of the Orange County Museum of Art; Piss Christ, the crucifix in the artist&#8217;s urine shown at galleries around America; and exhibits composed of menstrual blood are but a few examples.</p>
<p>—Environmental Laws</p>
<p>While all rational people want to protect the environment, environmentalism has become a destructive leftist religion. Millions of Africans have died of malaria because of the environmentalist-induced bans on DDT. Environmentalist opposition to modifying rice to include Vitamin A led to the deaths of about 8 million Third World children. In 2012 alone, wind turbines have created killing fields for birds and bats. The American prairies are being destroyed by the environmentalists&#8217; push for ethanol.</p>
<p>—The Culture</p>
<p>The cultural left has created and celebrated an unbelievable coarsening of the culture, especially injurious to the young. Examples of Hollywood&#8217;s degradation of culture in film and on television are too numerous to mention. We will suffice with mentioning only MTV, one of the most damaging cultural forces in the lives of American young people; and the sex-drenched universities from an f-saw exhibition to the ubiquitous &#8220;sex week.&#8221;</p>
<p>—The Military</p>
<p>For decades, the left has sought to weaken the American military, the most potent force for peace and liberty on planet earth — by, among other things, obtaining huge cuts in military spending (not only through sequestration) and social engineering experiments such as placing women in combat units.</p>
<p>—California</p>
<p>Thanks to the left&#8217;s total dominance of California political life, the left, in the words of the most respected observer of California life, Chapman University&#8217;s Joel Kotkin, &#8220;has turned the California Dream into a nightmare.&#8221;</p>
<p>—Black America</p>
<p>Left-wing policies have done incalculable to damage to black America. Left-wing mayors of nearly every major American city have supervised the economic ruin of many of those cities. Decades of rhetoric reinforcing black victimhood have served only to stymie black progress and increase anger. And left-wing welfare policies have been the primary contributor to the 70 percent rate for children born out-of-wedlock and the concomitant decline of black fatherhood.</p>
<p>—The Economy</p>
<p>The left-engineered welfare state with its monumental national debts is crushing the economies of virtually every European country that has adopted them, and it will do the same to the American economy. Even the proudest achievements of the left — Medicare and Medicaid — will soon be unsustainable, as will Social security if the retirement age is not raised by at least a few years.</p>
<p>—Men and Women</p>
<p>Thanks to left-wing attitudes inculcated in women from high school on, more and more women consider marriage and family second in importance to career success. This will lead, as it already has, to unhappiness among vast numbers of women who eventually realize that career isn&#8217;t nearly as meaningful to them as it is to most men. Meanwhile, the anti-boy policies in elementary schools and high schools — books assigned that appeal far more to girls, the end of games at recess that boys enjoy and need — have directly led to boys falling more and more behind girls in academic and professional achievement.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, left-wing denigration of marriage (except same-sex marriage) has led to the lowest rates of marriage in Western history, and the left-wing-induced secularization of society has massively contributed to historically low birth rates in America and Europe.</p>
<p>—God and Religion</p>
<p>For over half a century, the left has made war on Judeo-Christian religions in the popular culture and through legislation, beginning with the Supreme Court&#8217;s 1962 decision banning this voluntary and non-denominational prayer in New York State schools: &#8220;Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country.&#8221; The consequences of this enforced secularization of American life in terms of human happiness and ethical behavior are — and will increasingly be — disastrous.</p>
<p>It turns out that there is little difference between the Midas touch and the leftist touch. Both end up destroying everything.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Shahina Siddiqui’s Muslim Contribution to Canada</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/shahina-siddiquis-muslim-contribution-to-canada/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=shahina-siddiquis-muslim-contribution-to-canada</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:15:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Janice Fiamengo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islamic History Month Canada]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Shahina Siddiqui]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tolerance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209513</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Chair of Islamic History Month Canada is no exemplar of tolerance.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/siddiqui.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-209517" alt="siddiqui" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/siddiqui.jpg" width="306" height="172" /></a>Last week I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/janice-fiamengo/islamic-history-month-comes-to-manitoba-canada/">called</a> Manitoba’s announcement of Islamic History Month “an extraordinary act of dhimmitude.”</p>
<p>Of course, that’s not what the Chairwoman of Islamic History Month Canada, Shahina Siddiqui, calls it. She says that it is an opportunity for Muslims to “<a href="http://news.gov.mb.ca/news/index.html?item=19253">celebrate</a>, inform, educate and share with fellow Canadians the Muslim cultural heritage” in order to “help build a more inclusive, compassionate and multicultural Canada.”</p>
<p>Let’s put aside the fact that for some Canadians, the Muslim cultural heritage, with its appalling record of violence, hatred, bigotry, and barbarity, is something we’d rather not share (for evidence-based  confirmation of this description, consider the work of <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Dhimmitude-Bat-Yeor/dp/1618613359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507104&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=understanding+dhimmitude">Bat Ye’or</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Ishmaels-House-History-Muslim-Lands/dp/0771035691/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507175&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+ishmael%27s+house">Sir Martin Gilbert</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Lust-Knowing-Robert-Irwin/dp/0140289232/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507202&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=for+lust+of+knowing">Robert Irwin</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/American-Jihad-Terrorists-Living-Among/dp/0743234359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507239&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=american+jihad">Steven Emerson</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Islamic-Imperialism-ebook/dp/B00EZ22C8M/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383507267&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=islamic+imperialism">Efraim Karsh</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-I-Am-Not-Muslim/dp/1591020115/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383505206&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=ibn+warraq+books">Ibn Warraq</a>). Let’s simply consider Ms. Siddiqui’s own record as an advocate for Islam.</p>
<p>In her personal history as a Muslim spokesperson, Siddiqui is a vivid illustration of a certain kind of Muslim contribution to Canada, of which I offer a few highlights.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui is litigious. In 2004, she was responsible for a lengthy human rights complaint against <a href="http://www.vosizneias.com/19879/2008/08/31/winnipeg-canada-muslim-advocates-discrimination-allegations-against-bnai-brith-drags-on/">B’nai Brith Canada</a> for its hosting of an anti-terrorism conference for police, firefighters, and paramedics. Siddiqui lodged the complaint, which was investigated and ultimately dismissed by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, because she felt the B’nai Brith-sponsored event was biased against Muslims. She had not actually attended the workshop, which was given by an internationally respected counter-terrorism organization, but she had spoken to a couple of people who did attend—and felt that in focusing on <i>Muslim terrorism</i> (gasp!), the event promoted hatred.</p>
<p>Given that in our time, Muslims are a <a href="http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/04/lessons-from-the-fbi-most-wanted-terrorist-list">majority</a> of those who commit acts of terrorism and that they usually do so specifically in the name of Islam, it is hard to imagine how any legitimate counter-terrorism event could address terrorism without a sustained focus on Islam; nonetheless, Siddiqui took advantage of Canada’s hate speech legislation to hound B’nai Brith into a costly defence, and the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, to its everlasting shame, saw fit to pursue the complaint for <i>five years</i> before finally dismissing it for lack of evidence.</p>
<p>This is a Siddiqui <i>modus operandi</i>, it seems, labeling anti-terror activism as “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/film-s-screening-sparks-religious-controversy-1.600325">hate propaganda</a>” and seeking to censor it. In 2006, she led the charge against the Canadian premiere of <i>Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West</i>, a sober documentary film detailing, mostly through interviews with Islamists and secret tape recordings in mosques, the “<a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0606/glick060606.php3">indoctrination to jihad</a>” taking place amongst Muslims worldwide. In an attempt to have criminal charges laid against the Jewish sponsors of the film, Siddiqui filed a complaint with the Winnipeg police hate crimes unit, stating that she wanted police “to be aware who the sponsors are and what they are doing.” It is not clear if Siddiqui actually <i>watched</i> the film before calling for the criminal prosecution of its sponsors.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui has also made notable contributions to discussions of Islam. When Aqsa Parvez was killed by her father, Muhammad, and brother, Waqas, in 2007 because she <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/robert-spencer/the-lonesome-death-of-aqsa-parvez/">rejected Islamic behavior codes</a>, Siddiqui was distressed by news coverage assuming it was an “Islamic thing” (though Muhammad Parvez himself <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/father-son-plead-guilty-to-aqsa-parvez-murder-1.905089">believed</a> it was). She <a href="http://www.issaservices.com/issa/pressrelease_prd.html">wrote</a> in her capacity as Executive Director of the Islamic Social Services Association that Parvez’s murder was no different from any other case of family violence in Canada, and she castigated an unsympathetic host culture for failing to “support” the Parvez family: “And herein lies the crux of the matter: How do you maintain pride in your roots if your values are demonized, ridiculed, and condemned? What, if any, recourse does a parent have when the values of their family are labeled as un-Canadian and unjust by members of society, from schools to service providers and the justice system?”</p>
<p>The implication that Aqsa’s father killed her because his “values” were “demonized” by non-Muslims does not address why so many Pakistani fathers <i>in Pakistan</i>—where presumably their Muslim values <i>are</i> affirmed—also kill their daughters in alarming numbers, but it does neatly make the case that non-Muslim Canadian society owes Muslim-Canadians (more public funding for Muslim social services, in this case) in order not to be held responsible for future violence.</p>
<p>Ms. Siddiqui also offered clarification on a more recent Muslim-Canadian controversy: the Toronto school cafeteria (Valley Park Middle School) that becomes a mosque-space closed to non-Muslims every Friday, and in which girls and boys are separated and menstruating girls placed at the back of the room. In an opinion <a href="http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2011/07/12/secular_extremists_ignore_tradition_of_diversity.html">article</a> in the Toronto <i>Star</i>, Siddiqui dismissed objections to the mosque, which began operation in 2011, ascribing the opposition to “secular extremists and gender Nazis,” and claiming that the controversy “reflects to what depths we have sunk when it comes to fear and hatred of Islam and Muslims.” It seems that when it comes to “demonizing” those with different “values,” Ms. Siddiqui can slug it out with the best of them.</p>
<p>Siddiqui’s defensiveness about Islam is understandable, if regrettable. Many people, after all, would be more than willing to outlaw criticism of their own and to have “offensive” people punished by the state. Siddiqui has learned well how to work the Canadian system: file human rights complaints, accuse critics of hate crimes, and claim that her cultural practices have been viciously misrepresented. Her aggressive style of advocacy may, from a Muslim-supremacist point of view, make her the ideal person to head up Islamic History Month Canada.</p>
<p>But an exemplar of tolerance she is definitely not. Siddiqui’s attitude to the non-Muslim majority is suggested in an <a href="http://www.soundvision.com/info/socialservice/shahina.asp">interview</a> she gave to <i>Sound Vision</i>, an Islamic website (a tip of the hat <a href="http://blazingcatfur.blogspot.ca/2009/03/wonders-another-islamist-front.html">to Blazing Cat Fur</a> for alerting me to this source). In discussing why she established the Islamic Social Services Association, she explained the dilemma of many Muslim women in Canada as follows:</p>
<p>“Majority of the abused Muslim women, if you ask them, why didn’t they turn for help, all they needed to do was call 911, they’ll say that ‘I don’t want him to go to jail, I don’t want to end up in a shelter where my children and I will be exposed to an un-Islamic lifestyle.’ So there is a fear that if they go to mainstream social services, they won’t be able to preserve their faith and their children will be lost in mainstream society. So they’ll choose the lesser of two evils.”</p>
<p>It is surely telling that Siddiqui’s account of Muslim revulsion at non-Muslim society contains no hint of disapproval or objection. Is this a woman who advocates the <i>integration</i> of Muslims into Canadian society? On the contrary, Siddiqui seems to sympathize with an attitude that sees beating or even death at the hands of a violent husband as “a lesser evil” to mixing with non-Muslim society, where one’s “children will be lost.”</p>
