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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Hollywood</title>
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	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
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		<title>Hollywood’s Last Stand</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hollywoods-last-stand</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-last-stand/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Dec 2014 05:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-American]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[the interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[villains]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248360</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Americans are the only safe villains left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248363" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351-450x249.jpg" alt="article-2656810-1EB7C4F100000578-425_634x351" width="331" height="183" /></a>Americans are the only people in the world who go to see movies in which they are the villains.</p>
<p>Russians stayed away from Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit with its Slavic villains (though Chinese audiences liked it well enough). And movies with Chinese villains can’t get made because the People’s Republic has more devastating penalties for offending studios than a mere hacking. Instead of leaking private emails, the studios simply aren’t allowed to release their movies in the world’s second biggest film market.</p>
<p>Hollywood’s titans take a break from patting themselves on the back for their commitment to freedom of expression and eagerly rush to work with the censors of the Chinese Communist Party to make their movies acceptable to China.</p>
<p>Muslim villains can’t appear in movies at all since September 11. The last time a movie had a villain named Mohammed, the filmmaker ended up hauled out of his home and tossed into jail. Hillary Clinton, Hollywood’s choice, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/white-house-ordered-prosecution-of-mohammed-filmmaker/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">had assured grieving Benghazi family</span></a> members that instead of punishing their son’s killers, she would “have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.”</p>
<p>With script control like that, it’s no wonder that you don’t see many Muslim movie villains. Not when Hillary is planning her presidential victory tour.</p>
<p>What does all that leave Hollywood scriptwriters with? Aliens, comic book villains and North Korea.</p>
<p>North Korea is a perfect villain because it isn’t a film market. Even possession of an American film can mean death. You can’t release the next weepy melodrama or comic book movie there which makes it fair game. And so a small nasty country with no sense of humor became the favorite movie villain of a gutless entertainment industry.</p>
<p>James Bond took on North Koreans in Die Another Day, the North Koreans invaded the White House in Olympus Has Fallen (or rather a radical faction of North Koreans, even before the Sony hack Hollywood was staking out a cautious position) and took over America in the Red Dawn remake.</p>
<p>These cinematic victories over North Koreans (or North Korean extremists) were hollow displays of Hollywood cowardice and the panicked response to The Interview stripped the hollow pretense of that courage away. And all that remains is the Great American Villain.</p>
<p>If Hollywood can’t even pick on North Korea, a country with no political or economic influence in the West, then it has no safe targets left. All that Hollywood can do is continue exporting anti-Americanism in movies which make the American military and American traditionalists into the villains.</p>
<p>Anti-American movies are a safe export. By making anti-American movies, Hollywood saves Russia and China a lot of money on propaganda. Instead of having to manufacture their own stories about the Yankee Devils, they can buy them directly from the Yankee Devils.</p>
<p>Or as Lenin was said to have put it, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”</p>
<p>The entertainment industry has made anti-Americanism into its biggest export. In another age, Hollywood exported the values of a vibrant and promising nation. Now it exports dystopian fantasies, post-apocalyptic societies, corporate made satires about corporations and other narratives which depict the collapse and fall of America as the inevitable outcome of its dysfunctional society and warped values.</p>
<p>North Korea could never make better anti-American movies than Hollywood does. It’s one reason why Hollywood movies play to large audiences in countries like China and Russia where America is disliked.</p>
<p>This is the courageous storytelling that the entertainment industry prides itself on as it cringes before dictators while abusing Americans. But courage was never Hollywood’s strength. Before Hollywood studios were allowing Chinese Communists to censor their movies, they had extended that same privilege to Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>Joe Kennedy warned Hollywood, “You guys are going to be responsible for pushing the United States into war against the Nazis unless you stop your anti-Nazi films, your anti-Hitler propaganda.”</p>
<p>But Joe was wasting his time. Between Hollywood’s Communists (the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League changed its name to American Peace Mobilization once Hitler and Stalin made their dirty deal) and the native cowardice of the studio bosses, there wasn’t much to censor.</p>
<p>The Nazi as the standby villain had to wait until the actual Nazis had been defeated. Real Nazis were too dangerous to offend. So were Communists and Islamic terrorists. And now even North Koreans.</p>
<p>Regardless of who was behind the Sony hack, the industry reacted with kneejerk appeasement. That was the way that MGM had reacted to Nazi demands for censorship. Before theaters were turning their backs on The Interview, British theaters were turning up their noses at Chaplin’s self-financed The Great Dictator because it might offend Hitler at a time when appeasement was still the watchword.</p>
<p>While The Interview has been compared to The Great Dictator, Chaplin made his movie because he genuinely thought that Hitler needed to be opposed. By contrast The Interview is a typically ironic muddle with no moral center whose only reason for existing is its own miserably unfunny absurdity.</p>
<p>What Chaplin had was a point of view. Hollywood tends to have a political agenda, but nothing it will fight for or defend. Nothing that it truly believes in.</p>
<p>Hollywood has a long history of pandering to totalitarian regimes and ideologies. The difference is that it no longer does so under American colors. Instead it pretends to speak truth to power with its anti-Americanism while pandering to every dictator abroad.</p>
<p>With its British stars, Australian locations and Qatari investors, there isn’t much American about Hollywood these days except its anti-Americanism. That is one reason why Hollywood movies often perform better abroad than they do at home. Hollywood is becoming irrelevant in America. North American box office receipts fell 5 percent this year and 15 percent during the summer.</p>
<p>But that doesn’t matter because the international box office is holding strong.</p>
<p>A post-American entertainment industry naturally draws on American villains. Its stock of foreign villains is now exhausted. After the Sony hack, studios rushed to cancel North Korean themed movies before even waiting for the outcome of the investigation. And without North Korean villains to implausibly seize the White House and invade America, that leaves Americans as the villains.</p>
<p>At a time when few countries are willing to tolerate being ‘villainized’ in Hollywood films, Americans are still expected to subsidize their own demonization.</p>
<p>Unlike North Korea, Hollywood doesn’t take them seriously.</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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		<item>
		<title>The End of Hollywood&#8217;s Last Safe Foreign Enemy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-end-of-hollywoods-last-safe-foreign-enemy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-end-of-hollywoods-last-safe-foreign-enemy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-end-of-hollywoods-last-safe-foreign-enemy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 02:55:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247760</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hollywood smears Americans, but cowers in front of North Korea.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/GTY_oscar_mar_140225_16x9_992.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-247761" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/GTY_oscar_mar_140225_16x9_992-450x253.jpg" alt="GTY_oscar_mar_140225_16x9_992" width="450" height="253" /></a></p>
<p>North Korea&#8217;s rise as an international supervillain in Hollywood movies, conquering America in the Red Dawn remake and assailing the White House in Olympus Has Fallen was due to political correctness and greed.</p>
<p>China&#8217;s rise as both a major market for films under tight government control and as an owner of a major theater chain in the United States completed the process that began with Scorsese&#8217;s Kundun of making movies that offend China off limits.</p>
<p>Political correctness ruled out depicting Muslim terrorists as anything but victims. A handful of movies broke the rules, but most of them did so before 9/11. Post 9/11 Muslims are not allowed to be movie villains, with a few rare exceptions, as I discussed in<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-muslim-lies/"> Hollywood&#8217;s Muslim Lies</a>.</p>
<p>North Korea was an easy target because it&#8217;s not a movie market. Possession of Hollywood movies in Norkville can get you shot. And it&#8217;s only half of Korea so it couldn&#8217;t be considered a distinct minority.</p>
<p>So Hollywood went nuts. Now that era is over. Hollywood marches in lockstep. The Chinese hackers did their work well and few studios will want to risk a repeat.</p>
<p>That leaves Hollywood with no villains.</p>
<p>Russia will occasionally show up, but it&#8217;s also a major movie market and occasionally dips its toes into investing as well. And Russian hackers are better positioned to repeat the same stunt.</p>
<p>So what does that leave? Expect lots more evil American villains, government operatives, corporate goons and domestic militia terrorists. Americans are the only safe politically correct villains for an un-American industry that pretends to be courageous when it smears its own customers while cowering in front of North Korea.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan: #GamerGate Forever!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-gamergate-forever/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-gamergate-forever</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-gamergate-forever/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:43:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Entertainment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GamerGate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[video games]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>In this special episode, our well-dressed, stylish host explores the coordinated left-wing media attacks on video games and the amazing response by gamers in defense of their right to be actual humans who like things that actual humans like. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3w_NwLLqrDs" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s time to take a semi-serious look at gamergate.  Now I know some of you out there are saying, “Gamergate?  What’s that?  You annoying little man.  Speak english!  And tuck in your shirt.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But Gamergate is an important cultural battleground, where brave knight-like gamers are fighting back against the leftwing Orcs and Trolls&#8230; and feminists&#8230; who are trying to monopolize entertainment.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For decades, left wingers have dominated the arts, using movies, television, novels and critical articles to sell idiot notions like: America is oppressive, capitalism is evil, gender difference is bigotry and God is dead.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Why were these leftist knuckleheads able to subvert our culture?  To find out, let’s consult Conservative Culture Expert Grampus McFuddyDudd:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Grampus:  In my day, we didn’t have all this sex and violence in the picture shows, women were virgins until they got married or drunk, whichever came first&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That’s why.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But there was one area of the culture that remained untouched by the left’s poisonous and dishonest influence:  Video games, where freedom of thought and expression were untrammeled, where men were men and women had enormous breasts — but I mean, really, just huge and you could make them jiggle around by pressing the&#8230;.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Anyway&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You may not play video games yourself&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Grampus:  In my day, if we wanted to play Pong, we had to use actual paddles and make those little booping noises with our lips.  It taught us self-reliance&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the fact is, video gaming is an important segment of the entertainment industry.  More people play video games than watch cable TV and hit games make far more money far faster than hit movies. It’s not just for kids either; most gamers are adults&#8230;  or semi-adults like myself.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And while video games are mostly geared toward the geeky males who play them, they cover a wide spectrum of points of view. There’s macho all-American scenarios in Call of Duty, multicultural sensitivity in Assassin’s Creed, gangster hyper-violence in Grand Theft Auto, and of course the feminist action of Tomb Raider starring Lara Croft with her tremendous breasts&#8230;  really they’re gigantic and when you make her jump up and down&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But&#8230; over the years, video gamers began to notice something suspicious.  Video games were continually being attacked in the media as violent and misogynistic.  Games that didn’t toe the left wing line were getting low ratings in important trade venues that were really mouthpieces for leftwing publishers like Vox Media and Gawker Media.  Left wing game journalists were organizing concerted attacks through a secret email list called GameJournoPros.  And the usual feminist dragon ladies were whining and screeching, then screeching and then whining, about every stupid thing from the fact that Super Mario rescues Princess Peach to the fact that the girl in Soul Calipur has these immense&#8230; I mean just titanic&#8230;</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The point is:  Video games are under a left wing cultural invasion!  But look!  Gamers are fighting back.  Yes, a brave band of nerds calling themselves hashtag-gamergate has taken to social media and the press to denounce the onslaught of squid-like leftists and even more squid-like feminists.  With the help of honest journalists like Milo Yiannapolous of Breitbart. com, and despite the constant distortions of the mainstream media, hashtag-gamergaters are actually defending the free culture of the games they love so much.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Imagine!  What would it be like if freedom lovers fought to reclaim the culture everywhere?  If we pushed back against the left wing scolds who suck the joy out of everything they touch? If we made our own entertainments in which America is a beacon of freedom, capitalism is an engine of prosperity and innovation, the male-female dynamic is a unique source of human joy, and the God of liberty and love is alive and well.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Grampus:  What an exciting idea!  I think my heart&#8230;  Oh jinkies&#8230; [keels over with a thud.]</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That’s right, freedom lovers.  Let’s follow the nerds of gamergate!  Once we dare to speak the truth fearlessly, it’s game over for the left.  Gamergate forever!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Grampus:  I think I need an ambulance.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</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>Ben Shapiro: Katy Perry, Cher and Macklemore All Lie About Ferguson</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/ben-shapiro-katy-perry-cher-and-macklemore-all-lie-about-ferguson/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-shapiro-katy-perry-cher-and-macklemore-all-lie-about-ferguson</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/ben-shapiro-katy-perry-cher-and-macklemore-all-lie-about-ferguson/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2014 05:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Katy Perry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Macklemore]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246632</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Ben Shapiro breaks down the witness testimony from the St. Louis County Police Investigative Report of the shooting of Michael Brown and demonstrates that, contrary to President Obama&#8217;s assertions, the black community in Ferguson did in fact make up the story of the racist cop murdering a teenager with his hands up. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/O2PYJPPFx9Q" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The evidence shows that Michael Brown was an 18-year-old, 6’4”, 289-lb. black criminal who robbed a convenience store and attacked a police officer while high, then got shot – that’s what the grand jury determined when they decided not to indict Darren Wilson.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But evidence has never stopped people like Cher, who tweeted, “Something must b done 2 protect innocent young blk men.” Or Moby, who tweeted that “Darren Wilson chased Michael Brown and murdered him.” Or Serena Williams, who tweeted, “Wow. Just wow. Shameful. What will it take???” Or Katy Perry, who said, “praying for an equal America,” or Macklemore, who said “No justice,” and tried to block the I-5 in Seattle. Or Rihanna, who tweeted out a photo of this <a style="color: #0066cc;" href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/celebrities-respond-ferguson-decision">sign</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Or LeBron James, who tweeted this <a style="color: #0066cc;" href="http://t.co/VTe0rwXeek">image</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Or the St. Louis Rams, five of whom walked onto the football field on Sunday in the “hands up, don’t shoot” pose.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">President Obama, of course, jumped in, too. He said this:</p>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic; color: #8f8f8f;"><p>&#8230;There are still problems and communities of color aren&#8217;t just making these problems up.</p></blockquote>
<p style="color: #000000;">That’s a lie, at least with regard to Michael Brown. Grand jury testimony shows that the community of Ferguson, Missouri did make this problem up. In fact, they lied, they intimidated witnesses, and they pressured others to lie – all to put an innocent man behind bars for the rest of his life in the name of social justice.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">According to the St. Louis County Police Investigative Report, the mob mentality began immediately. A huge crowd formed at the scene of the shooting almost instantaneously; that crowd included both Brown’s mother and his stepfather, according to witness testimony. The police report states:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The investigation of the scene was interrupted several times by death threats directed toward police officers and gunshots being fired by unknown persons around the crime scene.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">One witness told police she didn’t want to “get involved for fear of retaliation.” She said, “I have to live here.” An adult male near the scene “commented to detectives as they walked by that he witnessed the incident and the officer was ‘in the right’ and ‘did what he had to do.’ He added the statements being made by bystanders in the complex were inaccurate… The male indicated he was not making any further comments or identifying himself.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Two more witnesses, one male and one female, “said they were afraid to speak about what they witnessed. Both said they were worried about retaliation from people who live in the area.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Still another witness said “threats… had been made to the residents of Canfield Green Apartment Complex. He said notes had been posted on various apartment buildings threatening people not to talk to the police, and gunshots were still being fired every night.” He said “there were at least 10 other people who were outside and saw exactly what happened.” He said Wilson told Brown to get down and that Brown never raised his hands.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In FBI interviews, witnesses repeated such accusations. Witness 10, whose account backed Wilson’s story, said, “I just wanted to come forward and just tell it how I seen it. Because I feel like it’s very rare that somebody’s gonna come forward and tell actually what happened.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Witness 14, stated:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys, they have nothing to do. When they can latch on the something they embellish it because they want something to do…The majority of them do not work. They all they do is sit around and get high all day.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Witness 14 added that within one minute of the shooting, there were 70 or 80 people “saying things that didn’t happen,” and they “started embellishing it when the stepfather showed up.” That would be this stepfather, <a style="color: #0066cc;" href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/25/us/michael-brown-stepfather-video/">Louis Head</a>.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Witness 14 said witnesses were lying when they said the officer “ran up behind him shot him in the back.” Witnesses lied, he said, when they said he had “his hands straight up in the air.” Witnesses lied, he said, when they stated that Brown was shot while down. He continued. “They are set they are looking for a reason to explode, that’s what they, ‘cause they don’t have anything to do…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The original witness who started all of this, Dorian Johnson, helped Brown rob the convenience store. He then went on television and lied about Brown having his hands up and being shot from behind. He then had to change his story multiple times to fit the autopsy results. Still, there he was with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes last week, telling his lies.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And those lies had quickly become the prevailing wisdom. At least 12 witnesses claimed that Brown was shot from behind, which was factually false. At least 16 witnesses said Brown’s hands were up when he was shot, which was factually false. One witness said Wilson used a Taser, then a gun: false. Another said she witnessed the events, but admitted she was blocks away when the events occurred. Still another witness said there were two officers involved in the shooting, and admitted she couldn’t tell what she’d seen and what she’d read about the case. One witness admitted in testimony to changing his story to “coincide with what really happened.” Another witness said that he was friends with Brown, and that Brown was shot while on his knees. When informed that such a story contradicted all physical evidence, the man admitted that he had not seen the shooting and then asked if he could leave because he was “uncomfortable.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This is evil. An entire community conspiring to put an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life based on his race is evil. But then again, so is “social justice” – the notion that individual lives and decisions don’t matter, so long as the narrative of American racism is forwarded. Truth is the first casualty of the social justice mob. And in Ferguson, and now across America, that mob runs wild.</p>
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		<title>A Conservative Actor’s Activism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/a-conservative-actors-activism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-conservative-actors-activism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/a-conservative-actors-activism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:53:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Death of Klinghoffer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Little Flower]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tony Lo Bianco]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242034</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives aren’t the only activists in showbiz.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LoBianco.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242204" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/LoBianco-231x350.jpg" alt="LoBianco" width="180" height="273" /></a>In the wake of the recent anti-capitalist, climate change march in New York City, featuring Hollywood notables Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, it’s refreshing to be reminded that progressives aren’t the only activists in showbiz.</p>