<p>With such comments and actions as evidence, it’s hard to feel that Shahina Siddiqui models the Canadian qualities of “inclusion” and “compassion” that she identified in her Islamic History Month press release. On the contrary, her comments imply a conviction that Muslim culture is superior to Euro-Canadian culture and that Canadians must adapt to Muslim values and doctrines or be judged guilty of criminal hatred. Thanks for “sharing,” Ms. Siddiqui—but no thanks.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Subverting the Cultural Occupation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/subverting-the-cultural-occupation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=subverting-the-cultural-occupation</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[celebrities]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203441</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why conservatives can no longer afford to dismiss pop culture. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-jayz-obama3-1106.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203764" alt="article-jayz-obama3-1106" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/article-jayz-obama3-1106-450x314.jpg" width="315" height="220" /></a>In a recent <i>National Review </i>piece, Jim Geraghty pondered the alliterative question, “<a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/356351/can-conservative-comments-celebrities-change-culture-jim-geraghty">Can Conservative Comments from Celebrities Change the Culture?</a>” He’s worried that by touting two celebrity quotes that espoused conservative values, the right is wading into the shallow waters of pop culture and degrading the serious business of politics. His concern couldn’t be more misdirected.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, rock star/globetrotting activist Bono <a href="http://www.drudge.com/news/171132/bono-capitalism-takes-more-out-poverty">asserted</a> that capitalism pulls more people out of poverty than aid does. As if this concept emanating from such a pop icon weren’t refreshing enough to conservative ears, hip actor Ashton Kutcher gave a Teen Choice Awards acceptance speech around the same time, in which he stated that opportunities for success arose from hard work and personal drive; it was an inspirational antidote to the left’s “you didn’t build that” message, delivered to a young, impressionable audience (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuBSRC1zpHw">this video</a> of that speech has garnered over 3.6 million views).</p>
<p>The right, aware more than ever before of the importance of reclaiming the culture (although many simply pay lip service to that), pounced on these statements as hopeful signs that our ideas were beginning to breach the wall of the left-dominated cultural stronghold. This made Geraghty squirm:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m still chewing this over, and trying to decide whether this represents a necessary tactic in an era of celebrity-obsessed pop culture, or whether it’s just the latest version of the conservative tendency to instantly adopt and celebrate any celebrity who happens to echo some of our arguments.</p>
<p>After all, when we say it’s shallow and silly and superficial for Democrats to emphasize their Hollywood star supporters at their political conventions, and to hold campaign events with Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z and such . . . we’re <i>not wrong.</i></p>
<p>Politics may be entertaining at times, but politics and governing are supposed to be distinct from entertainment. Not everything in life is supposed to be a fun show! Sometimes the country’s problems and potential solutions are complicated, detailed, involve trade-offs, and require a bit of thinking to evaluate.</p></blockquote>
<p>It’s disheartening that after losing two elections to the most celebrity-obsessed and pop culture-connected president in history, too many on the right still dismiss this most critical element of political war. As <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/notes-toward-winning-the-culture-war/">I’ve written before</a>, conservatives lost in the political arena last November because for decades the radical left laid the groundwork for it in the <i>cultural</i> arena, while we turned our backs on it. Disengagement isn’t how you win a culture war.</p>
<p>“If you’re going to try to transform every aspect of the public’s evaluation of public-policy decisions into a flashy, glamorous, sexy, exciting thrill,” Geraghty joked, “pretty soon we’ll see campaigns rolling out Katy Perry in a latex dress!” – which of course is <a href="http://www.sheknows.com/entertainment/articles/975025/katy-perry-endorses-president-obama">exactly</a> <a href="http://news.nationalreview.com/images/582/clip_image007_0001.jpg">what the left</a> <a href="http://research.fuseink.com/cp/MTAxNTQ1OQ">did</a>, and her candidate won (and if you don’t know who Katy Perry is, you’re part of the problem, not the solution).</p>
<p>Geraghty scorns the Perry-in-a-latex-dress-tactic as appealing to “people with no actual interest or knowledge of what’s going on in the political world,” and yet he grudgingly concedes that it works, and that we need our own “effective vote-getting tactics, especially with the young. But how likely are we to win if, through our own decisions, we legitimize the notion that campaigns ought to be duels of celebrities?”</p>
<p>It’s not a matter of dueling celebrities; for one thing, we don’t have enough celebs on our side to compete, and not one with half as much cultural influence as Perry. It’s not a matter of dumbing down political discourse; it’s a matter of embracing the reality that the culture is the battleground that matters now. We <i>must</i> recognize the power of pop culture and its primacy as a medium for disseminating, as Geraghty himself puts it, “conservative ideas, messages, and arguments to audiences that may otherwise never encounter them.”</p>
<p>Geraghty asserts that the Bono and Kutcher quotes may be “swell” (<i>swell</i>? He just lost everyone younger than 65), but the right shouldn’t be touting those pop icons as political authorities because they’re just showbiz stars.</p>
<p>This grossly underestimates the power of showbiz stars today. Bono and Ashton Kutcher <i>are</i> political authorities for countless millions here and abroad; their ilk are the only public figures that many young people trust and listen to, because they’re <i>cool</i>. Obama’s young, politically ignorant/brainwashed fans don’t admire him because they have carefully weighed the political arguments of both sides and rationally sided with his agenda; they admire him because he’s <i>cool</i>. They see him chatting with Letterman and Fallon, hanging with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and appearing on <a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/halloween-party/n12185/"><i>Saturday Night Live</i></a>, and instead of feeling that this degrades the office of the presidency, it speaks to them. They see First Lady Michelle on <a href="http://d1n0t8embjb5t8.cloudfront.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/michelle-obama-vogue.jpg"><i>Vogue</i></a> <a href="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1037427/thumbs/o-MICHELLE-OBAMA-VOGUE-COVER-570.jpg?5">covers</a> and <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/michelle-obama-makes-cameo-in-nickelodeons-icarly/">Nickelodeon</a> and <a href="http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/08/michelle-obama-releasing-rap-album-but-she-doesnt-170422.html">a rap album</a>, and that speaks to them.</p>
<p>But Geraghty thinks we shouldn’t lower ourselves: “I feel like we sometimes forget conservatives recoiled from American popular culture for a lot of good reasons.” Maybe so, and look where that got us.</p>
<blockquote><p>We’re tired of big corporations telling us stories about how bad big corporations are. We’re tired of seeing some of our religions mocked and demonized while others are protected by political correctness…</p>
<p>We’re tired of seeing our own military revealed as the bad guys behind the conspiracy, southerners depicted as ignorant hicks, suburban parenthood portrayed as soul-crushing conformity, and so on.</p></blockquote>
<p>We are mocked and demonized precisely because decades ago our side began shunning pop culture as unserious and demeaning, and we abandoned it to the left, who shrewdly filled that void. It’s also the very same reason we find ourselves losing at the ballot box, and will continue to do so until we engage the left on their cultural turf.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean we should engage them <i>in the same way</i> – we shouldn’t be about dumbing down the level of discourse, but about elevating it. We shouldn’t be about emotional manipulation, but about enlightening ideas. We shouldn’t be about preaching, but about seducing converts to our values. The way to do that is primarily culturally, not politically.</p>
<p>We cannot afford to be dismissive of how crucial pop culture is in the larger political scheme. Even when our politicians win – which will happen less and less often as long as we are in denial about this – they too often disappoint or even betray us. We cannot look to them to turn this country around. Instead, America will change course only when our values and ideas begin to subvert the occupation of our cultural territory.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Fiddling While Washington Burns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/fiddling-while-washington-burns-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fiddling-while-washington-burns-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Aug 2013 04:12:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Solway]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[nation]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201893</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When a culture puts frivolity over survival.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fiddle.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201996" alt="fiddle" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/fiddle.jpg" width="280" height="386" /></a><strong>[Illustration by Frontpage&#8217;s cartoonist <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/amir-avni/obama-fiddles-while-america-burns/">Amir Avni</a></strong>].</p>
<p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In an August 20, 2013 article for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-rotberg/fun-and-foolishness-in-a-dangerous-time/"><i>FrontPage Magazine</i></a>, Howard Rotberg deplores the “growing cultural emphasis on fun” which, in the midst of the current crisis brought on by fiscal irresponsibility and by Islam’s war against the West, distracts us from understanding the various forces that threaten our way of life and from “taking up arms in defense of [our] own liberty.”</span></i></p>
<p>Not that the warning hasn’t been sounded before. In his perennially relevant study of an increasingly frivolous intellectual culture, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1377091661&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=amusing+ourselves+to+death"><i>Amusing Ourselves to Death</i></a>, Neil Postman addresses the subject from the standpoint of the electronic media that entertain while detaching viewers from the social, political and economic issues and consequences of “real life.” Fun, so to speak, has become fundamental, superseding both specific and contextual knowledge and leading to what today we call the “low-information voter” or, just as likely, the no-information voter. One recalls Lewis Mumford in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/City-History-Origins-Transformations-Prospects/dp/0156180359/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1377094547&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=lewis+mumford+the+city+in+history"><i>The City in History</i></a>, who referred to a historical episode dating back to the 5<sup>th</sup> century A.D. that has always struck me as an exemplum of a culture in terminal decline. The citizens of Augustine’s city of Hippo, Mumford writes, were too busy attending the games in the local Forum to defend themselves against the Vandals at the walls, whose defense they had left to a contingent of hired mercenaries, with the inevitable result that the city was razed and these distracted citizens put to the sword.</p>
<p>When a culture puts fun over the demands of survival, the writing is on the very wall that is about to be breached. <i>Mutatis mutandis</i>, our condition today is not structurally different from that of our fifth century precursors. “Fun” in all its ramifications—the circus atmosphere enveloping election seasons and the media cosmeticizing of party candidates, the transformation of the electorate into spectators seeking entertainment, the concomitant refusal to pay attention to the pressing issues of the day, the free rein of appetite as a societal “right,” the reluctance or even inability to look beyond the narrow perimeter of immediate caterings, the hypertrophic emphasis on pleasure and gratification at the expense of civic responsibility, the valorizing of and enchantment with violence as a means of escaping boredom, a tendency, as most of us know but are chary of acknowledging, called the “<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/wwii-vet-death-race/2013/08/23/id/521952?s=al&amp;promo_code=14A1A-1">thrill kill</a>,” that is fast becoming a <a href="http://clashdaily.com/2013/08/hate-crime-88yr-old-wwii-vet-dead-after-brutal-beating-by-black-teenage-thugs/">signature</a> of the <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/if_gw_bush_had_a_son_hed_look_like_christopher_lane.html">black subculture</a>—has come increasingly to predominate in the sensibility of the age. What goes along with it is a general sense of mental stupefaction that incapacitates and disqualifies the person so afflicted from making informed decisions about matters of social and political import or considering his own long-term interests.</p>
<p>According to the satirical magazine <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/study-38-percent-of-people-not-actually-entitled-t,5701/"><i>The Onion</i></a>, 38% of people are not entitled to their own opinion. Tongue solidly lodged in capacious cheek, the magazine reports: “In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago&#8217;s School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.” <i>The Onion</i> may not be that far off the mark; indeed, the percentage is doubtlessly higher. The article continues, citing the renowned ersatz authority Professor Mark Fultz: “While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don&#8217;t have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them.” Professor Fultz’s conclusions are obviously a tad exaggerated, but knowledgeable experts, like the late Milton Friedman and the late Andrew Breitbart, and probably respected commentators like Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter, would surely agree. Of course, the so-called “intellectual classes” are, for the most part, equally dysfunctional, playing with ideas that have no more bearing on reality than the pursuits of their less privileged counterparts.</p>
<p>But it is not only a question of amusing, tweeting, texting, sexting, video-gaming, i-poding, Biebering, downloading, raving, drugging and golfing ourselves to death. No less damaging are ideological considerations, formulaic convictions, and self-inflating preoccupations with issues that, by any mature standard of value and importance, would be judged as manifestly trivial or, if not wholly inane, indulgently misguided. Many people, for example, particularly among the “elite,” invest their time and energy in taking up the cause of the transgendered or in asserting the social construction of gender, in renaming Muslim vandals as “Asians” or disaffected “youths,” in accusing whites of crimes committed far more often by blacks, in arguing about the status of gay marriage, in misrepresenting Israel as guilty of the very atrocities that define Islamic culture, in trashing neighborhoods in the name of social justice, in legislating the size of soda pop bottles, in prescribing the composition of school lunches, in mandating diversity training programs, and so on—all this while the Middle East is aflame largely due to American policy incompetence, while Russia and China are flexing their muscles in the international arena, while the Muslim Brotherhood is undermining nation after nation and unbridled Muslim immigration is changing the face of Western civilization for the worse, while dedicated enemies like North Korea and Iran are advancing their nuclear ambitions, and while the economy is imploding as we speak. We are like the grade school children for whose benefit the authorities have required bolsters to be placed at the bottom of playground slides to cushion their landing; meanwhile, youngsters in Gaza are learning to fire AK-47s.</p>