<p>As a former Golden Gloves boxer, the Brooklyn-born, Italian-American actor Tony Lo Bianco is known for tough-guy, blue-collar roles on both sides of the law. Probably best-known as Sal Boca in <em>The French Connection</em> with Gene Hackman, Mr. Lo Bianco is an Obie-winning, Emmy-winning, and Tony-nominated actor who still performs onstage, currently in <em>The Little Flower</em> as legendary New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia. He has starred in such films as <em>City Heat</em> with Clint Eastwood, <em>Nixon</em> with Anthony Hopkins, <em>F.I.S.T.</em> with Sylvester Stallone, and more recently, 2011’s <em>Kill the Irishman</em> alongside Vincent D’Onfrio and Val Kilmer. Some of his many television credits include <em>The Rocky Marciano Story</em>, the miniseries <em>Marco Polo</em>, <em>Jesus of Nazareth</em>, <em>Law &amp; Order</em>, <em>Murder She Wrote</em>, <em>The Twilight Zone</em>, and <em>Get Smart</em>.</p>
<p>More importantly, his many humanitarian efforts have earned multiple awards including Man of the Year for Outstanding Contributions to the Italian-American Community from the Police Society of New Jersey; Man of the Year from the New Jersey State Senate; a Golden Lion Award; the Humanitarian Award of the Boys’ Town of Italy, and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.</p>
<p>Mr. Lo Bianco recently took time to talk a bit with FrontPage Mag about his activism:</p>
<p><strong>Mark Tapson</strong>: <em>Tony, it’s an honor to have you on FrontPage. Let’s start by asking about your participation in the protest last week against the opera </em>The Death of Klinghoffer<em>. What was your message about it and why did you feel strongly enough about it to speak out?</em></p>
<p><strong>Tony Lo Bianco:</strong> With our country facing the biggest terrorist threat, it is not the time to be looking to justify the killing of a helpless, innocent man because he was a Jew. The decision to put this opera on is not only in the worst of taste, it is insensitive and irresponsible and lacks the understanding of who our enemy is.</p>
<p>Freedom to express your opinion is your right, but remember your enemy can hear you. It is your obligation as an American to make sure your country is safe. We are all warriors in this war. Israel and the Jewish people are our allies.</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>Have you always been conservative? What’s it been like for you as a conservative during your many years in the acting game</em><em>?</em></p>
<p><strong>TLB:</strong> Following the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the laws of the land, caring about the human race, understanding history and learning the results of it, respecting your fellow man, trusting the American people to know how to spend their own money that they have earned, working hard to fulfill your dream, protecting your family, your friends and your country and to be allowed to practice whatever religion you choose and pledge allegiance to the United States of America under God. If what I just said labels me as a Conservative, then come and join the party.</p>
<p>I do not like labels. I think logic, common sense, facts and history make up my party. Putting labels on someone makes it easy to be a target to the less informed. If you see what has worked in the past, why not follow that example?</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>You and I both know that there are more conservatives in left-leaning Hollywood than many people are aware of. Are you optimistic or not about Hollywood shifting toward more of a balance in the near future, about seeing more films and TV shows that reflect conservative values and sensibilities?</em></p>
<p><strong>TLB:</strong> The more despair and proof becomes evident to the people, the hope is that the light will shine and they will be able to see. Yes, there are more people not only in Hollywood, but elsewhere, that are seeing what is happening to our country, and know for sure that we are going in the wrong direction. Let us hope that results in their voting in this next election. And yes, there is a strong feeling in Hollywood of enlightenment.</p>
<p><strong>MT</strong>: <em>These days Hollywood activists seem to focus on big progressive issues like climate change or Wall Street, but you’ve done a great deal of award-winning humanitarian work for </em>actual people<em>, like veterans and law enforcement and kids. Why are those causes meaningful for you? </em></p>
<p><strong>TLB</strong>: I guess I&#8217;m a realist. Maybe being born in Brooklyn makes me so. I&#8217;m used to seeing things from the ground up and in dealing strongly with human issues. Our veterans deserve everything we can possibly do for them, given what they have done for us. And we must help our children, for they are our future. They must be cared for physically and mentally. They must be taught the history of our country and how to restore that history for their own future.</p>
<p><strong>MT:</strong> <em>You’ve done a lot of work in your career portraying former New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, including, most recently, your one-man show </em>The Little Flower<em>. Tell us a bit about that show and why you think New York, and even America, needs him today.</em></p>
<p><strong>TLB:</strong> He was a dreamer, a doer, a fighter, and a man who was not afraid to ride the tiger. He was a man who cleaned up this city of gangsters, crooks and especially political corruption. He was an honest man who thought of others, gave of himself and was a friend of the people. Fiorello&#8217;s accomplishments in his twelve years as mayor of New York City were tremendous. What drives me to bring him to life is his vision that parallels everything that is going on in this country now. If we would only listen to history, we would be able to minimize our mistakes.</p>
<p>I have been able to do this show not only in America but in Russia where the American Ambassador said to me after a performance, “You have done more for our country in two hours than I have done in two years.” My goal is to perform <em>The Little Flower</em> in as many colleges as I can. It is extremely important to get to the young minds <em>now</em>.</p>
<p><strong>[For more information about Tony Lo Bianco and <em>The Little Flower</em>, please go to <a href="http://tonylobianco.com">tonylobianco.com</a>.]</strong></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></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>PUMP to Kick Oil Addiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/edwin-black/pump-to-kick-oil-addiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pump-to-kick-oil-addiction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/edwin-black/pump-to-kick-oil-addiction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2014 04:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edwin Black]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[addiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fuel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OIL]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pump]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240960</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new Hollywood movie empowers the quest to get us off oil. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/vz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240964" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/vz-328x350.jpg" alt="vz" width="246" height="263" /></a>ISIS has trebled its forces within recent months and in large measure finances its expansion with $10 million to $20 million per week in illicit oil sales from as many as 70 captured oil wells.</p>
<p>Iran now has multiplied its centrifuges to almost 20,000, enabling it to convert its 5 percent and 20 percent enriched uranium to 90 percent weapons-grade HEU within a 7-week breakout period. With sanctions lifted, Tehran’s monthly oil revenues have soared to almost 3 million barrels per day, generating billions of dollars per month.</p>
<p>Tiny Qatar, with only about 280,000 citizens, provides Hamas with some $400 million annually. Qatar exports more than 600,000 barrels of oil per day helping to establish an estimated $200 billion petrodollar reserve.</p>
<p>Oil is driving it all —and more.</p>
<p>American petroleum use accounts for about one-quarter of global consumption, depending upon whose numbers you’re refining. Kicking our oil addiction is an old mantra that is preached daily from the sidelines by an army of expert energy analysts and security insiders. A slick, kinetic new Hollywood movie, <a href="http://www.pumpthemovie.com/">PUMP</a>, is breaking out of the wooden oil documentary mold to help power a concerted national effort to get off of oil.</p>
<p>PUMP’s point is easily distilled: if simple fuel choice were implemented, it would quickly dilute the power of petroleum and those who sell it. PUMP combines flashy cinematography and rock music with irrefutable testimony by the likes of former Shell president John Hofmeister, Tesla founder Elon Musk, analyst Annie Korin, and Auto Channel editor Marc Rauch. I also appear in the film with the inside historical story of corporate crimes committed by General Motors and Standard Oil to cripple the electric mass transit system, which proliferated in the first years of the twentieth century, and replace it with oil consuming buses — in other words, how we got here.</p>
<p>As I wrote in my book <em>Internal Combustion </em>and subsequent works, we never needed to be addicted to oil. Never. The electric car was invented in about 1835. Until the run-up to WW I, most of the motor vehicles in America were electric-powered, until Edison’s plans were subverted by the car industry and the manufacturers switched to gas-burning internal combustion vehicles.</p>
<p>The much-vaunted hydrogen fuel cell that uses water as a feedstock is based on technology developed back in 1835. Some years ago, I drove an ordinary showroom Hydrogen-powered Chevrolet Equinox all over Southern California on a single tank of hydrogen. That hydrogen fuel was zapped from simple water, filled at a public Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard that maintained a hydrogen pump on the side. Hydrogen supplies are abundant in the US — it’s the ingredient needed for unleaded gas.</p>
<p>More than 17 million compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles operate worldwide. A petroleum car can be converted to natural gas in a day. But in America, less than 120,000 operate —in large measure because Honda, America’s major NGV car manufacturer, stubbornly refuses to mass market its own vehicle beyond a few thousand per year.</p>
<p>Methanol, ethanol, a basket of other alcohol and alternative fuels — all can power an automobile with virtually equal ability. This is the so-called “Open Fuel Standard” that goes hand-in-hand with the flex-fuel-designed vehicles that more than 17 million Americans drive – yet many don’t know it. A minor adjustment in the software and the fuel system would allow fuel democracy — any alt fuel from anyone willing to provide it.</p>
<p>That is the message in PUMP:  Fuel democracy to protect American democracy. Unlock the car engines the way we want to unlock our cell phones.</p>
<p>Until we have a moment of truth with ourselves, America is destined to not only be addicted to oil, but addicted to all the terrible trappings that come with oil.</p>
<p>PUMP opens September 19 at many theater screens across America, including the AMC 25 in Times Square. You can <a href="http://www.pumpthemovie.com/">locate a PUMP</a> screening anywhere in America. Prepare to get angry. Getting off of oil is easier than we think — if we mobilize national will. There has never been a better or more critical time to energize this than now.</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 Twisted Path of Judeophobia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-twisted-path-of-judeophobia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-twisted-path-of-judeophobia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/the-twisted-path-of-judeophobia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2014 04:52:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ari Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Judeophobia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237968</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What makes the world root for a genocidal terrorist organization? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/article-2698331-1FCB64DE00000578-120_634x419.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237969" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/article-2698331-1FCB64DE00000578-120_634x419-443x350.jpg" alt="article-2698331-1FCB64DE00000578-120_634x419" width="267" height="211" /></a>Europe likes to think of itself as enlightened but Operation Protective Edge and Israel’s counter-offensive against Hamas terrorism has highlighted the extent to which Jew hatred is still ingrained on the continent. To be fair, much of the anti-Semitism we are witnessing there manifests itself among the Muslims who have made Europe their home. But in all honesty, European authorities have allowed the malignancy to <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ari-lieberman/letting-the-anti-semitism-genie-out-of-the-bottle/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">fester and metastasize</span></a> to the point where it is now uncontrollable and threatens other non-Muslim communities. Naturally, Jews, because of their small size are the focus for now but once the Muslim community reaches sufficient numbers, Sikhs, Hindus and yes, even Christians will be next. One need look no further than Gaza, Egypt, Iraq and Syria to witness first-hand the fate of Christians who live in majority Muslim states.</p>