<p>Plainly, it is not only the fun culture that distracts and decontextualizes us from matters of national concern, rendering us helpless before our enemies; it is the low-education citizen, the entitlement parasite, and the strident, high-self-esteem ideologue among us who are fiddling while New York, Washington and Detroit burn. And perhaps they must burn if we are ever to come to our senses, to put fun in its proper place as a recreational ingredient of life, to restore the conviction of responsibility for defending a millennial tradition, to cure the pathology of encapsulated indifference, and to expunge the frivolity, appetitive or intellectual, that a comparatively pampered existence has allowed to colonize the Western mind.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Jersey Shore vs. Chris Christie</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/jersey-shore-vs-chris-christie/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jersey-shore-vs-chris-christie</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/jersey-shore-vs-chris-christie/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 May 2013 04:43:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Christie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jersey Shore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MTV]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[snooki]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=190897</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Snooki Monster vs. The Cookie Monster.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/snook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-190937" alt="snook" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/snook-450x225.jpg" width="315" height="158" /></a>On Friday morning, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) may have had the run-in that finally ends his presidential aspirations: he got into a verbal sparring match with Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, star of MTV’s <i>Jersey Shore</i>. Both Christie and Snooki had just appeared on NBC’s <i>Today </i>show – a devastating critique of our culture in and of itself – but then they got into a heated conversation. After the conversation, Snooki tweeted, “Getting told why we are bad for jersey. Amazing.”</p>
<p>Apparently, Snooki, wearing a midriff-baring shirt, told Christie, “I just wanted to meet you, and just, hope you start to like us.” Christie shook her hand and said, “Good to meet you,” then left. Snooki turned to the camera: “He just doesn’t like us.”</p>
<p>Christie has every reason not to like <i>Jersey Shore</i>. The show, which ended its six-season run last year, features a bunch of low-IQ morons drinking and having promiscuous sex. Snooki, Christie’s bête noire, supposedly wants to be a veterinary technician, but is far more well-known for her sexual license and for being punched by a gym teacher on one episode (the punch was blacked out of the show, but went viral on the internet). During season 5 of the show, she earned $150,000 per episode. She has a child out of wedlock with Jionni LaValle. In 2011, she pulled down $32,000 to speak at Rutgers University and told students, “Study hard, party harder.” She’s also been in trouble with the police.</p>
<p>But there’s no way for Christie to win a confrontation with Snooki. She’s wildly popular: she has 6.3 million Twitter followers, compared with 370,000 for Christie. She’s supposedly attractive, at least in a trashy way. And she’s known for being a lightweight.</p>
<p>Christie, by contrast, is a polarizing political figure masquerading as a pop culture one. The media has evidenced its love for Christie ever since Christie shook up the presidential race by taking President Obama for a spin around the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy the week before the election. Since then, Christie has appeared on <i>Saturday Night Live</i>, <i>The Late Show with David Letterman</i>, <i>Extra!</i>, <i>The Daily Show</i>, and <i>Today</i>. <i>Inside Edition</i> covered his press conference about his lap band surgery. He’s hosted Jon Bon Jovi for a bill signing. And Snooki – yes, the same one – tweeted that she wanted to work out with him.</p>
<p>But when it comes to the conflict between a Republican wannabe celeb and a bubbleheaded nincompoop on MTV, the choice is clear: the bubblehead wins. That’s because the same machine Christie has used for months to build his credibility with the American public can tear him down in an instant. That’s the magic of Hollywood: if they can make a hero of Snooki, they can make a villain of Christie.</p>
<p>And that’s the reason Republicans keep losing presidential races: they don’t understand that Hollywood is like Sauron’s ring – it cannot be wielded by any conservative. Hollywood may offer the allure of love, the illusion of popularity. But both love and popularity will be ripped away the moment it becomes convenient.</p>
<p>This may not be the critical moment for Governor Christie. The media may wait until he wins the Republican nomination in 2016. But the fact that Christie will become the subject of late-night jokes, that he will be bashed about in the media for daring not to love Snooki, and that he will always come out on the short end of the stick with Hollywood, shows that it’s only a matter of time before Christie falls to the power of the ring, and it destroys him.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Bieber Gets Busted For Drugs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/bieber-gets-busted-for-drugs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bieber-gets-busted-for-drugs</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/bieber-gets-busted-for-drugs/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:34:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[drugs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justin Bieber]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=187243</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Joining the Hollywood frat house.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/justin.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187501" alt="justin" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/justin.jpg" width="264" height="162" /></a>This was not a good week for major stars and intoxicants. It kicked off with megastar Reese Witherspoon driving down an Atlanta highway on Friday morning, along with husband Jim Toth. Toth was weaving between lanes, so the police pulled him over. That’s when things got messy. As the officers interviewed Toth, Witherspoon intervened. “Do you know my name?” she asked. When the officers demurred, she said, “You’re about to find out who I am … You are going to be on national news.”</p>
<p>She was right. She was arrested along with her husband. She was booked for disorderly conduct. Later, she released a statement:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Out of respect for the ongoing legal situation, I cannot comment on everything that is being reported right now. But I do want to say I clearly had one drink too many and I am deeply embarrassed about the things I said. It was definitely a scary situation and I was frightened for my husband, but that was no excuse. I was disrespectful to the officer who was just doing his job. The words I used that night definitely do not reflect who I am. I have nothing but respect for the police and I am very sorry for my behavior.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>She wasn’t the only celebrity sorry for her behavior. The same day, sportscaster Al Michaels learned to believe in miracles after being pulled over for U-turning away from a sobriety checkpoint in Los Angeles. He was taken to the police station, where he clocked in at a respectable .08 percent blood alcohol level, right at the legal limit. The police booked him on suspicion of driving under the influence.</p>
<p>Younger but no smarter, Justin Bieber got himself into hot water as well. While touring in Sweden – just a few days after his infamous run-in with the Anne Frank House, where he signed a guestbook by hoping that Anne would have been a “Belieber” – Bieber’s tour bus was searched after authorities got a whiff of pot wafting from the party van. Unidentified drugs and a stun gun were found, according to the Associated Press. No one was arrested. Bieber then tweeted, “Some of the rumors about me … where do people even get this stuff. whatever … back to the music.” Bieber’s pet monkey is still hanging out in Germany, since nobody has claimed it after its seizure by German authorities.</p>
<p>What is wrong with the people in Hollywood?</p>
<p>The short answer is that nobody tells them no. Celebrity does odd things to people of all stripes;  it’s no surprise to find exceedingly high rates of bad behavior among both politicians and Hollywood icons. Nobody gets ahead in Hollywood by telling stars what they don’t want to hear. No one has ever gotten famous by taking away a singer’s cocaine, an actor’s alcohol, or a director’s hookers. But there are a good number of Hollywood folks who have done quite well after procuring any or all of the above for more powerful people.</p>
<p>We like to say that we’re a forgiving society. That’s true. But it’s even truer that we are selectively forgiving: we forgive people who are rich, famous, and talented. We throw people who are poor, anonymous, and untalented in prison. That’s not fair, obviously. But more importantly, it’s not good for the upper echelon stars, who are expected to party their butts off, and are excused when they do so.</p>
<p>That’s not to say that everyone in Hollywood is a druggie, alcoholic, or sex maniac. The vast majority of stars in Hollywood are actually relatively stable folk. But the significant minority who are not is widely disproportionate to that percentage in the rest of the population. We enable the collapse of our celebrities by enabling them. Everyone in America turned on a Michael Jackson song when he died of a drug overdose after a lifetime of immaturity and behavior ranging from the oddball to the borderline criminal. He would have been a lot better off if America had helped him protect himself by providing consequences to that behavior decades ago.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Winning the Culture War &#8212;- And the Next Generation</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/winning-the-culture-war-and-the-next-generation/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=winning-the-culture-war-and-the-next-generation</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/winning-the-culture-war-and-the-next-generation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Mar 2013 04:52:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[West Coast Retreat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180149</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[All-star panel at the West Coast Retreat discusses the urgent need for conservative action in Hollywood and beyond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the video of the panel discussion “Assault on the Culture,” featured at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2013 West Coast Retreat. The event was held February 22nd-24th at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California. A transcript of the discussion follows.</em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/60820844" frameborder="0" width="500" height="281"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/60820844">Assault on the Culture</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> As your mutual friend, the late great Andrew Breitbart, was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture.  And the results of the last election confirm that.  Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical Left has laid the groundwork for it in the cultural arena.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the Left had not previously and successfully infiltrated the key cultural arenas &#8212; education, the news media and entertainment &#8212; and spent decades indoctrinating generations.  Our task now is to retake the culture or create a parallel one, deprogram that indoctrination, and seduce subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism.</p>
<p>So, gentlemen, what are the symptoms of the assault on the culture?  And what is the cure?</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll begin with Ron.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh:</strong> As the moderator mentioned &#8212; I started out, as David did, as a young Marxist.  And let me take a page from Marx.  Just [as] people have learned that the Left organizes around the Alinsky playbook, here&#8217;s another leftist we can learn something from &#8212; the brilliant Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who developed a theory of hegemony.  He argued that before there could be any radical change or revolution, which is what he desired, there had to be first a total change in and control of the culture, so that the dominant ideas that would emerge would be those that would lead to the potential for revolutionary action.</p>
<p>He was really onto something.  He realized correctly that you had to wage what he called, in his Marxist terminology, a war of position to demand and create hegemonic control of the culture, so that the majority of people think alike and then would be ripe for and become vehicles for creating a revolution.</p>
<p>Well, the problem is, in this country &#8212; to make it very simple &#8212; that even if we win elections &#8212; and we are winning it in state and local level, but not in the national level &#8212; even if we win elections, the culture is at present controlled by the political Left.  Have no doubts about that.</p>
<p>The first thing &#8212; look at the polls and the studies that have been done in the past year.  I meant to bring it with me, but I can just mention it without reading through what this professor found out, from a very finely tuned study.  He studied the majority of liberal arts universities and colleges in the United States.  And he found out that almost 80, 90 percent of the faculty define themselves as liberal or radical and on the left.  And you can be sure that in the humanities &#8212; history, philosophy, political theory &#8212; the professors there are almost entirely on the left.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly you&#8217;ve all seen the recent studies of how many faculty members in the major Ivy universities gave to the Romney campaign.  They looked at Harvard and Princeton and Yale.  And I think at Harvard, everybody gave &#8212; 98, 99 percent gave to Obama.  And there were, I think, two faculty members &#8212; two people employed by Harvard &#8212; who gave to Romney; one was a janitor.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So, this is the reality we&#8217;re facing.</p>
<p>Now, I was supposed to talk &#8212; I&#8217;ve been on a one-man campaign.  And instead of giving you everything I said &#8212; because there&#8217;s just no time &#8212; all you have to do is blog, put it on Google &#8212; Ron Radosh on Oliver Stone.  And you will have maybe 10 recent articles come up.  And I&#8217;ve been on a one-man campaign against what I think is a major turning point in the culture.  Starting a few months ago, on the Showtime Network owned by CBS, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick have put together a 10-part documentary series that is now at an end, but you can still watch it on-demand.  And that is now going to be shown throughout our high schools and colleges &#8212; Oliver Stone&#8217;s &#8220;Untold History of the United States.&#8221;</p>
<p>If you have seen any of it &#8212; and I don&#8217;t know how many of you want to be masochists and watch it &#8212; it is horrendous.  It is &#8212; and I am not exaggerating &#8212; the exact KGB Soviet propaganda history of the United States as it was written by the KGB in the 1950s and &#8217;60s.</p>