<p>Of course, the irony is difficult to ignore. The Muslims who are currently demonstrating and displaying their blood-curdling hate and vitriol in a free environment would likely be mowed down en masse had they ever dared to protest in the fundamentalist and fascist countries they profess to support. Moreover, many of these Muslim provocateurs despise the very democratic institutions that sustain them. But Judeophobia and xenophobia have no rational basis precisely because they are ideologies rooted in a convoluted mixture of hate, jealousy and ignorance. Detesting the “enlightened” country that provides you with all sorts of <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/welfare-jihad-islamist-calls-taxpayers-slaves-encourages-muslims-to-go-on-welfare/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">entitlements</span></a> and supporting despotic regimes who would deny freedom to all is consistent with the doctrine of anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Then of course, there is the so-called intelligentsia and those among the cultural elite, the actors and actresses who feel compelled to weigh in on the Gaza issue and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict despite their extreme ignorance on the matter. Selina Gomez, a product of the Disney machine whose good sense of judgment compelled her to <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/16/selena-gomez-tattoo_n_5592685.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">tattoo some Arabic gibberish</span></a> on her back, posted on Instagram the message, “It’s About Humanity. Pray for Gaza.’’</p>
<p>Of course Gomez likely has no clue where Gaza is and as <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/07/25/joan-rivers-slams-selena-gomez-for-pray-for-gaza-post/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Joan Rivers</span></a> sardonically pointed out, probably doesn’t even know how to spell “Palestinian.” Gomez quickly realized the minefield she walked into and backtracked some with a subsequent post stating, “I am not picking any sides. I am praying for peace and humanity for all.’’</p>
<p>Sure Selena, don’t pick sides after all, a genocidal organization like Hamas whose charter calls for the murder of every Jew on the planet is morally equal to the Mideast’s only liberal democracy. A democracy that has dispatched its specialized rescue and medical teams to Haiti, Japan, Turkey and countless other places to provide humanitarian assistance while Hamas was busy digging tunnels for <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-25/in-this-gaza-war-the-truth-is-buried"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ghoulish purposes</span></a> with cement earmarked for building schools.</p>
<p>Our attachment to celebrity endorsements is inexplicable and this is especially true when those very celebrities profess ignorance on the subject they’re talking about. Consider the Spanish acting duo Javier Bardem and his wife Penelope Cruz. Both <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/bardem-cruz-walk-back-israel-criticism/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">penned a letter</span></a> accusing Israel of genocide likely because it’s fashionable to do so these days. Both then backtracked on their criticism with Bardem claiming that he has “great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses.”</p>
<p>Cruz went on to acknowledge that she was not an “expert” on the subject and only intended on signing the letter in the hope that there would “be peace in both Israel and Gaza.” Again we are faced with an almost laughable situation where an actor who professes ignorance after the fact makes outrageous and absurd proclamations about Israel’s war against a Nazi-like, genocidal organization. What is even more ironic is that Cruz, whose ancestors were responsible for <a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/expulsion.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">ethnically cleansing</span></a> Spain of its indigenous Jewish population, is now attacking Jews for defending themselves against an organization that wishes to ethnically cleanse Israel of its Jewish inhabitants.</p>
<p>It is also ironic that these actors, these self-professed guardians of morality, never once expressed revulsion over the fact that Hamas has fired over 3,000 rockets at Israeli cities with the intent of inflicting maximum civilian casualties. They have yet to express revulsion over the <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183750"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Hamas practice</span></a> of using <a href="http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/08/04/captured-hamas-combat-manual-explains-benefits-human-shields/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">human shields</span></a> and have yet to express any condemnation of Hamas for <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/rockets-found-in-unrwa-school-for-third-time/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">storing rockets</span></a> in UN schools and for <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/israel-revolt/italian-reporter-confirms-deaths-al-shati-result-hamas-misfire-not-israeli-missile"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Hamas rocket misfires</span></a> that have caused untold Palestinian civilian casualties.</p>
<p>But anti-Semitism in any form never followed a rational track. By its very nature it is perverse and convoluted, and hypocrisy follows it like a malevolent shadow. That is how raging anti-Semites like <a href="http://observer.com/2013/12/the-anti-semitic-stench-of-pink-floyd/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Roger Waters</span></a> and his idiot minions can ceaselessly malign the Mideast’s only liberal democracy while ignoring and whitewashing abhorrent and ongoing human rights abuses in the medieval Muslim world.</p>
<p>To be sure, there are indeed many celebrities who despite current trends among the cultural elite have had the fortitude to speak out for what’s right. Scarlett Johansson, Simon Cowell, Mayim Bialik, Joan Rivers, Bill Maher, Vanessa Williams, Jon Voight and Howard Stern have in one way or another expressed strong support for Israel. To them I say; the people of Israel and indeed all peoples of the free world, who cherish liberty and abhor servitude, salute you. On the other hand, those like Cruz and Bardem who sit and criticize are nothing but mindless, useful idiots who are helping to sustain echoes of Europe’s dark past and the ignominious flame of anti-Semitism.</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>Jon Voight Rips Into Anti-Israel Celebs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/jon-voight-rips-into-anti-israel-celebs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jon-voight-rips-into-anti-israel-celebs</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:47:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cruz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jon Voight]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hollywood’s most vocal conservative actor calls out the apologists of Jew-hatred. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jon-Voight.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-237762" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Jon-Voight-232x350.jpg" alt="Steve Granitz" width="232" height="350" /></a>Among the celebrities I <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/the-celebrities-who-get-it-wrong-and-right-about-israel/">wrote about</a> last week who are speaking out for and (mostly) against Israel during the Gaza conflict were Spanish husband-and-wife actors Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. They, in addition to dozens of other Spanish artists, signed <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/penelope-cruz-javier-bardem-denounce-721894">an open letter</a> condemning Israel for its “genocide” of the so-called Palestinians. In response, Jon Voight, Hollywood’s most vocal conservative actor, penned a strong <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jon-voight-pens-letter-ignorant-723007">open letter</a> of his own for <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em>, advising Cruz and Bardem to “hang your heads in shame.”</p>
<p>In a <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/penelope-cruz-clarifies-stance-israel-722367">statement</a> on Wednesday Penelope Cruz tried to walk back her denunciation of Israel. After prefacing her clarification with an acknowledgement that she is “not an expert on the situation,” Ms. Cruz explained that “My only wish and intention in signing that group letter is the hope that there will be peace in both Israel and Gaza.” Well, that’s what we all hope for, but some of us understand that peace is not going to come from the hatemongering terrorists of Hamas, and some of us, like Ms. Cruz and her husband, seem to believe that Israel is the problem.</p>
<p>Bardem released a <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/javier-bardem-clarifies-open-letter-722678">statement</a> as well, in which he tried to clarify his position and complained of the backlash against him and Cruz: “I am now being labeled by some as anti-Semitic, as is my wife — which is the antithesis of who we are as human beings. We detest anti-Semitism as much as we detest the horrible and painful consequences of war.” Bardem went on to try to make a distinction between his criticism of “the Israeli military response” and his “great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses.”</p>
<p>As I wrote last week, that distinction would carry more weight if Bardem and others like him didn’t always direct their condemnation toward the one nation in the Middle East that holds the values which liberals like Bardem and Cruz claim to cherish: human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, equality between Jews and Arabs, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and all the rest.</p>
<p>Instead, in addition to his signature on the open letter, Bardem had also written an op-ed for a Spanishnewspaper, in which he unjustly labeled Israel’s military operation “genocide” and “a war of extermination… where hospitals, ambulances, and children are targets and presumed to be terrorists.” “Right now,” Bardem wrote in the op-ed, “there is NO place for distance or neutrality.” He’s right about that, but unfortunately he chose to throw his support behind the terrorists.</p>
<p>In his more recent statement, Bardem noted that “Too many innocent Palestinian mothers have lost their children to this conflict. Too many innocent Israeli mothers share the same grief… There should not be any political reason that can justify such enormous pain on both sides.” But there <em>is</em> a reason for the enormous pain – the Palestinian leadership’s relentless determination to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map. Any further pain would cease overnight if the terrorism ended and Palestinians demonstrated a willingness to coexist in peace.</p>
<p>Incensed by what Jon Voight calls their “ignorance,” he lashed out at the couple in defense of Israel. “I am more than angry,” his open letter began. “I am heartsick that people like Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem could incite anti-Semitism all over the world and are oblivious to the damage they have caused.”</p>
<p>Voight proceeded to deliver a thumbnail history of the Arab-Israeli hostilities and to remind his readers that the current conflict began after the “travesty” of Hamas kidnapping and murdering three Jewish teenagers. He concluded thusly:</p>