<p>Indeed, when I was growing up, the first book that said the United States was the evil power in the world and responsible for the then-ongoing Cold War was a little-known book by a Communist &#8212; who was one of the Communist Party members of the United States who infiltrated the OSS during the war and was a top officer in the OSS &#8212; a man named Carl Marzani, who was a secret member of the Communist Party and later, we found out, paid by the KGB, and actually a paid agent of theirs &#8212; he published a book subsidized by the KGB &#8212; this is how he got the money to publish independently &#8212; called &#8220;We Can Be Friends.&#8221;</p>
<p>And that book outlined the theory that the United States &#8212; there could&#8217;ve been peace with the Soviet Union if the United States had done what Stalin wants.  Because Stalin was a good guy.  Truman, who then President, was a fascist, which &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You have to remember, the Communists in America called Harry Truman a fascist.  Not even a conservative Republican, but a fascist &#8212; creating a fascist America.  And he outlined the theory in this book.</p>
<p>And, lo and behold &#8212; I watched Oliver Stone&#8217;s first five episodes; I couldn&#8217;t go beyond that.  I know what&#8217;s in them; I read the [synopsis] in David Horowitz&#8217;s FrontPage.  I&#8217;m not going to torture myself that much.  But I watched the first five.  It was exactly the argument, with the same quotations and the same facts, in the same order, as this 1952 book by this Communist KGB agent.</p>
<p>And they are &#8212; you have to realize this is a turning point.  If something like this had been produced and tried to be shown when John F. Kennedy was President, or in the years after Kennedy &#8212; even, I think, when Bill Clinton was President &#8212; first they would not have been able to get it aired in a major network.  It would&#8217;ve been attacked all over as outright distortions of history, as Communist propaganda, as an embarrassment.</p>
<p>What has happened?  Just the reverse.  They have been touring &#8212; up to the present, and still going on every weekend &#8212; college after college in the United States, where they speak to thousands of students, show them one episode, and then talk and answer questions.  They are getting phenomenal attention.  Both of them have been on every major TV and radio talk show you can think of, including, I&#8217;m sorry to say, Mike Huckabee, who sang their praises and thanked them for doing such a wonderful job in educating our students in the history of the United States.  Either Mike Huckabee is dumb or he just got something handed to him by his staff and didn&#8217;t really watch it.</p>
<p>So this is what we&#8217;re against.  Let me just give you one brief example, because I only have two minutes left.  The hero of the Stone TV series is the late Vice President &#8212; before that Secretary of Commerce &#8212; Vice President and then Secretary of Commerce, who Truman fired for being an appeaser of the Soviets, Henry A. Wallace.  The theory of their TV show is that had Henry A. Wallace successfully become President, there would&#8217;ve been no Cold War, we would&#8217;ve had peace with Russia, we would&#8217;ve had total income redistribution, we would have an equitable, fair, social democratic America.  And everything would&#8217;ve been roses.  As it was, this was failed because of the political bosses in the rightwing corporations who fought Wallace and stymied him.</p>
<p>Well, who was Henry Wallace?  He was a naïve, classic dupe.  And just to give you the one incident that says it all &#8212; when he was Secretary of Commerce, still in the President&#8217;s cabinet, he had a secret meeting with the head of the KGB, the KGB station chief in Washington, DC.  And he went to see Anatoly Gorsky.  And he said to him &#8212; you know, we&#8217;re having an internal battle in the administration.  Truman and all these advisors around him want to get tough with the Russians, they want to stand up to Stalin.  Can you help me out and give us support and ammunition, so we can defeat these anti-Soviet forces?</p>
<p>And he goes to the KGB station chief to ask for help in settling an internal administration dispute, while he&#8217;s in the President&#8217;s cabinet.  The man, in other words, was either a fool or a traitor, or just a total idiot.  Or maybe all three.</p>
<p>And this is the man that students and people in America are being told, week by week, is the unsung hero who should&#8217;ve been the President of the United States instead of all the reactionaries who followed him.</p>
<p>We have a fight to wage.  It&#8217;s a fight to change the culture, to change the way the truth about our past is taught.  It&#8217;s something that has to be carried out.  It is extremely important.  And if not, you&#8217;re going to see a whole new generation mis-educated, as Stone and Kuznick are doing now, with the most vile, old kind of Communist propaganda.  And that will be what they think of the United States.  They will come out learning the evil power in the world is the United States.  And just as we should&#8217;ve appeased the Soviets then, we have to now reach out and honor the wishes of the Islamists who have something to say.</p>
<p>I learned yesterday, the great Iranian-American filmmaker who did &#8212; what&#8217;s the name of the movie about the woman who was stoned?  Stoning of Soraya &#8212; he told me yesterday that he spoke to Stone and Kuznick, and they saw his movie.  And Stone and Kuznick said to him, to Cyrus &#8212; you know, your film is very dangerous, because it would have the effect of turning the American people against radical Islam.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And he then said to them &#8212; what, you&#8217;re not against the stoning of women?  He said &#8212; well, that&#8217;s their culture, and who are we to oppose it?</p>
<p>Now, that&#8217;s the people we&#8217;re dealing with.  If we don&#8217;t fight this, and develop films like Cyrus&#8217;s movie &#8212; why can&#8217;t we develop a counter-series about the history of the United States to sell to HBO or Showtime that tells that truth about our past, rather than the kind of stuff they&#8217;re showing now?</p>
<p>And Howard Zinn was on Fox with his special before he died.  Now we have Stone.  This could not have happened years ago.  These guys would never have got contracts for major television time.  And this is a crisis that this has been received well.  Look at the rave review it got in the Washington Post.  This says something about our culture.  It&#8217;s a dangerous time, and we have to oppose it.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Well, on a lighter note &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Brought with me a quote, one of my favorite quotes from the lyricist/librettist, W.S. Gilbert, the lyric-writing half of Gilbert and Sullivan, who wrote in one of his operettas, &#8220;Iolanthe&#8221; &#8212; &#8220;I often think it&#8217;s comical/How Nature always does contrive/That every boy and every gal/</p>
<p>That&#8217;s born into the world alive/Is either a little Liberal,/Or else a little Conservative!&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And Steven Pinker, the science writer, uses this quote in his book, &#8220;The Blank Slate,&#8221; to put forward the idea that there&#8217;s a genetic component to our politics &#8212; that people are naturally liberal and naturally conservative, and I think there&#8217;s some truth to that.  And it creates a kind of paradox for conservatives in the United States.  Because in other countries and other cultures, people who are naturally conservative are naturally trying to conserve naturally conservative stuff.  I mean, if you&#8217;re an English conservative, you&#8217;re really in favor of a sort of aristocratic class system.  You know, the Russian conservative is in favor of state control over people.  The Saudi Arabian conservative is trying to conserve seventh-century barbarism.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But if you&#8217;re an American conservative, you&#8217;re trying to conserve something revolutionary, and a kind of a revolution that is, by its nature, individualistic, kind of antic and freewheeling.  And it&#8217;s going to be a little nutty.  So you&#8217;re trying to conserve something that&#8217;s really not very conservative at all.  And that paradox really comes to the fore when you hear conservatives start talking about the arts.  When you hear them talking about &#8212; oh, there&#8217;s too much sex in the arts, and there&#8217;s too much violence, and there&#8217;s too many gay people, and there&#8217;s too much, you know, romanticism of gangsters and all this stuff.  And I always tell them &#8212; don&#8217;t worry, when the jihadis take us over, all those problems will be solved.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Because as long as America is America, the America we care about, there&#8217;s going to be all that stuff in the arts.  The arts is going to be a frontier crazy house.  It&#8217;s going to be filled with naked women, it&#8217;s going to be filled with gay people, it&#8217;s going to be filled with guns, it&#8217;s going to be filled with gangsters.  If you don&#8217;t like it, you stay home and read Shakespeare.  Because all that stuff is in Shakespeare, too.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>He just talks so funny, nobody knows what he&#8217;s saying.</p>
<p>The fact is, if you look at our cultural situation from a certain angle, things are going really rather well for our team.  If you look at the most popular movies last year, the top three popular movies &#8212; one was &#8220;The Dark Knight,&#8221; the most conservative movie ever made, as far as I&#8217;m concerned.  The reason Batman wears a mask in that picture is, if he took it off and people found out it was David Horowitz, none of us would be safe.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The other one was &#8220;The Avengers,&#8221; which was written by one of these fake Hollywood socialists and yet, all the same, is a very patriotic, heroic film.  And then, &#8220;The Hobbit,&#8221; which of course was Tolkien&#8217;s Christian allegory.  These are the top three Box Office films of last year.</p>
<p>If you look on TV, TV has become such a niche market that you can watch the Americans and root for the KGB, which is amazing.  I was actually called in &#8212; when they were looking to create that show, I was one of the writers they called.  And I said I&#8217;d be happy to do it, but I don&#8217;t want anybody rooting for the KGB, and they never called me back.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But you can also find &#8220;Downton Abbey&#8221; and all kinds of &#8212; &#8220;Blue Bloods,&#8221; and all kinds of conservative shows.</p>
<p>So if you look at it from a certain angle, the culture is really not as bad as conservatives naturally feel that it is.  I mean, we have a natural feeling that they&#8217;re out to get us.  But what Ron just said is exactly right.  The place where the Left is moving most assiduously and most carefully, and is blackballing people and blacklisting people, is in the realm of recreating history and the facts.</p>
<p>If you take a look at what&#8217;s happening &#8212; the Oscars are tomorrow &#8212; the lead picture, the favorite for the Oscar, was &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty,&#8221; until the Left set up such a stink about &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty&#8221; for telling the truth about, you know, water-boarding.  &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty&#8221; is a completely po-faced film.  It&#8217;s like a piece of journalism.  It shows you these things.  It doesn&#8217;t make any moral argument about them, but it shows you that the CIA water-boarded people, got some information that helped in the 10-year hunt for bin Laden.</p>
<p>Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain have been complaining about this.  And this caught on with the Left that they showed that water-boarding worked, and this is a terrible thing.  Well, Dianne Feinstein is no stranger to this.  Dianne Feinstein&#8217;s the one who hounded Joel Surnow on &#8220;24,&#8221; the television show &#8220;24.&#8221;  When she found out that Joel was giving speeches to places like this, she went after the network on &#8220;24&#8243; to tell them to tone it down, and tone down the anti-jihadi propaganda and pro-torture propaganda.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, &#8220;Argo&#8221; is now the favorite for the Oscar.  I don&#8217;t know it&#8217;s going to win the Oscar, but &#8220;Argo,&#8221; about the escape from Iraq &#8212; Iran, sorry, the escape from Iran &#8212; is the favorite.  And conservatives are saying nothing about this, whereas &#8220;Argo&#8221; completely rewrites history to whitewash the Carter Administration, makes Jimmy Carter sound like he handled this thing with brilliant nobility, edits Ronald Reagan out of the picture &#8212; you&#8217;ll remember it was the election of Ronald Reagan that ended that crisis &#8212; and basically blames the United States for the crisis in the first place, the United States and Britain for the crisis in the first place.</p>
<p>This is a pattern.  This happens all the time.  You mentioned Cyrus Nowrasteh.  His film, &#8220;The [Road] to 9/11,&#8221; which shows that Bill Clinton let bin Laden get away because he was distracted by the Lewinsky affair &#8212; that was one of the most popular miniseries ever on television.  It has been banned from DVD because the Clinton Administration reached Disney and got them not to release it on DVD.  When I tried to write about this in The Washington Post, they edited it out of my article repeatedly.  I kept putting it back in, and they kept taking it out.</p>
<p>Of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan &#8212; maybe a dozen to 15 films depicting our soldiers as idiots and rapists and killers, with really nary a one except for &#8220;The Hurt Locker,&#8221; depicting the enemy as they really were.</p>
<p>Now, here&#8217;s the thing.  You know, why does this matter?  About three days ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote a column saying conservatives don&#8217;t need a movie studio.  That&#8217;s kind of been a meme that&#8217;s been going around &#8212; conservatives need to buy a movie studio, we need to buy women&#8217;s magazines, we need to buy magazines.  And he said we don&#8217;t really need a movie studio, because look at all these films that they made against the war, and they all bombed, they all tanked.  I hate to disagree with Jonah, because he&#8217;s such a brilliant guy, and he&#8217;s a great guy, and I agree with him 99.9 percent of the time.  But he&#8217;s wrong about this.</p>
<p>The trick is, while we&#8217;re trying to win the next election, they&#8217;re trying to win the next generation.  Because these films last forever.  And nobody reads history books; they watch movies.  They think that Oliver Stone&#8217;s &#8220;JFK&#8221; is how JFK was killed.  They don&#8217;t know he was killed by a Communist.  They don&#8217;t know he was killed by a Communist because he was a cold warrior; they think it was some incredible conspiracy involving everybody in America except for Oliver Stone.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson &#8212; remember the guy who wrote that article in the New York Times about how Bush was lying about weapons for mass distraction, right?  To distract from the fact that he had lied, they created this kind of Valerie Plame scandal, which was every bit as important as Rubio drinking water in the middle of his speech.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They then made a movie of this, okay, recreating this whole thing as if Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame were great American heroes.  And somebody at the Times asked Joseph Wilson &#8212; look, nobody&#8217;s going to want to watch this movie.  Nobody&#8217;s going to want to watch this movie, why are you making it?  Joseph Wilson said &#8212; for people who have short memories or don&#8217;t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.  That is absolutely right &#8212; art never dies.  It&#8217;s on TV every night, people watch it all the time.</p>