<blockquote><p>After years of trying to make peace, the wars they had to fight, being attacked by their enemies, and still being attacked, and finally after years of running into bomb shelters and having hundreds of civilians killed by suicide bombers, civilians being killed in their sleep, stabbed to pieces, finding enough is enough and finally retaliating, instead of my peers sticking up for the only democratic country in that region, they go and take out poison letters against them.</p></blockquote>
<p>Voight didn’t let his acting colleagues get away with claiming no ill will against the Jewish people, asking</p>
<blockquote><p>all my peers who signed that poison letter against Israel to examine their motives. Can you take back the fire of anti-Semitism that is raging all over the world now?&#8230; You had a great responsibility to use your celebrity for good. Instead, you have defamed the only democratic country of goodwill in the Middle East: Israel.</p></blockquote>
<p>The actor concluded by admonishing Bardem, Cruz, and the rest to “hang your heads in shame. You should all come forth with deep regrets for what you did, and ask forgiveness from the suffering people in Israel.”</p>
<p>As is typical of artists, Bardem and Cruz believe that violence is always wrong, that fighting back against terrorism only breeds more violence, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a “cycle of violence” which it is incumbent upon Israel to end, that 1400 years of religious enmity can somehow be erased by a simple plea for coexistence, and that Israel is an oppressive occupier and the Palestinians are helpless victims. “My signature [on the open letter] was solely meant as a plea for peace,” Bardem tried to explain. But Israel has <em>tried</em> such pleas for decades. The time for pleading for peace with an enemy who will not rest until you and all your kind are violently eradicated is <em>over</em>. Now the time has come for the extermination of the Jew-hating Palestinian leadership. That way lies peace.</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 Celebrities Who Get it Wrong – and Right – About Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/the-celebrities-who-get-it-wrong-and-right-about-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-celebrities-who-get-it-wrong-and-right-about-israel</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 04:34:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Penelope Cruz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rosanne Barr]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237532</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Their opinions carry significant weight among their untold numbers of fans ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Penelope-Cruz.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-237618" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Penelope-Cruz-233x350.jpg" alt="Penelope-Cruz" width="233" height="350" /></a>Once Israel’s military operation got underway in Gaza, celebrity actors, who desperately want to be taken seriously, predictably took to social media to express their very special concern. An <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-us-european-stars-are-722225">article</a> in <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em> (<em>THR</em>) examined the differences between American and European celebrities’ positions on the conflict, and concluded, unsurprisingly, that European celebs are much harsher and more vocal about their opposition to Israel.</p>
<p>As partial evidence, the article noted that husband-and-wife stars Javier Bardem (in <em>No Country for Old Men</em>, most famously) and Penelope Cruz (<em>The Counselor</em>, most recently) joined more than 100 other Spanish actors and directors to issue a statement urging the European Union to formally condemn Israel for waging “genocide” in Gaza. <em>THR</em> reports that the letter essentially lays the blame for the entire conflict on Israel, because it “humiliates, detains, and tramples on the rights of the Palestinian population in all of the West Bank every day, also causing many deaths.”</p>
<p>In response to that statement, European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor criticized its “gratuitous use of the term ‘genocide’” and pointedly suggested that</p>
<blockquote><p>Rather than outrageously attacking a fellow democracy for defending itself against radical terrorists, the time of Spanish public figures would be better put to use fighting against the rapidly growing hatred of Jews in their country, which according to recent surveys is one of the highest in Europe.</p></blockquote>
<p>Bravo. He concluded that the statement “demonstrates grave ignorance or extreme malice.” I suspect it’s a combination of the two. When Bardem, for example, writes, “This is a war of occupation and extermination against a whole people without means, confined to a miniscule territory without water and where hospitals, ambulances, and children are targeted and presumed to be terrorists,” there is so much grave ignorance there that one must assume extreme malice as well.</p>
<p>After taking some heat for their position, Penelope Cruz followed up with a <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/penelope-cruz-clarifies-stance-israel-722367">statement</a> trying to walk it back a bit: “I’m not an expert on the situation and I’m aware of the complexity of it.” Well, kudos to her for that admission – it has to be the first time in Hollywood history that a celebrity has acknowledged his or her own ignorance about an issue. She went on to plead that</p>
<blockquote><p>My only wish and intention in signing that group letter is the hope that there will be peace in both Israel and Gaza. I am hopeful all parties can agree to a cease fire and there are no more innocent victims on either side of the border. I wish for unity, and peace&#8230; I believe in a civilization that can be capable of bringing the courage to have a world where humans can live side by side.</p></blockquote>
<p>That sounds nice, but if Mrs. Bardem really wishes for unity and peace, if she truly yearns for no more innocent victims on either side, if she really believes in a civilization capable of rising above this conflict, then her only logical choice is to support the civilized Israel unequivocally, because it is there and nowhere else in the Middle East that her dream of Jews and Arabs living and working side by side as equals exists.</p>
<p>They aren’t the only European celebrities to jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon. In May, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Nick Mason<strong> </strong>sent an open letter to the Rolling Stones urging them not to perform in Israel:</p>
<blockquote><p>Playing Israel now is the moral equivalent of playing Sun City at the height of South African apartheid; regardless of your intentions, crossing the picket line provides propaganda that the Israeli government will use in its attempts to whitewash the policies of its unjust and racist regime.</p></blockquote>
<p>To their enormous credit, Jagger and the Stones ignored the boycott letter and went forward with their concert in Tel Aviv.</p>
<p>American celebs who have spoken out against Israel have been, as <em>THR</em> put it, “careful to note that their sympathy for the civilians should not be equated with anti-Jewish sentiment.” Thus former actress Mia Farrow tweeted: “We can passionately protest Israel’s assault upon Gaza without descending, even remotely, into the hideousness of anti-Semitism.” That would carry more weight if, among her dozens of tweets about the Gaza hostilities, Farrow ever tweeted about Hamas’ assaults on Israel. Later, she added: “To be clear I do not support Hamas. I care about children everywhere.”</p>
<p>If she and other celebrities care about children everywhere, why do they consistently reserve their condemnation for Israel and not tweet their outrage about Arab terrorists <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CB8QFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.frontpagemag.com%2F2011%2Fmark-tapson%2Fsuffer-the-little-children%2F&amp;ei=dNfZU8jHNMPcoAT8koDIBg&amp;usg=AFQjCNEZq46qsBkHd7wtkgitHoEIqNbPdw&amp;sig2=gdp0VOLQWDPeR1tICNCmvw&amp;bvm=bv.72185853,d.cGU">targeting</a> Israeli children, the deaths of Syrian children, or the hundreds of poor Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram (not to mention the boys slaughtered by those savages) who merited only some temporary “<a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=1&amp;cad=rja&amp;uact=8&amp;ved=0CB0QFjAA&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Facculturated.com%2Fangelina-jolie-not-just-another-hashtag-activist%2F&amp;ei=Id3ZU_CfE6r-igKn3YD4Ag&amp;usg=AFQjCNFKVRrZlRL4GTm0wPd9NBlIIQoNlA&amp;sig2=tpX26p-_-Kge1By_xJX4kQ&amp;bvm=bv.72185853,d.cGE">hashtag diplomacy</a>” and photos of posers with scribbled “Bring Back Our Girls” signs shared on Instagram?</p>
<p><em>Daily Show</em> host Jon Stewart took a similar tack: “Just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas.” Actually it is, if you’re not also condemning Hamas for brainwashing their children to become Jew-killers, for creating a culture of martyrdom, for purposefully incurring the deaths of their own civilians in order to smear Israel in the media war. If you’re not openly condemning them for that, if you’re condemning only Israel, then whatever your intentions, you are supporting Hamas.</p>
<p>Act0r Mark Ruffalo clung to the same excuse, tweeting a link to an article entitled, “Empathizing w/Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel. It makes me human.” If you are an empathetic human, then your only rational choice is to support the Israelis, who love life, unlike the death cultists of Hamas.</p>
<p>It’s easy to dismiss celebrities who decide to weigh in on current events as uninformed and irrelevant, but unfortunately their opinions carry significant weight among their untold numbers of fans – not because those opinions are necessarily insightful or even correct, but because celebrities are <em>cool</em>, and fans don’t want to be <em>un</em>cool by having a different opinion.</p>
<p>And what about the celebs who <em>do</em> support Israel? Rosanne Barr<strong>,</strong> of all people, tweeted some stone cold truth about Hamas to her 250,000 followers: “They say they won’t stp fighting Israel til evry Jew there is dead. They say it everyday, repeatedly. If ur ignoring/excusing that-yr sick.” Bravo, Rosanne.</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>God&#8217;s Not Dead Beats Noah</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/gods-not-dead-beats-noah/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gods-not-dead-beats-noah</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/gods-not-dead-beats-noah/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 20 Apr 2014 13:59:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[box office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Noah appears to have completely fallen out of the top 10.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222226" alt="noah-lead" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>The success of Heaven is for Real and God&#8217;s Not Dead shows that if Hollywood wants to appeal to religious audiences, it should make religious movies, instead of hijacking a religious story for a fanatical environmentalist version of Clash of the Titans complete with an attempted abortion.</p>
<p>The numbers are still preliminary, but Noah appears to have completely fallen out of the top 10. God&#8217;s Not Dead appears to have taken its place.</p>
<p>Noah will not make $100 million domestically. Its budget is $125 million, not counting another $50 &#8211; 75 million for promotion. Internationally though it took in over $160 million which is one reason why Hollywood keeps making so many bad movies these days. They play well abroad.</p>
<p>American audiences may have rejected Noah, but Brazilian, Mexican, Russian and South Korean audiences flocked to see it.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>&#8216;Noah&#8217; Now Closely Tied With &#8216;God&#8217;s Not Dead&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/noah-now-closely-tied-with-gods-not-dead/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=noah-now-closely-tied-with-gods-not-dead</link>
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		<pubDate>Sun, 13 Apr 2014 22:20:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[box office]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Noah had a budget of $125 million. God's Not Dead has a budget of $2 million.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222226" alt="noah-lead" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Noah, the fanatical environmentalist anti-religious move, has crashed to 6th place, where it&#8217;s closely tied with God&#8217;s Not Dead, a Christian film.</p>
<p>Noah had a budget of $125 million and is struggling to make that back. God&#8217;s Not Dead has a budget of $2 million and has made it back many times over.</p>
<p>Noah is playing in over 3,282 theaters, while G0d&#8217;s Not Dead is playing in 1,860 theaters. While the final box office figures for the weekend aren&#8217;t in yet, current estimates place Noah in 6th place with $7 million for the weekend and God&#8217;s Not Dead in 7th place with $5.47 million for the weekend.</p>
<p>Per theater estimates are too preliminary to list, but it&#8217;s clear that God&#8217;s Not Dead is doing much better per theater than Noah.</p>
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		<title>Man Who Directed 10 Movies Claims Hollywood &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t Let Black People Tell Stories&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/man-who-directed-10-movies-claims-hollywood-doesnt-let-black-people-tell-stories/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=man-who-directed-10-movies-claims-hollywood-doesnt-let-black-people-tell-stories</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2014 23:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[And the proof of that is 12 Years a Slave ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/john-singleton.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-222070" alt="Director John Singleton speaks at the American Cinematheque tribute honoring Samuel L. Jackson in Beverly HIlls" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/john-singleton.jpg" width="420" height="328" /></a></p>
<p>Hollywood isn&#8217;t letting black people tell stories. And the proof of that is 12 Years a Slave with a black writer and a black director. Or the career of John Singleton, who has directed ten movies, but complains that <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/john-singleton-says-studios-aint-690486">Hollywood doesn&#8217;t let black people tell stories</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>John Singleton criticized the major studios March 19 for refusing to let African-Americans direct black-themed films. &#8220;They ain&#8217;t letting the black people tell the stories,&#8221; the Oscar-nominated director-writer told students at Loyola Marymount University.</p>
<p>&#8220;[Studio executives say] &#8216;We&#8217;re going to take your stories but, you know what? You&#8217;re going to go starve over here and we&#8217;re not going to let you get a job.&#8217; The so-called liberals that are in Hollywood now are not as good as their parents or ancestors. They feel that they&#8217;re not racist. They grew up with hip-hop, so [they] can&#8217;t be racist. ‘I like Jay Z, but that don&#8217;t mean I got to give you a job.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
<p>He added: &#8220;They want black people [to be] what they want them to be. And nobody is man enough to go and say that. They want black people to be who they want them to be, as opposed to what they are.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>So if they&#8217;re not giving Singleton, specifically, a job, they&#8217;re not letting all black people tell stories?</p>
<p>Singleton got his debut with Boyz n the Hood, a movie that he wrote and directed. He went on to do movies like Poetic Justice and Higher Learning that few people saw or cared about. He still got to write and direct Shaft, which did pretty well, and Baby Boy, which didn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Before that he did Rosewood, which was Django before its time. Then he did Baby Boy, a politically incorrect depiction of black male perpetual childhood. He also produced Craig Brewer&#8217;s toxic racial fetishization in Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan.</p>
<p>Aside from that he directed one of the Fast and Furious movies and a few other forgettable pictures while working on his Tupac biopic.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not exactly starving in a corner.</p>
<p>&#8220;The clear awards frontrunner 12 Years a Slave never could have been made by a major Hollywood film studio.,&#8221; Singleton writes in his editorial.</p>
<p>12 Years a Slave was backed by Brad Pitt&#8217;s Plan B and financed by Arnon Milchan&#8217;s New Regency. Milchan is a huge Hollywood producer and Regency is closely tied to FOX. Paramount <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/paramount-brad-pitt-company-feuding-651131">was actually angry at not</a> being allowed to finance and distribute the movie.</p>
<p>The obvious problem for Singleton is that his legacy is aging fast and he hasn&#8217;t done anything that anyone cares about in a long while. Hollywood is ageist and Singleton is headed for 50. That&#8217;s his personal career problem, not Hollywood&#8217;s.</p>
<p>Singleton was associated with a style of &#8216;street&#8217; movies that is very much 90s. He&#8217;s still trying to make a Tupac biopic which sums up what&#8217;s wrong with his career. America and Black America have moved on.</p>
<p>The black movies that do well are different. They depict a black middle class or a black family. Directors like Tyler Perry and Steve McQueen have found success in Hollywood by representing a different perspective. Historical fictions like The Help, The Butler or 12 Years a Slave have also done well. Singleton is just out of phase with what black viewers want.</p>
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		<title>Noah is the Most Unpopular Movie in Current Release</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/noah-is-the-most-unpopular-movie-in-current-release/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=noah-is-the-most-unpopular-movie-in-current-release</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/noah-is-the-most-unpopular-movie-in-current-release/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2014 15:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[box office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222225</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Cinemascore's rating for Noah is a C. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-222226" alt="noah-lead" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/noah-lead-350x350.jpg" width="350" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>Noah has topped the box office, but the opening weekend is about marketing dollars. At a production budget of over $125 million and poor audience responses, Paramount had to put some serious money into promotion.</p>
<p>Reportedly that may be something in the $50 &#8211; $75 million range on marketing to get people to see Noah. That&#8217;s  short of its weekend box office total which is likely to be under $50 million.</p>
<p>But while you can get audiences to show up for the opening weekend, you can&#8217;t make them like it.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cinemascore.com/">Cinemascore&#8217;s rating</a> for Noah is a C. That&#8217;s the worst movie they have ranked in current release. Worse than Sabotage, the Schwarzenegger movie which just bombed, which still only pulled in a B.</p>
<p>That means audiences hated Noah more than Sabotage. They hated it more than the Legend of Hercules. They just plain hated it.</p>
<p>At Rotten Tomatoes,<a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/noah_2014/"> the audience score is at 50 percent</a> and falling. The<a href="http://www.metacritic.com/movie/noah/user-reviews"> user score at Metacritic is 5.4</a>.</p>
<p>The critic numbers tend to be much higher only because director Darren Aronofsky is an indie favorite who could film wallpaper for two hours and still get high scores and because the movie&#8217;s anti-human environmental message caters to their prejudices.</p>
<p>Noah was dumped on international audiences in countries like Mexico and Korea early on where it did well enough and if Paramount scrapes some money out of audiences before it gets crushed by the new Captain America movie, it may accept that as the best it can get.</p>
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		<title>Ex-CAIR Official Celebrates Victory Over &#8220;Zionist Hollywood&#8221; for Forcing Cancellation of Alice in Arabia</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/ex-cair-official-celebrates-victory-over-zionist-hollywood-for-forcing-cancellation-of-alice-in-arabia/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ex-cair-official-celebrates-victory-over-zionist-hollywood-for-forcing-cancellation-of-alice-in-arabia</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/ex-cair-official-celebrates-victory-over-zionist-hollywood-for-forcing-cancellation-of-alice-in-arabia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 01:33:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cyrus McGoldrick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dhimmitude]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221633</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[That would be the same "Zionist Hollywood", in which terrorists are never Muslim]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/image-2.jpg"><img class="alignnone  wp-image-221634" alt="image (2)" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/image-2.jpg" width="420" height="236" /></a></p>
<p>Nothing says fighting bigotry&#8230; like bigotry.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/cair-civil-rights-manager-endorses-hamas-terrorism-against-israel/">Hamas supporter Cyrus McGoldrick</a> was the Civil Rights Manager for the CAIR chapter in New York, a front organization for the international hate group and terror group known as the Muslim Brotherhood, which also supported Hamas.</p>
<p>Alice in Arabia, an ABC Family pilot that would have been critical of Saudi Arabia, was swarmed on by CAIR and its media allies, almost right away, even though none of them had actually seen it.</p>
<p>And so ABC Family <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/03/abc-drops-alice-in-arabia-after-complaints-from-hamas-linked-cair">did the politically correct thing </a>and cancelled it.</p>
<p>The Onion&#8217;s AV Club, the only part of it that reads like a parody, but isn&#8217;t, &#8220;Everyone already hates ABC Family&#8217;s Alice In Arabia.&#8221;</p>
<p>By everybody, Sonia Saraiya meant the people on CAIR&#8217;s mailing list.  Sonia declared it &#8220;racist&#8221; without actually having seen the pilot either. But actually watching shows before you denounce them is passe.</p>
<p>The premise of Alice in Arabia of Saudi sexism and a set of events that happens in real life all the time was less important than claiming that Islam is a race.</p>
<p>Dean Obeidallah declared that Hollywood has a &#8220;Muslim problem.&#8221; It does. A &#8220;Pandering to Muslims&#8221; problem. No other group would be able to get a TV show canceled sight unseen.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/03/ex-official-of-hamas-linked-cair-hails-victory-over-zionist-hollywood">Cyrus McGoldrick however said what Dean and</a> his ilk don&#8217;t dare write in the pages of the Daily Beast.</p>
<blockquote><p>Getting ‪#‎AliceInArabia‬ cancelled was a good move – I’m glad it got done so quickly, too. These skirmishes with Zionist Hollywood should be easy and decisive, and I’m so pleasantly surprised that this was. S/o to ADC, CAIR, and the many individuals who stormed the internet and handled this.</p></blockquote>
<p>That would be the same &#8220;Zionist Hollywood&#8221;, i<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hollywoods-muslim-lies/">n which terrorists are hardly ever Arab Muslims</a>, and which bends over backward to appease hatemongers like McGoldrick and the hateful ideology that he and his terrorist buddies support.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>The Entertainment President</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-entertainment-president/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-entertainment-president</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/the-entertainment-president/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2014 04:45:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[funny or die]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[interview]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[two ferns]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Zach Galifianakis]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220948</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama is keeping his presidency just above water. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/funny-or-die-01_large_large.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-220949" alt="funny-or-die-01_large_large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/funny-or-die-01_large_large.jpg" width="266" height="221" /></a>For years, conservatives have puzzled over President Barack Obama&#8217;s continued personal popularity in the face of his dramatically uninspiring performance as commander-in-chief. Obama seems to inspire a bizarre personal loyalty among his advocates, particularly among young people who should by all rights be concerned with their fading futures and collapsing prospects. Why do his numbers remain so stubbornly mediocre?</p>