<p>Now, the way that Jonah is right &#8212; and I want to finish up quickly &#8212; the way that Jonah is right that we don&#8217;t need to buy a movie studio is this &#8212; the movie studio paradigm is over.  The publishing house paradigm is over.  We are in the middle &#8212; you know, this hasn&#8217;t reached the general populace yet, but for people like me in the arts, we are in the middle of a revolution in the arts that is unlike anything anybody has ever seen.</p>
<p>Nobody knows how to deal with it.  Nobody knows what&#8217;s going to happen next.  People are going to be making movies on their laptops &#8212; I mean, really good, professional movies on their laptops &#8212; and distributing them through Netflix and YouTube.  People can already write novels, press a button and publish them for everyone to see.</p>
<p>This is an amazing moment.  This is a model that is particularly susceptible to patronage.  This is a model where money will talk.  Because the money that&#8217;s going to be needed is money for promotion &#8212; how do you make your book stand out from the other guy&#8217;s book if it&#8217;s self-published?  How do you make your movie stand out from the next guy&#8217;s movie?  It&#8217;s a moment when the Right should be all over this culture.  As Ron said, we need to be fighting back against this complete distortion of history and reality, and especially moral reality.  I mean, if you put on a show like &#8220;The Americans,&#8221; and you&#8217;re rooting for the KGB, you&#8217;re rooting for these guys who exterminated like 60 million people.  You&#8217;re rooting for an absolute evil.</p>
<p>And so this is a moment when we need to be alert and awake to where to spend the money that we&#8217;re now throwing away on guys like Karl Rove.  And I think that &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I think that it&#8217;s right there, and it&#8217;s really exciting moment.  And we should be paying attention.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> It turns out &#8220;Big Bang Theory&#8221; is actually the number-one-rated show among conservatives.  If you look at the list of shows that conservatives watch, &#8220;The Big Bang Theory&#8221; is number one.  Now, that&#8217;s true because &#8220;The Big Bang Theory&#8221; is most watched by virtually everyone; it&#8217;s a huge show.  Everyone watches that show.</p>
<p>The reason that this is important is because it means that we go to sleep on entertainment.  And I think I agree with Drew on virtually everything.  But on this one, I sort of disagree.  I think the part that really is harmful is not the rewriting of history.  I think the rewriting of history is massively important.  But for me, that&#8217;s mostly done by the media in real time.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We watch it happen every day in The Washington Post, in the New York Times.  We&#8217;ve seen it happen this week, we&#8217;ve seen it happen last week.  As it now turns out, the sequester was entirely the Republicans&#8217; idea.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>No Democrat had ever seen this thing before.  And now, those dastardly Republicans, who didn&#8217;t have a majority in the Senate and didn&#8217;t have the presidency &#8212; now these jerks, they&#8217;re trying to ram this thing through.  And if they would just listen to Obama, they&#8217;d raise taxes and everything would be hunky-dory.  And they do this on every topic.  I mean, just ask George Zimmerman how he&#8217;s feeling today when you want to talk about the media&#8217;s ability to rewrite history in real time.  Then Hollywood makes a movie of the rewritten history.  And that&#8217;s how we end up with this false history for all time.  It starts off with the media.</p>
<p>In terms of what Hollywood entertainment does, originally originally &#8212; you know, to be honest with you, I don&#8217;t watch TV.  Now, I do have a TV.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I do watch &#8212; a watch a lot of TV, actually.  But one thing I really don&#8217;t do this listen to a lot of pop music.  I listen to classical music; I&#8217;ve been playing violin since I was five.  I grew up with a lot of classical music and opera.</p>
<p>So on the way down here, I figured &#8212; you know what?  I&#8217;m going to speak about culture; maybe I&#8217;ll turn on like 98.7.  Right?  I&#8217;ll turn on one of these &#8212; some form of pop station on the radio.  So I turn it on.  And what I hear blaring at me is a very sophomore version of John Maynard Keynes.  That&#8217;s what I hear blaring at me, and I&#8217;ll explain.</p>
<p>Katie Perry has a new song out &#8212; I don&#8217;t know the name of it.  But Katie Perry&#8217;s new song &#8212; the entire lyric to it &#8212; it&#8217;s about, you know, basically &#8212; like most of these songs &#8212; about her having a one-night stand, right?  And it&#8217;s no questions, no regrets, I feel like a teenager again.  And don&#8217;t live for tomorrow, live for tonight.  You know, John Maynard Keynes &#8212; if you boil down his philosophy, what it boils down to is that one line, right, that one line that he was asked about.  People were disagreeing with his economic philosophy.  And he said &#8212; in the long run, we&#8217;re all dead.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Right?  That is the single most pernicious line the Left has ever spoken, and it&#8217;s also the single most true.  It is &#8212; the entire appeal of leftism is the idea that we don&#8217;t have to worry about the next generation.  We don&#8217;t have to worry about their education system, we don&#8217;t have to worry about cost.  We don&#8217;t have to worry about taxation.  We don&#8217;t have to worry about debt.  In the long run, we&#8217;re all dead.  So we might as well spend all the cash now.  And then later, you know, they&#8217;ll deal with it, or they&#8217;ll kick it off to the future generations down the road.</p>
<p>Now, when people listen to Katie Perry, that&#8217;s not what they&#8217;re getting, obviously.  They&#8217;re not thinking economic theory.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But what they are hearing is the idea &#8212; it&#8217;s okay to do things without any regard for the consequences.  Right?  You can see that [regard] from Katie Perry in &#8220;Footloose,&#8221; right?  &#8220;Footloose,&#8221; the idea is you can do anything you want.  And the bad guy is the guy who stands up and says &#8212; no no no, you can&#8217;t do anything you want.  The religious guy who&#8217;s in the community, who&#8217;s the villain in the piece &#8212; they make him over-the-top, because otherwise you would be sympathetic to him.  But they make him completely over-the-top, horrible &#8212; you can&#8217;t have, you can&#8217;t dance &#8212; what he&#8217;s really saying is you can&#8217;t screw around, right?  But he&#8217;s a bad guy because he&#8217;s saying that.</p>
<p>This is what has a damaging impact on the culture.  It&#8217;s not the hard history.  The hard history we can actually argue against.  We have mechanisms for arguing against that.  That&#8217;s why we have talk radio, that&#8217;s why we have Fox News.  It&#8217;s easier to argue against Oliver Stone than it is to argue against &#8220;The Big Bang Theory.&#8221;</p>
<p>I was watching an episode of that the other day.  There&#8217;s a guy, proposes to the girl.  And the girl can&#8217;t believe that he&#8217;s proposing to her.  Can&#8217;t believe it.  Why would you propose to me?  We haven&#8217;t even had sex yet.  That&#8217;s her actual line.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Actual line.  And, you know, it used to be in this country that that was sort of backwards.  Right?  For me personally, you know, the sex came after the marriage.  That was one of the great benefits of being married.  Right?  This idea that the Left pushes &#8212; and they do it on a soft level &#8212; that has a [moderate] impact on the culture.</p>
<p>Now, people in Hollywood are not the ones who feel that impact.  Most of them are very wealthy.  Most of them, if you meet them &#8212; the ones who are successful &#8212; they live in nice areas off of Sunset Boulevard.  They don&#8217;t live the liberal lifestyle.  They live a lifestyle in which they live in huge houses.  Many of them are married, a lot of them have kids.  They&#8217;re really not different in lifestyle from many conservatives.  If you meet a liberal, and you didn&#8217;t know they&#8217;re a liberal from Hollywood &#8212; if you ignore the views and everything &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; then what you would see is somebody who&#8217;s basically living a conservative lifestyle.  Charles Murray has written about this, where he said upper-class white liberals live like upper-class white conservatives.  The difference is they preach liberalism.  And then people at the bottom rung of society economically pick that up and think that that&#8217;s okay.  They think that it&#8217;s okay now.  Okay, fine, I&#8217;ll screw around.  There are no consequences; Katie Perry told me so.</p>
<p>And, truthfully, there are no consequences.  Because then, the Left comes in.  And they say &#8212; okay, we will take care of that kid that you just produced because you thought there were no consequences.  Oops, sorry.  Now it&#8217;s time for us to fix the problem in the short term.  And, what the hell, there&#8217;s no tomorrow anyway.  So if we spend all the cash, and it&#8217;s gone, so what?</p>
<p>This is, to me, the greatest danger of what Hollywood does.  And yeah, there is a plethora of rightwing material out there, and there is a great variety.  But overall, the culture has moved to the left.  If you look at TV in the 1950s and you look at TV now, there&#8217;s no comparison.  There&#8217;s no comparison.  Not because there&#8217;s no conservative stuff on TV now; there is, and there&#8217;s conservative stuff in the movies.</p>
<p>I agree with Drew on this.  &#8220;Dark Knight Rises&#8221; is the best conservative &#8212; is the most conservative movie you&#8217;ll ever see.  There are actually Stalinist show trials in the movie.  There are actual lines in the movie where somebody goes into a room &#8212; she&#8217;s a former Communist &#8212; and she goes into this room, and it&#8217;s been completely trashed.  And she walks in.  And she says &#8212; this used to be somebody&#8217;s home.  And her friend, who&#8217;s still a Communist, turns to her and says &#8212; well, now it&#8217;s everybody&#8217;s home.  And it&#8217;s completely trashed.  Right?  I mean, it&#8217;s a very conservative movie.</p>
<p>And you see this.  And there are conservative movies out there &#8212; &#8220;The Lives of Others&#8221; &#8212; it&#8217;s a beautiful movie altogether, but it&#8217;s a beautiful conservative movie from Germany about the East German Stasi.  You can find that.  But overall, the kind of mainstreaming of the culture, we have moved left.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s very easy to see this in one quick example.  Look at &#8212; okay, in 1992, Dan Quayle says that Murphy Brown is mainstreaming single motherhood.  Right?  Gets raked over the coals for this &#8212; how dare Dan Quayle say any of this.  This is so terrible.  What kind of nonsense is this?  Candice Bergen, of course, who played Murphy Brown, later came out and said Dan Quayle was exactly right.</p>
<p>This election cycle, Joe Biden comes out, and he says &#8212; you know why we have gay marriage in this country?  &#8220;Will and Grace&#8221; and Ellen.  And you know what?  He&#8217;s exactly right &#8212; that is why we have gay marriage in this country.  That is why we have gay marriage in this country.  Because the Left doesn&#8217;t like to talk about good and evil except when they&#8217;re writing in Hollywood.  They understand the draw of good and evil in Hollywood.  Because every narrative has to have a good guy and has to have a bad guy.  And the bad guy &#8212; invariably, invariably, with very, very (inaudible) exception, with rare exceptions, virtually every [villain] is a bad guy.</p>
<p>And I mean, Drew said it when he walked in for the meeting on the KGB show.  Right?  I mean, I had that same experience.  I was talking to an agent in Hollywood.  And I said &#8212; you know what I&#8217;d love?  I&#8217;d love to write &#8212; you know, here&#8217;s a pitch for a movie &#8212; the bad guy&#8217;s the government.  And my agent says &#8212; can you make the bad guy a corporation?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I said &#8212; well, you know, I have a different pitch for you.  How about &#8212; white guy drives into the middle of the Rodney King riots in the early &#8217;90s and has to fight his way out?  She didn&#8217;t like that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>That was a bad pitch to her.</p>
<p>The bottom line is this &#8212; when they pitch good and evil, there&#8217;s a reason that they&#8217;re pitching it in terms of conservative versus liberal.  They are all liberal, they want to push that agenda, they have admitted to me they want to push that agenda.  Some of them aren&#8217;t conscious of it all of the time.  But they bathe in that milieu.  That is the bath that they live in.  They have never met a conservative.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s why, when you meet a Hollywood liberal, and they meet a Hollywood conservative, they act as though you are made of acid &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; as though if you shake their hand, their arm will literally burn off.  Because they think that we&#8217;re nasty human beings.  And that&#8217;s the real impact of all of this.  It has affected our politics.</p>
<p>The way that is boils down now is that if you&#8217;re having &#8212; and I mentioned it earlier &#8212; if you&#8217;re going to have Thanksgiving dinner with your family, and you&#8217;re against gay marriage, it&#8217;s not because you have good reasons for being against gay married, like, say, a kid should have a mother and a father.  Right?  That&#8217;s not a good reason.  It&#8217;s because you hate gay people.  That&#8217;s something that Hollywood has pushed.  Because every character in television history who has been pro-traditional marriage has been Archie Bunker pro-traditional marriage.  Every character on TV who has ever been pro-low taxation &#8212; it&#8217;s because they&#8217;re Alec Baldwin in &#8220;30 Rock&#8221; pro-low taxation.  Right?  Meaning that they are pro-rich, and they hate the poor, and they can&#8217;t understand the poor.  And they think that rich people are wonderful and poor people are stupid.</p>
<p>This is the narrative that has been created.  And that to me is the real danger of Hollywood.  That&#8217;s the background noise that has been created.  When it comes to the rewriting of history &#8212; yes, in the long run, that&#8217;s dangerous.  But on a day-to-day incremental level in our politics, it&#8217;s not the clear stuff, it&#8217;s not the stuff that&#8217;s easy to identify, where we can see, you know, in that &#8220;Family Guy&#8221; episode, where Stewie travels back in time, back to Nazi Germany.  He pulls back the lapel of a Nazi, and there&#8217;s a Sarah Palin pin.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Right?  That stuff &#8212; that happened.  That is not as damaging, because you can spot it, and you can say that&#8217;s ridiculous.  It&#8217;s ridiculous.  What is damaging is the idea that if you&#8217;re against the concept of single motherhood becoming a broad national problem, it&#8217;s because you&#8217;re a nasty human being, a villain, a &#8220;Footloose&#8221; type uptight human being.  That&#8217;s the real damage of Hollywood.  And that&#8217;s the most difficult thing to fight.  There are ways to do it.  But just to put that, you know, on the board, that is &#8212; from my mind, it&#8217;s the hardest thing to fight, because it&#8217;s the most ambiguous.  And it&#8217;s the thing that is going to make you least likeable when you go to fight it.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> I&#8217;d like you to respond to how the Right gets suppressed, and yet somebody like Molly has to live in fear for her life, like Lars in Sweden right now, and a lot of other people that are free speech advocates?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Yeah.  It&#8217;s a nightmare.  The guy you&#8217;re talking about, Lars &#8212; he&#8217;s the one who was shot at, at his own door, right?  And he&#8217;s a free speech advocate.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> And a Marxist.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Yeah, and a Marxist.  He really is.  And as he pointed out, his concept of the Left was always in favor of free speech.  And this kind of bizarre paradox that&#8217;s going on with the Left is backing these homophobic, you know, misogynistic, hyper-religious destroyers of freedom is kind of a nightmare, is kind of the Left showing itself, coming out into itself.</p>