<p>The answer came Tuesday in the form of a ridiculous video cut by Obama with the help of &#8220;The Hangover&#8221; star Zach Galifianakis and the online outlet Funny or Die. Funny or Die is in the viral video business; it often features celebrities in bizarre skits designed to draw clicks. But Funny or Die also has a political agenda: In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that Funny or Die honcho Mike Farah had become an integral part of &#8220;the campaign to ensure the success of President Obama&#8217;s healthcare law.&#8221; Obama enlisted Farah in July 2013 during a meeting with Hollywood bigwigs in which Obama recruited his arts team to rally to the Obamacare cause.</p>
<p>The video, the latest in an ongoing series of episodes of a faux talk show titled &#8220;Between Two Ferns,&#8221; has Galifianakis interviewing Obama about Obamacare. The portly actor, best known for playing a moron in movies, asks Obama questions about whether he will miss winning at basketball when he is no longer president. Obama, on script, answers by getting testy with Galifianakis before pushing Obamacare with his usual lack of verve: &#8220;Healthcare.gov works great now. And millions of Americans have already gotten health care plans. And what we want is for people to know that you can get affordable health care.&#8221;</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t Obama&#8217;s only major media appearance this week.</p>
<p>Obama also introduced the Fox reboot of the miniseries &#8220;Cosmos,&#8221; explaining to Americans that hope and change could still be attained through science: &#8220;America has always been a nation of fearless explorers who dream big and reach farther than others might imagine.&#8221; Which sounds better than &#8220;America has always been a nation of close-minded bigots requiring the intervention of government to force them into tolerance and diversity.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama&#8217;s pop-cultural focus may seem demeaning to the office of the presidency. It may be mockable. But it is also tremendously effective. In the first 24 hours alone, the &#8220;Between Two Ferns&#8221; segment received almost 8 million views; approximately 20,000 people visited Healthcare.gov directly from the watching the segment. That&#8217;s not bad for a pure propaganda effo</span>Obama also introduced the Fox reboot of the miniseries &#8220;Cosmos,&#8221; explaining to Americans that hope and change could still be attained through science: &#8220;America has always been a nation of fearless explorers who dream big and reach farther than others might imagine.&#8221; Which sounds better than &#8220;America has always been a nation of close-minded bigots requiring the intervention of government to force them into tolerance and diversity.&#8221;</p>
<p>Conservatives must understand that culture is the lifeblood of politics. Most Republicans have no idea what Funny or Die is, let alone why people watch it. BuzzFeed is a dirty word to most conservatives, even though their sons and daughters read it regularly for its cat lists — and some of them stay for the leftist politics. Obama gets culture, or at least does a serviceable job of pretending he does. His shock troops in the entertainment industry are willing to do the rest on behalf of the Obama agenda.</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>Leftists Love Global Warming Because They Hate the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/leftists-love-global-warming-because-they-hate-the-middle-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:25:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Noah]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why Hollywood turned the story of Noah into a warning against carbon sin. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219393" alt="flooded_ny" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/flooded_ny-432x350.jpg" width="302" height="245" /></a>This week, Secretary of State John Kerry announced to a group of Indonesian students that global warming was &#8220;perhaps the world&#8217;s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Because of climate change, it&#8217;s no secret that today Indonesia is &#8230; one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth. It&#8217;s not an exaggeration to say that the entire way of life that you live and love is at risk.&#8221;</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Hollywood prepared to drop a new blockbuster based on the biblical story of Noah. The film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, centers on the story of the biblical character who built an ark after God warned him that humanity would be destroyed thanks to its sexual immorality and violent transgressions. The Hollywood version of the story, however, has God punishing humanity not for actual sin, but for overpopulation and global warming &#8212; an odd set of sins, given God&#8217;s express commandments in Genesis 1:28 to &#8220;be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.&#8221;</p>
<p>This weird perspective on sin &#8212; the notion that true sin is not sin, but that consumerism is &#8212; is actually nothing new. In the 1920s, the left warned of empty consumerism with the fire and brimstone of Jonathan Edwards; Sinclair Lewis famously labeled the American middle class &#8220;Babbitts&#8221; &#8212; characters who cared too much about buying things.</p>
<p>In his novel of the same name, Lewis sneered of his bourgeois antihero, &#8220;He had enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices. They were his symbols of truth and beauty.&#8221; Lewis wrote, through the voice of his radical character Doane, that consumerism has created &#8220;standardization of thought, and of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows it that they&#8217;re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent.&#8221;</p>
<p>Lewis, of course, was a socialist. So were anti-consumerism compatriots like H.G. Wells, H.L. Mencken and Herbert Croly. And their brand of leftism was destined to infuse the entire American left over the course of the 20th century. As Fred Siegel writes in his new book, &#8220;The Revolt Against The Masses,&#8221; this general feeling pervaded the left during the 1950s, even as more Americans were attending symphony concerts than ballgames, with 50,000 Americans per year buying paperback version of classics. That&#8217;s because if the left were to recognize the great power of consumerism in bettering lives and enriching culture, the left would have to become the right.</p>
<p>Of course, consumerism is not an unalloyed virtue. Consumerism can be utilized for hedonism. But it can also be utilized to make lives better, offering more opportunity for spiritual development. It&#8217;s precisely this latter combination that the left fears, because if consumerism and virtue are allied, there is no place left for the Marxist critique of capitalism &#8212; namely that capitalism makes people less compassionate, more selfish, and ethically meager. And so consumerism must be severed from virtue (very few leftists critique Americans&#8217; propensity for spending cash on Lady Gaga concerts) so that it can be castigated as sin more broadly.</p>
<p>In a world in which consumerism is the greatest of all sins, America is the greatest of all sinners. Which, of course, is the point of the anti-consumerist critique from the left: to target America. Global warming represents the latest apocalyptic consequence threatened by the leftist gods for the great iniquity of buying things, developing products, and competing in the global marketplace. And America must be called to heel by the great preachers in Washington, D.C., and Hollywood.</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>The Politics of Hate and Envy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-politics-of-hate-and-envy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-politics-of-hate-and-envy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-politics-of-hate-and-envy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:00:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Athletes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[CEO]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HATE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[salary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[workers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217444</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the left demonizes CEOs but not much richer professional athletes and actors. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/WalmartProtest.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217452" alt="WalmartProtest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/WalmartProtest-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation&#8217;s chief executive officer&#8217;s earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in &#8220;Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries&#8221; (http://tinyurl.com/c2b24rv). Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf&#8217;s annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf&#8217;s salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke&#8217;s $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt&#8217;s $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let&#8217;s look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.</p>
<p>Forbes lists the &#8220;Highest-Paid Football Players 2013&#8243; (http://tinyurl.com/kw4dv3d). Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees&#8217; salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.</p>
<p>But the &#8220;unfair&#8221; salaries of sports players pale in comparison with movie stars. According to Forbes&#8217; listing of the highest-paid actors (http://tinyurl.com/k3p8djs), Robert Downey Jr. earned $75 million from June 2012 to June 2013. Channing Tatum: $60 million. Hugh Jackman: $55 million. Let&#8217;s suppose the cameraman working with Downey earned $60,000. It would take the salaries of 1,250 of them to equal his salary. Oprah Winfrey&#8217;s 2012 salary came to $165 million, thousands of times what the earnings of people who work for her are.</p>
<p>Though sports and Hollywood personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you&#8217;ll never find leftists and progressives picketing and criticizing them.</p>
<p>Why? The strategy for want-to-be tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That&#8217;s the typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate. In 18th-century France, it was Maximilien Robespierre&#8217;s promoting hatred of the aristocracy that led to his acquiring dictatorial power. In the 20th century, the communists gained power by promoting public hatred of the czars and capitalists. In Germany, Adolf Hitler gained power by promoting hatred of Jews and Bolsheviks.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m not equating America&#8217;s progressives and liberals with Robespierre, Josef Stalin and Hitler. I am saying that promoting jealousy, fear and hate is an effective strategy for leftist politicians and their followers to control and micromanage businesses. It&#8217;s not about the amount of money top executives earn. If it were, politicians and leftists would be promoting jealousy, fear and hatred toward multi-multimillionaire Hollywood actors, celebrities and sports stars. But there is no way that politicians could usurp the roles of Drew Brees, Kobe Bryant, Robert Downey Jr. and Oprah Winfrey. That means celebrities can make any amount of money they want and it matters not one iota politically. Do you think President Barack Obama would stoke the fires of hate and envy by remarking that he thinks that &#8220;at a certain point, you&#8217;ve made enough money&#8221; — as he did in a 2010 Quincy, Ill., speech — in regard to the salaries of Winfrey, Brees and Hollywood celebrities?</p>
<p>Why the high salaries? Ask yourself: If a corporate board of directors could hire a person for $45,000 who could do what a CEO could do, why would they pay CEOs millions? If an NFL team owner could hire a person with the athletic ability and decision-making capacity of Drew Brees for $100,000, why would he pay Brees $40 million? If some other actor could have created as many box-office receipts, why would movie producers have paid Downey $75 million?</p>