<p>What are you going to do against gangsters except speak out against them?  This is always the problem with gangsters is they come and kill you if you point your finger at them.  That&#8217;s who these guys are, and I think we have to not only point our fingers at them, but we have to point our fingers at the people who facilitate what they do.</p>
<p>And the only thing that&#8217;s a little tricky about it, I would say, the only area at all that is a gray area, is mocking people&#8217;s religion in the first place is not something in general that I stand for.  Opposing bad philosophy and bad ideas is something I very much stand for.  And I think that Islam is basically a collection of bad ideas.  And I’m willing to say that anywhere and any time.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But I do think that we have to maintain our own standards of behavior, and not &#8212; I don&#8217;t particularly like it when they mock my religion.  I don&#8217;t mock other people&#8217;s religions.  But if their response is to kill them, they&#8217;re gangsters.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh:</strong> I would just say that in culture, the people affecting &#8212; aside from that woman&#8217;s story &#8212; I don&#8217;t know what happened to her, either &#8212; but the greater capitulation was the episode a few years ago by Yale University Press that published a huge book about the cartoon controversy of Mohammad.  And Yale published the book without any of the cartoons in the book.  They took them out because of threats by the mullahs against the press.  Now there&#8217;s scuttle.</p>
<p>But why did they do this?  Why didn&#8217;t the university, dedicated to the idea of freedom of expression, defend the right and say &#8212; we&#8217;re going to print the book that was given to us with the cartoons?  Well, the obvious answer is &#8212; though we can&#8217;t prove it &#8212; that the trustees met and said &#8212; if we do this, it&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re going to be attacked or bombed.  But the Saudi money coming to many departments within Yale, where obviously they were going to be withdrawn, and they didn&#8217;t want to jeopardize the funding from Islamists and believers in the Koran who would withdraw their money.</p>
<p>So you can&#8217;t even depend on a great university like Yale to defend the principle of freedom of expression.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> These are all private institutions.  And they have the right to be as stupid as they want to be, including Yale &#8212; especially Yale.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The bigger problem to me, and the best example of this, is the Obama Administration condemning a YouTube video for the murder of four people in Libya.  And then, President Obama going to the UN and trying to make the case that a YouTube video &#8212; and our tolerance for a YouTube video, more than anything &#8212; sort of allowed this to happen.</p>
<p>Now, I agree.  We don&#8217;t stand for mockery of other people&#8217;s religions on a private person-to-person level.  As a government, that is precisely what we stand for.  As a government, the First Amendment was created to protect this sort of stupidity.  I mean, what, we&#8217;re supposed to say that the First Amendment stands for Larry Flynt&#8217;s ability to distribute his wares but not for a guy to make an anti-Islam film?  I&#8217;m sorry, the Founders would&#8217;ve thought actually precisely the reverse.  They would&#8217;ve &#8212; they probably would put Larry Flynt in prison, and they would&#8217;ve gave this guy &#8212; and the Founders certainly would not put the guy who made the anti-Mohammad film in prison.  You should read what some of the Founders thought about Islam.</p>
<p>The fact is that we now live under a government that is unconcerned with the First Amendment.  And that is the scary thing to me.  The parts of the First Amendment that they want to protect are the parts of the First Amendment that are least valuable.  And the parts of the First Amendment that they most want to protect, especially in terms of political speech &#8212; this is why they&#8217;re so against Citizens United &#8212; especially in terms of political speech, are the ones that they are attacking with alacrity.  And they&#8217;re undermining the very basis of what it means to be an American by doing this.</p>
<p>If Yale University doesn&#8217;t want to print Mohammad cartoons, that&#8217;s their prerogative.  What is not the prerogative of the President of the United States is to go in front of the United Nations and make the case in front of the entire world that the future does not belong to those who would mock Islam.  That is nonsense.  The future belongs to those who would allow mockery of any religion on any basis.  As an Orthodox Jew who&#8217;s not using a microphone today, I promise you that the First Amendment was created so that Jerry Stiller can make fun of Judaism on &#8220;Seinfeld.&#8221;  That&#8217;s okay.  It&#8217;s not the end of the world.</p>
<p>And so I think that, you know, when we see cases like this Seattle person, the fact that our government has not come out in strident defense of people like that and their right to do it is the most telling aspect of this, not the fact that our enemies happen to be scum-of-the-earth pieces of human garbage who want to kill people for insulting their religion.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> And, by the way, just to be clear, I certainly agree with you (inaudible) &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> But &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> I didn&#8217;t mean to (inaudible) &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Yeah, I was simply talking about our behavior, and our expectations of our own behavior, yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> Yes, sir?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Andrew, I think I&#8217;d like to have you clarify a little bit about the &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty.&#8221;  It&#8217;s my understanding that when the Bush Administration water-boarded people in Iraq, they had a doctor present who was taking the vital signs of people whom they were interrogating.  I didn&#8217;t notice any doctor present in &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty.&#8221;  So my question is &#8212; was that really an accurate description of water-boarding?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Well, except it&#8217;s not their obligation to make an accurate description; it&#8217;s their obligation to make an entertaining and good movie.  You know, if &#8220;Argo&#8221; rewrites history so that Jimmy Carter knew which way was up &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; I don’t see why this guy can&#8217;t rewrite history to get rid of the annoying doctor character who might&#8217;ve just muddied up the scene.  The question is the response and the outcome of their showing torture as an efficacious thing.  Think about the next guy who&#8217;s going to make a movie who wants to win an Oscar.  Just think about that guy.  Because you know he&#8217;s not going to do that.  And that&#8217;s always the way they&#8217;re thinking, especially Dianne Feinstein, who&#8217;s very, very sophisticated about this, and really goes after the arts a lot.</p>
<p>So in other words, I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s an accurate depiction; it&#8217;s a movie.  As we always say in Hollywood, it&#8217;s just a movie.  And so I&#8217;m not defending its accuracy.  I just think it was a really good movie and deserved to win or lose on its own merits.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh:</strong> The interesting thing &#8212; the guy who made &#8212; there was a long interview, I think it was in the New York Times &#8212; is that right, Drew, with Neil Gould?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Mark Gould.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh:</strong> Mark Gould?  And he said he&#8217;s a leftist.  He says he&#8217;s on the left.  And he is furious.  He said &#8212; look, we wanted to make a movie, it wasn&#8217;t literal truth.  He said &#8212; if I wanted to make a movie that said Osama bin Laden was killed by space aliens, that would be my right.  And he is furious at all his fellow leftists who are ganging up on him.</p>
<p>The other strident thing about the attack on &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty&#8221; &#8212; it was started by two people &#8212; I forget the actor&#8217;s name.  Twenty-five years ago, when he was on &#8220;Thirtysomething&#8221; in a minor role &#8212; he&#8217;s not a big actor &#8212; he and Ed Asner &#8212; Ed Asner, an old Communist &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>These two guys alone started the whole campaign against &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty.&#8221;  Why is everyone listening to them?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> It&#8217;s amazing to me, by the way, how shocked leftists in Hollywood are when they get shut down by the Left.  The guys who made &#8220;The Path to 9/11&#8243; &#8212; stone leftists.  They were total leftists.  When the Clintons stomped on that, they were shocked.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> It&#8217;s amazing to me that the Left was even all that upset with &#8220;Zero Dark Thirty,&#8221; considering exactly that point, which is that they were making that torture appear as though it was morally questionable.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh:</strong> Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> Right?  I mean, it makes it so much less bad, or even morally nuanced &#8211;</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> &#8212; if there is a doctor there trying to revive something and making sure you don&#8217;t kill the guy.  So they took that out, so the torture scene is actually pretty brutal.  And they show that.  And so, you know, the idea is supposed to be &#8212; okay, here&#8217;s the cost, here&#8217;s the benefit.  Except they make the cost way higher than it was in reality.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Right.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> So the fact that the Left was even upset about that shows just how ideologically corrupt they are.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> I personally believe water-boarding jihadis should be an Olympic sport.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>CIA agents in sequined outfits &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> I believe we have a question over here.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Ben, you mentioned that Obama conducted a campaign against that YouTube clip.  You didn&#8217;t mention that this so-called filmmaker was thrown in jail.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> Yeah, he&#8217;s in jail.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> I&#8217;m wondering if any of the four of you feel chilled because of that.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> Well, you know what&#8217;s hilarious?  When I did my book on Hollywood, &#8220;Primetime Propaganda,&#8221; I talked to a bunch of folks in Hollywood.  And I said, you know &#8212; what did you hate so much about Bush?  And they said &#8212; well, I felt a chill wind.  Right?  They gave this whole Tim Robbins chill wind blowing throughout Hollywood routine.  And I said &#8212; did you, really?</p>
<p>Of course you feel a chill when you see the President of the United States go out there and rip free expression.  Of course you do, when the President of the United States, in order to shift blame from himself to essentially &#8212; basically, what he just said is that anybody who makes a YouTube video can now be blamed by the federal government if a Muslim gets offended.  I promise you this &#8212; if those people &#8212; if somebody had made the case that that attack had taken place after [AG Hoddy] watched an odd episode of &#8220;Will and Grace&#8221; &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; President Obama would have been nowhere near it.  It would&#8217;ve been &#8212; these people are absolutely evil, these people are horrible, how dare they, this is a violation of our First Amendment rights.  The First Amendment is all about &#8220;Will and Grace.&#8221;  But the fact that they did something anti-Islam directly &#8212; that, you know, in and of itself upset President Obama.  Of course there&#8217;s a chill wind.  This President is not interested in freedom of speech.  This President is interested in freedom of speech for him, and he&#8217;s interested in destroying everybody who&#8217;s on the other side of the aisle personally, politically, and in any way he possibly can.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> By the way, you know, there is an Arab production, an Arab film production company, that is creating a biography of Mohammad.  It&#8217;s a $100 million picture &#8212; so far, the budget is.  And they&#8217;re doing it in conjunction with a Hollywood producer, a big Hollywood producer.  I can guarantee you that it will not be critical of Mohammad, like the trailer on YouTube was.  But the Arabs want to do their own version of the life of Mohammad.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew Klavan:</strong> Should get Mel Gibson to direct.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> Yes.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Okay, one more question.  Over here?</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Audience Member:</strong> Much of what you&#8217;ve been talking about is basically sort of conflict &#8212; a chess game amongst the intelligentsia.  These are people at the upper levels, the controllers, of the media.  Not unlike what was happening leading up to the French Revolution, the elites of France were playing a game of chess using the masses as their cannon fodder in the streets.  It simply got out of control.</p>
<p>What is really ominous about what President Obama has been putting out to the masses, in terms of his support of Occupy New York, Occupy LA; identifying the 1 percent; and turning then to the 99 percent, just as Mao did in the Cultural Revolution, saying &#8212; you, you individual, any of you, can turn in your parent, can denounce a hero of the Revolution, and we will take care of them.</p>
<p><strong>Ben Shapiro:</strong> Well, I mean, look, (inaudible) [have led] down.  But I do get a little bit annoyed when people boil this all down to President Obama.  This is about Obamaism, and it&#8217;s been a movement in the making for the last 100 years.  We didn&#8217;t get here overnight.  It wasn&#8217;t like President Obama suddenly sprang up out of the ground, and everybody just went and bowed at his altar.</p>
<p>This has been a long time in coming, and this is why culture matters.  The reason culture matters is because that emotional up-swell that came with President Obama&#8217;s election was years in creation.  It was years in creation, and it was all about emotion.</p>
<p>See, the Left operates on the plane of emotion.  This is where David Horowitz has this exactly right, and he&#8217;s great on it.  The Left operates on the plane of emotion.  That&#8217;s where Hollywood operates.  That&#8217;s why Hollywood is effective.  Most of the big decisions that we make in our life are based on emotion.  You get married based on emotion, you have kids based on emotion.  These things are not based on reason; they&#8217;re based on, you know, love, and they&#8217;re based on respect, and they&#8217;re based on all of the things that we deal on a daily basis &#8212; anger &#8212; I mean, all of these things are what the Left is professional at manipulating.</p>
<p>They&#8217;re very good at it.  Underestimating them &#8212; you know, I see a lot of folks on the right &#8212; these people in Hollywood, they&#8217;re hacks.  They&#8217;re absolutely not hacks; they are fantastic at what they do.  They are real craftsmen.  They&#8217;re real artists.  Now, they may have no clue what they&#8217;re doing politically; they&#8217;ve just been bathing in this kind of bathwater, this lukewarm bathwater, of leftism for a long time.  But they&#8217;re extraordinarily good at what they do, extraordinarily good at manipulating emotions in the American people.</p>
<p>And what you saw in President Obama was a President who took the values of Hollywood and really, more than any candidate in human history, integrated those values into his campaign, into everything he does.  Stage managing gun control &#8212; he&#8217;s got a bunch of kids standing behind him for imagistic purposes.  Stage-managing immigration &#8212; so he flies out to a high school in Las Vegas &#8212; which, by the way, is a massively underperforming high school, which is [pretty bitchin].</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>He flies out to that high school.  There&#8217;s a bunch of Hispanic kids in the crowd.  And then he, you know, has the cameras taking pictures of him with the hero shot, you know, from that upswing.  Taking pictures during the all-star game, but making sure, making sure, there&#8217;s no camera right behind him to show that he throws like a girl.  Right?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>All of this is designed specifically to appeal to the emotions.  And that&#8217;s why Obama won in 2012.  Everybody felt he was a bad President, everybody felt that his policies were wrong, and everybody also felt that he was a good guy and Mitt Romney was a nasty guy.  And you have to be prepped for years in the art of only feeling and not thinking in order to vote the way that Americans just did.</p>
<p>And they&#8217;re going to continue to vote that way if we don&#8217;t engage in the battle of emotion.  And that&#8217;s where Hollywood is Ground Zero.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson:</strong> And I think on that note, we&#8217;re done.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Cultural Deviancy Is the Problem, Not Guns</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/cultural-deviancy-is-the-problem-not-guns/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cultural-deviancy-is-the-problem-not-guns</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/cultural-deviancy-is-the-problem-not-guns/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:10:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177477</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real driving force behind fire arms violence. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/cultural-deviancy-is-the-problem-not-guns/rappers-gun-violence-4/" rel="attachment wp-att-177479"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-177479" title="rappers-gun-violence-4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/rappers-gun-violence-4.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="217" /></a>There&#8217;s a story told about a Paris chief of police who was called to a department store to stop a burglary in progress. Upon his arrival, he reconnoitered the situation and ordered his men to surround the entrances of the building next door. When questioned about his actions, he replied that he didn&#8217;t have enough men to cover the department store&#8217;s many entrances but he did have enough for the building next door. Let&#8217;s see whether there are similarities between his strategy and today&#8217;s gun control strategy.</p>
<p>Last year, Chicago had 512 homicides; Detroit had 411; Philadelphia had 331; and Baltimore had 215. Those cities are joined by other dangerous cities — such as St. Louis, Memphis, Tenn., Flint, Mich., and Camden, N.J. — and they also lead the nation in shootings, assaults, rapes and robberies. Both the populations of those cities and their crime victims are predominantly black. Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered. Close to 100 percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.</p>
<p>According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation&#8217;s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it&#8217;s 22 times that of whites. Coupled with being most of the nation&#8217;s homicide victims, blacks are also most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery. The magnitude of this tragedy can be seen in another light. According to a Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute study, between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched at the hands of whites.</p>
<p>What percentage of murders, irrespective of race, are committed with what are being called assault weapons? You&#8217;d be hard put to come up with an amount greater than 1 or 2 percent. In fact, according to FBI data from 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle of any kind but 496 murders committed with a hammer or a club. But people who want to weaken our Second Amendment guarantees employ a strategy like that of the Paris chief of police.</p>
<p>They can&#8217;t do much about hammers, clubs, fists or pistols, but by exploiting public ignorance, they might have a bit of success getting an &#8220;assault weapon&#8221; ban that will have little impact on violent crime.</p>
<p>There are other measures these people employ in an attempt to end violence that border on lunacy. Massachusetts&#8217; Hyannis West Elementary recently warned a 5-year-old&#8217;s parents that if their son made another gun from a Legos set, he&#8217;d be suspended. Elementary-school children have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for drawing a picture of a gun or pointing a finger and saying, &#8220;Bang, bang.&#8221; I shudder to think about what would happen to kids in a schoolyard if they played, as I played nearly 70 years ago, &#8220;cops &#8216;n&#8217; robbers&#8221; or &#8220;cowboys &#8216;n&#8217; Indians.&#8221; Maybe today&#8217;s politically correct educators would cut the kids a bit of slack if they said they were playing &#8220;cowboys &#8216;n&#8217; Native Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>What explains a lot of what we see today, which politicians and their liberal allies would never condemn, is growing cultural deviancy. Twenty-nine percent of white children, 53 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of black children are born to unmarried women. The absence of a husband and father from the home is a strong contributing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data show that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. In 2009, the poverty rate among married whites was 3.2 percent; for blacks, it was 7 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 13.2 percent. The higher poverty rates — 22 percent for whites, 35.6 percent for blacks and 37.9 percent for Hispanics — are among unmarried families.</p>
<p>Other forms of cultural deviancy are found in the kind of music accepted today that advocates killing and rape and other vile acts. Punishment for criminal behavior is lax. Today&#8217;s Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Notes Toward Winning the Culture War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/notes-toward-winning-the-culture-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=notes-toward-winning-the-culture-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 04:42:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177057</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How conservatives can win the future. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/notes-toward-winning-the-culture-war/ats-hollywood-sign/" rel="attachment wp-att-177202"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-177202" title="ATS Hollywood sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ATS-Hollywood-sign.jpg" alt="" width="258" height="194" /></a>As my friend the late, great Andrew Breitbart was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture, and the results of the last election confirm that. Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical left laid the groundwork for it in the <em>cultural</em> arena. Politics is obviously a critical battleground, but unless and until we start thinking in terms of waging a vigorous cultural campaign, we will never win another presidential election. Following is a rough beginning of some thoughts toward that end.</p>
<p>There is no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the left had not successfully infiltrated the key cultural realms – education, news media, and entertainment – and spent decades indoctrinating generations to reject traditional American values, feel shame rather than pride in our country’s history, and embrace their own enslavement to a big government, post-American, cancerous ideology rebranded as progressivism. That indoctrination runs so deep in too many American hearts and minds that not even the reality of four disastrous years under Obama was enough to shock them out of their irrational addiction to his hope-and-change snake oil. Deprogramming that indoctrination and seducing subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism means retaking the culture or creating a parallel one.</p>
<p>What does it mean to “retake the culture”? Let’s focus on entertainment or pop culture for the time being, because education and the news media are each broad and unwieldy topics in their own right. There was once a time – difficult as it is to imagine now – when Hollywood wasn’t overwhelmingly contemptuous of our country and the audiences in it, and the music biz didn’t revel in degraded spectacle. Taking back pop culture doesn’t mean reverting to that time, which in any case can’t be done, and it doesn’t mean stamping out anything we don’t like – that’s the way of the totalitarian left. It means breaking through the left’s monolithic hold on entertainment by creating more alternative voices in the film, TV, and music industries, voices that express and celebrate <em>our</em> values. It means seducing converts through the message delivery system, if you will, of quality art and entertainment. Easier said than done. If conservatives settle for making crappy independent movies and even crappier, heavyhanded political music, we will be easy to dismiss and will convert no one.</p>
<p>Speaking of conversion, the significance of pop culture isn’t limited to its impact on American youth; it affects our international standing as well. The critic Irving Kristol once said, “A world power, if it is to maintain its position, needs to generate respect for its culture.” Is America generating respect for its culture? Of course not. And let’s be clear: here and abroad, Hollywood <em>is</em> American culture. The world looks to Hollywood as the barometer of America’s moral and political character and direction. Generating respect for our country again depends on conservatives taking the helm of our culture.</p>
<p>The first step is simply getting conservatives to acknowledge the importance of the cultural fight, and convincing ourselves to embrace popular culture, not reject it as we are understandably inclined to do. Long ago we unwittingly ceded that arena to the subversive left, with the result that we find ourselves and our values assaulted and mocked mercilessly in the entertainment world. And how do we respond? Too many conservatives say, “I’m done with Hollywood. I don’t go to their movies. I cancelled my cable TV. I refuse to give them a penny.” Fair enough, but the problem with that stance is that disengagement isn’t how you win a culture war. Taking yourself out of the culture stream simply means that you end up as marginalized as the Amish. So we have to acknowledge that winning the cultural civil war requires that we get into the fray, understand pop culture, and commit to transforming it in ways that convey our positive values instead of the left’s nihilistic ones.</p>
<p>In the wake of the presidential election loss, conservatives have agonized endlessly about our “message.” We need to get our message across better, we say; we need to change our message, we need a more effective, compelling messenger. Well, the best way to get our message across now is through stories rather than political lectures, through values rather than political talking points. Nobody likes to be preached to, not even the left, which is why leftist message flicks like Matt Damon’s “Bush lied” anti-war movie <em>The Green Zone</em> and anti-capitalism Brad Pitt flick <em>Killing Them Softly</em> bombed in theaters. But people are seduced and changed by great stories, whether the teller is a screenwriter or a politician.</p>
<p>Hollywood has been called the greatest propaganda machine in human history. Maybe not for much longer. The rules are changing in Hollywood. Affordable technology and the internet are changing and democratizing the way films are made and distributed. We won’t have to depend on Hollywood gatekeepers anymore. The big studios are occupied with making “tentpole” pictures – blockbusters – and they’ve abandoned the middle ground to independents. So now it’s time for conservatives to fill that void, create production companies or back such companies, and start producing quality entertainment that represents <em>us</em>.</p>
<p>Is the culture war winnable? It’s possible but it’s a steep uphill battle that requires a shift in conservative thinking. As my friend, blogger and media consultant <a href="http://rjmoeller.com/">R.J. Moeller</a>, says, when young conservatives want to have a political impact, they move to Washington D.C.; when young leftists want to do likewise, they move to Hollywood. That needs to change. Our side needs fewer think tank policy wonks and more talented filmmakers and television showrunners, more screenwriters and songwriters, more novelists like <a href="http://www.andrewklavan.com/">Andrew Klavan</a>, more TV hosts like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joy-Hate-Triumph-Whiners-Outrage/dp/0307986969/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360305269&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=greg+gutfeld+joy+of+hate">Greg Gutfeld</a>.</p>
<p>One optimistic perspective we can take to heart is that, culturally speaking, the left is the “Establishment” now, to put it in 1960s terminology. <em>We </em>are the outsiders, the counterculture, the rebels with a cause. We need to revel in that underdog role and embrace the challenge. The future of American culture – indeed, the future of America – depends on it.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Palestinian &#8216;Honor Killings&#8217; Rising</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-crimi/palestinian-honor-killings-rising/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=palestinian-honor-killings-rising</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-crimi/palestinian-honor-killings-rising/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Aug 2012 04:15:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frank Crimi]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Honor Killings]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mahmoud abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinian authority]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=140914</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Are human rights advocates finally taking notice? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/mideast-israel-palestinians-honor-killings-1464275320_v2.grid-6x2.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-140935" title="mideast-israel-palestinians-honor-killings-1464275320_v2.grid-6x2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/mideast-israel-palestinians-honor-killings-1464275320_v2.grid-6x2.gif" alt="" width="375" height="250" /></a>A growing collection of Palestinian leaders are acknowledging that the recent rise in “honor killings” and other horrific acts of violence being perpetrated against Palestinian women can only be stemmed by changing the Arab cultural and Islamic propensity of violence toward women.</p>