<p>There&#8217;s another important issue. If one company has an effective CEO, it is not the only company that would like to have him on the payroll. In order to keep him, the company must pay him enough so that he can&#8217;t be lured elsewhere.</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>Che Guevara SI!—Tea Party NO!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/che-guevara-si-tea-party-no/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=che-guevara-si-tea-party-no</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/che-guevara-si-tea-party-no/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:10:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Humberto Fontova]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Che]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[San Francisco]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Singer-actress Maria Conchita Alonso]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217100</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Singer-actress Maria Conchita Alonso commits the ultimate thought crime.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/che.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217109" alt="che" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/che.png" width="302" height="234" /></a><i>“Mexicans are a rabble of illiterate Indians.”</i> <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">(Ernesto “Che” Guevara, May 1956)</a></p>
<p>Singer-actress Maria Conchita Alonso, a multiple-Grammy nominee, was scheduled to star in a Spanish-language production of the Vagina Monologues next month in San Francisco’s Brava Theater. Then she starred in a video ad for California Assemblyman and gubernatorial hopeful Tim Donnelly, a Tea-Party Republican who calls for enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.</p>
<p>Only the torches and pitchforks were missing from the outraged mobs of San Francisco’s “Latinos” who (verbally) set upon Ms. Alonso during a subsequent radio show. The woman could hardly get a word in edgewise. Callers insulted her relentlessly.  “I’ve been called all these horrible names, like you can’t believe,” Alonso told Megyn Kelly. “They were saying they were going to <em>burn down</em> the theater, they were going to boycott (the show.)”</p>
<p>The hipster area’s “Latino” politico-cultural establishment joined the chorus, if slightly more decorously.</p>
<p>&#8220;We don&#8217;t act like that,” snapped Jim Salinas, former president of the San Francisco Latino Democratic Club. “First of all, that is not a typical Latina.&#8221;</p>
<p>“We really can’t have her in the (Brava theater production of The Vagina Monologues) show, unfortunately,” said the show’s producer Eliana Lopez, who also happens to be wife of San Francisco Sheriff Mirkarimi. “Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the (heavily Hispanic) Mission. Doing what she is doing is against what we believe.”<b> </b></p>
<p>So Alonso “resigned” from the show. Naturally Alonso and Donnelly were denounced as “racists.” Naturally no amount of proof otherwise stemmed the torrent of insults.  &#8220;If I am a racist, I&#8217;m not a very good one,&#8221; Donnelly clarified on <i>CNN en Español</i>. &#8220;I must have gone to the wrong school where you learn how to be a racist because I married a woman with dark skin. As a matter of fact, her skin&#8217;s darker than Maria Cochiti’s.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Tim is married to a Filipina,” Alonso explained. “His daughter-in-law is Mexican. He is not a racist and neither am I, as we are now being accused.&#8221; “He (Donnelly) is anti-undocumented immigrant,” she explained to <i>Fox News Latino.</i> “It’s different than being anti-immigrant, which he is not. We have a right to protect our borders. Tim knows there are many good Latinos out there. He respects them because they don’t beg, they go out looking for work.”</p>
<p>No liberal or “Latino leader” bothered to listen. In sum, the “racist” Alonso will not appear in Brava’s Vagina Monologues.</p>
<p>Ms. Alonso was born in Cuba, raised in Venezuela and became a U.S. citizen in 2005. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara destroyed her native country and Hugo Chavez destroyed her first adopted country.  In brief: “Been there-<i>seen </i>that,” is her horrified reaction to socialism. &#8220;I like the way he (Donnelly) wants the government to stay away from our lives,&#8221; she told Megyn Kelly. &#8220;You know, it&#8217;s our lives, it&#8217;s our decisions to do with our lives whatever we want. We should not depend on government … when you have to depend on a government, that&#8217;s what they want, to control you. And that&#8217;s communism.&#8221;</p>
<p>Alas, given her ethnic heritage and profession Ms. Alonso is also branded as a “Hollywood Latina.” This media branding, as everyone knows, implies a very rigid code of conduct, thought and speech. And endorsing a Tea Party political candidate grotesquely violates all the implied vows of her profession.</p>
<p>“What was she thinking?” many might ask. The video-ad for Donnelly was meant as “outreach” to California “Latinos” but backfired hideously.</p>
<p>Oh, I know, I know. We keep hearing and reading that “in polls” and among “hispanics” or “Latinos” the “illegal immigration issue” is almost trivial.  But in real life it doesn’t seem to work that way. The ugliest threats and insults against Ms. Alonso all referred to her immigration stance, especially her use of the term “illegal” for those who are in the U.S. illegally. Ms. Alonso seems to actually <i>endorse</i> the laws of the nation she <i>swore</i> allegiance to upon becoming a citizen, if you can <i>imagine</i> such a heresy!</p>
<p>As Eliana Lopez forthrightly declared: “We’re in the middle of the (heavily Hispanic) Mission. Doing what she (Alonso) is doing is against what we believe.”</p>
<p>But just down the street from the Mission District’s Brava theatre a “Talking Mural” features Che Guevara.”  “He dedicated his life and energy to fighting exploitation, deeply held ideals of hating injustice, and to struggling for the liberation of not only the oppressed and exploited of Latin America but oppressed masses throughout the world,” explains his bio by an outfit named “Freedom Archives,” who provides the audios for the mural.</p>
<p>“The U.S<b>.</b> is the great enemy of mankind!” raved Che Guevara. “The U.S. is a carnivorous animal feeding on the helpless!”</p>
<p>A few more famous Che Guevaraisms:</p>
<p>“Against those hyenas (Americans) there is no option but extermination!”</p>
<p>“We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies’ (Americans) very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy (Americans) must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we’ll destroy him!</p>
<p>“We must keep our hatred (against the U.S.) alive and fan it to paroxysm!”</p>
<p>“The U.S. is the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression against all the peoples of the world!”</p>
<p>“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unlike Alonso<b> </b>and Donnelly’s support for U.S. laws—which provoked a firestorm of protests from Mission’s residents and Brava’s producers&#8211;  none of the above observations and admonitions by a Stalinist mass-murderer seem to violate “what we (The Mission District) believes.” Furthermore, back in 2008 the very Brava Theatre that booted Alonso proudly showcased the movie “Chevolution,” a glorification of Che produced in partnership with Castro’s propaganda ministry. Apparently this communist propaganda film meshed perfectly with “what we believe,” in the Mission District.</p>
<p>Alas, neither Chevolution nor the Talking Mural features the above Guevaraisms. They also omit one that should be of <i>immense</i> interest to San Francisco’s “Latino” community:</p>
<p><i>“Mexicans are a rabble of illiterate Indians.”</i> <a href="http://www.hfontova.com/che.html">(Ernesto “Che” Guevara, May 1956.)</a></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>Finally a Hollywood Movie Depicts a Terrorist Sleeper Cell in Dearborn&#8230; in a Russian Church</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/finally-a-hollywood-movie-depicts-a-terrorist-sleeper-cell-in-dearborn-in-a-russian-church/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=finally-a-hollywood-movie-depicts-a-terrorist-sleeper-cell-in-dearborn-in-a-russian-church</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/finally-a-hollywood-movie-depicts-a-terrorist-sleeper-cell-in-dearborn-in-a-russian-church/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Jan 2014 01:59:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dhimmism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tom clancy]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Midwest-based sleeper agents are activated of their tasks during a reading of Lamentations.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Terrorist001.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-216895" alt="Terrorist001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Terrorist001-450x333.jpg" width="450" height="333" /></a></p>
<p>Russian Christian terrorists are apparently a major threat to America. Not only did they kidnap the president in Air Force One and try to detonate a nuke in New York in The Peacemaker, but they seem to be showing more in Hollywood movies as villains after the fall of the USSR, than during the Soviet Union when they actually might have tried to do things like that.</p>
<p>If I didn&#8217;t know better, I would think that Hollywood had some kind of left-wing agenda. But instead Hollywood is just depicting real life.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/01/the-follies-of-jack-ryan-another-hollywood-thriller-about-christian-terrorists-in-new-york-city/">Like its attempt to make a Jack Ryan movi</a>e not based on a Tom Clancy movie, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (currently at no. 4 after Ride Along, Lone Survivor and The Nut Job) which<a href="http://frdennismoviereviews.blogspot.com/2014/01/jack-ryan-shadow-recruit-2014.html"> depicts the reality </a>of terrorist sleeper cells operating<a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/schaeffersghost/2014/01/2066/"> out of Russian Orthodox churches in Dearborn</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>A discerning viewer might notice that Russia essentially employs al-Qaeda tactics, of which would be ironic considering al-Qaeda’s affiliates have targeted Russia brutally in the past&#8230;</p>
<p>The desire for glory embodied in Cheverin’s evil machinations is colored with religious fervor. The entire operation is called “Lamentations,” and Cherevin asks for Divine favor for his impending plot in prayer during an Orthodox vesper.</p>
<p>The Midwest-based sleeper agents are activated of their tasks during a public reading of Lamentations 2:2 in the local Orthodox parish that the sleepers attend. It reads: “Without pity the Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob; in his wrath he has torn down the strongholds of Daughter Judah. He has brought her kingdom and its princes down to the ground in dishonor.”</p>
<p>In the film, the Orthodox Church is a conduit to “bless” and commence Russia’s operations.</p>
<p>To do so, they awake &#8220;sleeper agents&#8221; in the U.S. by sending a cumbersome coded message through the Russian Orthodox Church&#8230; &#8220;Slava Bogu!&#8221; (thank god)  one sleeper agent exclaims on catching the coded message.</p></blockquote>
<p>So true to life.</p>
<p>We can&#8217;t have Muslim terrorists shouting Allah Akbar, but we can have Christian terrorists shouting Slava Bogu! We can&#8217;t have Muslim mosques depicted as conduits for terrorism. But Russian Orthodox churches are fair game.</p>
<p>The Koran is off limits, but the Bible is just full of terrorist codewords.</p>
<p>And Dearborninstan, ground zero for Christian terrorists, finally gets its due.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not hard to see how Paramount screwed up. Instead of working with a Tom Clancy novel, they decided to reboot Jack Ryan as another Jason Bourne. It&#8217;s not a very logical move and when Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit went up against Lone Survivor, a movie with actual appeal to the Tom Clancy readership, Shadow Recruit sank like a stone.</p>
<p>Shadow Recruit opened in 400 more theaters than Lone Survivor and it couldn&#8217;t even begin to fill them. While Lone Survivor had a <span style="font-size: small;">$7,380</span> per theater average, Shadow Recruit is at $<span style="font-size: small;">4,600</span>.</p>
<p>The money for Shadow Recruit is mainly coming from overseas&#8230; <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/international-box-office-wolf-of-wall-street-kills-in-european-debuts-jack-ryan-bows-in-china-walter-mitty-crosses-100m/">and mainly from China</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>This weekend in China, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit had a rare day-and-date opening for a studio film. The Paramount picture grossed an estimated $9.5M to land the No. 1 spot and largely outpace last year’s Jack Reacher, though it opened soft in the States.</p></blockquote>
<p>I doubt they would have gotten this movie into China if it had featured Muslim terrorists. Especially now. And that tells you all you need to know about where the movie industry is headed.</p>
<p>Shadow Recruit may be no. 4 in America, but it&#8217;s no. 1 in China.</p>
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