<p>The latest victim of a Palestinian honor killing was Nancy Zaboun, a 27-year-old mother of three, who, moments after she left a divorce hearing in Bethlehem, was brutally <a href="http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/in-peace-palestinian-women-under-attack/" target="_blank">murdered</a> by her husband.</p>
<p>Nancy had been in the process of seeking an early exit from her marriage after having suffered repeated beatings over the course of her ten-year marriage, beatings that often required hospitalization but which never resulted in criminal charges being brought against her husband.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Nancy Zaboun’s attempt to flee her abusive marriage caused such a stain on her husband’s familial honor that he stabbed her multiple times, a death sentence which tragically has been shared by a long and ever-expanding list of Palestinian women and girls.</p>
<p>In the years between 2007 and 2010, the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights has <a href="http://www.upi.com/Top_news/World-News/2012/08/03/Protesters-ask-crackdown-on-honor-killings/UPI-62991343996034/" target="_blank">reported</a> 29 women were killed by family members in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, in the past two years, 25 women have been subjected to honor killings, with 13 women murdered in 2011 and 12 women slain in 2012.</p>
<p>Those victims include: 17-year-old Rofayda Qaoud, whose mother placed a plastic bag over her head and slashed her wrists after she had been raped and impregnated by her two brothers; 27-year-old Fadia Najjar, a divorced mother of five, bludgeoned to death by her father because she owned a cell phone that he thought she was using to call a man outside of the family; and 20-year-old Aya Baradiya, tied up and thrown down a well to die by her uncle because he disapproved of her engagement.</p>
<p>Yet, while honor killings have long been a staple byproduct of Palestinian society, the sharp upsurge in familial murder over the past several years has generated widespread <a href="http://www.palwatch.org/" target="_blank">condemnation</a> by a growing coalition of Palestinian officials and human rights activists, denunciations which have included calls for new criminal legislation and longer prison terms.</p>
<p>To that end, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in May 2011 issued a <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43099010/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/harsh-west-bank-honor-killing-brings-tougher-law/" target="_blank">decree</a> that amended decades-old laws which had guaranteed “leniency” for honor killers such that prison terms might not exceed three years.</p>
<p>The result of the presidential decree, according to PA Justice Minister Ali Mohanna, is that honor killings are now treated as any other murder, and, as such, claims of assailants that they were simply protecting “family honor” are no longer taken into account.</p>
<p>However, that judicial opinion is not equally shared by all, as critics argue the Palestinian legal system does not punish the crime of honor killing severely enough and thus still allows for violence against women to continue to go unpunished.</p>
<p>Specifically, they point to the fact that tenets of the amended laws in President Abbas’ legal order left in place can still be used to justify honor killings, such as mitigating circumstances that let perpetrators avoid severe punishment if they can prove that they acted in a “state of rage.”</p>
<p>As such, Attorney Salwa Banura <a href="http://palwatch.org/" target="_blank">said</a> the new law encourages murders, since mitigating circumstances “are accepted by the courts, and a man who murders his daughter, wife or sister stays in prison only three months, and is then released.”</p>
<p>Yet, unfortunately, honor killings remain just one small aspect of the horrific torment faced by Palestinian women and girls at the hands of Palestinian men.</p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://mepi.state.gov/mh_003032010d.html" target="_blank">study</a> done by the Gaza-based Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Center found that 67 percent of Palestinian women reported being subjected to verbal violence on a regular basis, 71 percent to psychological violence, 52 percent to physical violence and 14 percent to sexual violence.</p>
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		<title>Banning &#8216;Hate Speech&#8217; at UC?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/banning-hate-speech-at-uc/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=banning-hate-speech-at-uc</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jlaksin/banning-hate-speech-at-uc/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Aug 2012 04:46:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[and Inclusion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[First Amendment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irvine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president mark yudof]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[university of california]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=139769</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The wrong approach to battling anti-Israel bias on California campuses.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/4404209839_0b3bf24f78_o-635x357.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-139772" title="4404209839_0b3bf24f78_o-635x357" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/4404209839_0b3bf24f78_o-635x357.gif" alt="" width="375" height="243" /></a>A Jewish student at the University of California at Davis was told that the Star of David was a hate symbol. A student at UC Santa Cruz, a veteran of the Israeli military, was frequently called a “baby killer” on campus. Protests at various UC campuses regularly analogize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi genocide against Jews. Among these protests is an annual “Israel Apartheid Week” which features stunts like mock “die-ins,” in which students pretending to be Palestinians collapse as if they had been killed en masse by Israelis.</p>
<p>Together, these events illuminate a pattern of pervasive anti-Israel sentiment on UC campuses, at least some of which rises to the level of actual anti-Semitism. That disturbing pattern is set forth in detail in a July 9 <a href="http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/documents/campus_climate_jewish.pdf">report</a> compiled by the UC Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion created in 2010 by UC President Mark Yudof. The report concludes that UC campuses play host to a</p>
<blockquote><p>“movement which targets Israel and Zionism through an ongoing campaign of protests, anti-Israel/anti-Zionism ‘weeks,’ and, on some campuses, the use of the academic platforms to denounce the Jewish state and Jewish nationalist aspiration.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Those findings are deeply troubling, and if they have not received the media coverage they deserve it is mostly because they have been overshadowed by another part of the advisory council’s report – namely, it’s no less troubling recommendation that “UC should adopt a hate speech-free campus policy” as a way to silence the speech that dismays so many Jewish students supportive of Israel.</p>
<p>Thus, the report’s authors lament that “UC does not have a hate-free policy that allows the campus to prevent well-known bigoted and hate organizations from speaking on campus” and insists that “UC should push its current harassment and nondiscrimination provisions further, clearly define hate speech in its guidelines, and seek opportunities to prohibit hate speech on campus.” To that end, the council calls on President Yudof to task his general counsel with finding “opportunities to develop policies that give campus administrators authority to prohibit such activities on campus.” Most brazenly, the council notes that while banning speech on campus would likely provoke a legal challenge, it suggests “that UC accept the challenge” and adopt such policies anyway.</p>
<p>The council is right to worry about the legal implications of outlawing hate speech. Banning speech &#8212; even extremely offensive speech &#8212; is clearly illegal and has long been recognized as such by the courts. That is especially true in the context of academia, which has been seen as a preserve of free expression. The council’s call for bans on anti-Israel hate speech is thus an invitation to violate the constitutional right to free speech in the name of campus sensitivity. “The First Amendment guarantees that Americans have the right to engage in speech and this includes speech that others might deem hateful,” notes Robert Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). “There is abundant legal precedent for this proposition and what this report seems to recommend flies right in its face.”</p>
<p>If there were compelling reasons for running roughshod over the First Amendment, the council fails to cite them. It asserts that students should be protected from “harassment and intimidation” but never explains why this cannot be accomplished by the university&#8217;s current policies on student conduct and discipline or why free speech should be sacrificed in the process.</p>
<p>The issue might be more complicated were the anti-Israel speech that students find offensive accompanied by physical threats but the council concedes that this is not at all the case, and in fact notes that “not one Jewish student indicated that they perceive the Jewish student community as physically unsafe at UC.”  On the rare occasions when attacks on Israel have gone beyond permissible free speech, universities have punished the conduct. In 2010, for instance, 11 students <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w96UR79TBw">shouted down a speech</a> by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine. That was a <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/alan-m-dershowitz/censorship-at-uc-irvine-3/">shameful incident</a> and the school brought appropriate punishment against the offending students: Ten of the students were convicted on misdemeanor charges for civil disturbance and sentenced to three years of informal probation. In light of this precedent, it is perhaps not surprising that the best the council can do to justify a ban on speech is to allude to some unspecified “complex dynamics” of the student &#8220;experience&#8221; that ostensibly justify such a ban. More should be required to trump free speech, however objectionable the ideas it expresses.</p>
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		<title>Israel’s &#8216;You Built It&#8217; Culture</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/israel%e2%80%99s-you-built-it-culture/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel%25e2%2580%2599s-you-built-it-culture</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/israel%e2%80%99s-you-built-it-culture/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2012 04:43:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Romney]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=139691</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Mitt Romney was right about the culture of success.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tel-aviv-panorama-big.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-139725" title="tel-aviv-panorama-big" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/tel-aviv-panorama-big.gif" alt="" width="375" height="246" /></a>When Mitt Romney arrived in Jerusalem and suggested that Israel’s success contrasted with its Muslim neighbors was due to a culture of success, he was waving a red flag in front of a red bull. Romney’s comments were as provocative to the left as Obama’s  “You didn’t build that” remark was to us.</p>
<p>To the left, success has become the Mark of Cain. Where success once used to be proof of good character, the balance has shifted and it is now proof of bad character. The left blames all disparities on injustice. If A has less than B, then B has somehow discriminated against A. All that’s left is for the sociologists and critical race theorists to plug in the variables, write their papers and explain the mechanism for the injustice and how it can be remedied through centralized redistribution.</p>
<p>This is the era of “You didn’t build that” where achievement is inherently unfair and an object of guilt. To succeed is to steal. Anyone who has achieved more than those around him has unfairly taken from them. And the more he succeeds, the more he has to feel guilty about and the more he must atone through social justice.</p>
<p>Mitt Romney didn’t build companies; he unfairly redistributed what should have been equal resources in an unequal way to create that success. America also didn’t build anything; it just looted the resources and markets that should have been divided equally among the nations of the world. And the same goes for Jews and the Jewish State. Individual success is not exceptionalism; it’s stealing from the collective.</p>
<p>The left already knows why Israel is more successful. Because it’s a greedy country whose success has come at the expense of its poorer neighbors. The left finds the idea of explaining success in terms of character, either individual or national, to be offensive. To suggest that success is due to personal virtue is to also imply that failure is due to a lack of virtue. The left is not interested in exploring what’s wrong with nations or groups that fail, only in explaining how their failure is no fault of their own.</p>
<p>The left was only interested in Jews as an oppressed minority and in Israel as a small doomed country. Once Jews became successful and Israel emerged victorious, the left turned on them and on Israel.</p>
<p>Israel’s success is one of the greatest weapons that the left uses against it. If Israelis were still living in tents and trying to get the power to stay on for more than a few hours a day, the Jewish State wouldn’t make nearly as tempting a target. Israel’s transformation from a bunch of refugees and farmers armed with third-rate weapons to a prosperous nation of flowering orchards, booming tech companies and new towns rising out of the earth, is proof of its immorality. If the Jewish State were truly moral, it would have stayed poor.</p>
<p>Most offensively Israel’s economic success has kept pace with its transition from socialist collectives to free enterprise, going from a “You didn’t build that” culture to a “You built it” culture. While the Palestinian Authority and most of Israel’s Muslim neighbors still operate under government monopolies, Israel’s tech industry revolution has boosted its international trade while making it possible for a few army or air force veterans to cobble together a company that brings a revolutionary new product to market.</p>
<p>USB flash drives and instant messaging software came out of that “You built it” culture. On the other side of the border malaise and misery, bombs and fanatics, have come out of the economic monopolies wielded by military rulers, tribal leaders and religious despots.</p>
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