<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; liberal</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/liberal/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Bill Whittle: You&#8217;re Not A Liberal!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:56:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[collectivist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242903</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">More and more these days, people who call themselves &#8220;liberals&#8221; have bumper-sticker philosophies that are liberal &#8212; they&#8217;re not even leftist. They&#8217;re infantile. In his latest FIREWALL, Bill Whittle dissects one of these childish, undeservedly self-righteous positions and compares the modern &#8220;liberal&#8221; to the real deal. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FAA_So0d01w" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi Everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You know how it is on Facebook. Every now and then a friend pops up who you haven’t seen in a long, long time. I had one of those fiend pops just the other day, and so I went to her page to see how she’s doing.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Just fine, and nothing new.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">She did have one of those interminable political pictures though, and while I have seen a few that were really dumb, this one was in line for the prize. And I about let it go – cause otherwise you’ll go mad – when I realized it was a share from a Facebook page called BEING LIBERAL, which has over a million followers.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So here’s what Being Liberal proudly posted as a nugget of political wisdom:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It says: “When all the trees are cut down…when all the animals are dead…when all the waters are poisoned… when all the air is unsafe to breathe… only then will you discover: you cannot eat money.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You know, I’m sorry – I have to take a swing at this. First the jab, then the uppercut…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Let’s start with the point of the poster.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I hate to break this to you, you blindingly stupid young thing, but even before I saw this picture I already knew that you can’t eat money. I learned this not through a program of nonviolent resistance to the corporate death machine, but rather through trial and error, at age two. By the time I was two I had experimentally determined that you cannot, in fact, eat money, and thus was prepared to delve deeper into economics. But I am glad to see that you have achieved mastery of the fundamental concept. If you keep at it, you may discover – at this rate, somewhere around age 85 or so – that while you cannot eat money, you can use money to buy food. That money could be pretty seashells, shiny pebbles, gold, paper, binary digits or cigarettes, but as long as there is money it is useful in order to buy food in a way that not having money is not useful.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’ll note in passing that not only are the trees not being cut down, but that there is far more forest in the United States today than there was a hundred years ago; in fact, there may be more today than before the Europeans arrived in the first place.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The animals are not all dead. I saw an animal on the way to work today. Like the forests – where they live! &#8212; there have never been more deer in America, and the buffalo – nearly wiped out a century ago – are back in numbers that make buffalo burgers routinely available.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The waters are not poisoned. They used to be. The Cuyahoga river caught fire at least 13 times between 1868 and 1969. The last time was 45 years ago – it, and the rest of the nation’s waterways, are far, far cleaner now. You’d have a point if you were your grandmother.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Likewise for the air. That’s all very 20th century. The air is much cleaner than it used to be – in places where we value money. Capitalist countries. Leftist countries – you know, leftists like you guys – are indeed filthy. China’s air pollution is so bad it makes up a third of the air pollution in San Francisco! But that because the left values the state over the individual, and the Chinese state wants the money from a manufacturing economy and the Chinese individual, as usual, can go pound sand.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now to the bigger point: namely, YOU ARE NOT LIBERALS. This isn’t liberalism: this isn’t even leftism &#8212; it’s infantilism. It’s the philosophy of children, because that’s what you are. I know you feel brave, holding up that sign, speaking truth to power. You have no right to feel brave, because the risk of anything happening to you with that sign in America is Zero.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((CHINESE STUDENT AND TANKS))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See this guy? That’s an individual, risking his life to fight the armies of socialism. He’s a hero, you’re not. That took courage. What you’re doing doesn’t. Like everyone else on the left, you want something – in this case moral superiority – but you don’t want to pay for it. So you just take it. See how easy it is?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">You’re not liberals – none of you are. You know who is a liberal?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((JEFFERSON))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">This guy. We’ll use the image of this dead white male to represent the other dead white males who were, in fact liberals. They were called liberals because they believed in liberty – which meant, and still means, simply the freedom to be left alone.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((JEFFERSON / PROTESTOR SPLIT))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The man on the right wanted people to be left alone. He believed in private property, strict limits on the power of government, freedom of speech, private ownership of weapons and was the founder of the Democratic party.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The woman on the left wants to government to take care of her health care, birth control, housing, food and transportation. She’s a collectivist who hates private property, wants to expand the government into every aspect of not just her life but yours as well, believes in speech codes and political correctness, wants guns banned and is the inheritor of the democratic party.</p>
<p>The man on the right spent a lifetime of study, debate and reflection trying to determine the nature of man, his history of rare success and frequent failures and with his fellows spent a lifetime trying to devise a realistic formula for the pursuit of happiness.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The woman on the left likely doesn’t know who the man on the right is.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-youre-not-a-liberal/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>There Is No Conservative Case for Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/there-is-no-conservative-case-for-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=there-is-no-conservative-case-for-amnesty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/there-is-no-conservative-case-for-amnesty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:58:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[border]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[crisis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234713</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The bipartisan effort to reshape America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BorderPatrolAgent2png.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234716" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BorderPatrolAgent2png-450x339.png" alt="BorderPatrolAgent2png" width="261" height="197" /></a>Under the hot sun, sweating Hondurans trudge across Mexico headed for the United States and khaki-wearing hacks in comfortable D.C. digs pound out defenses of amnesty on their iPads. The men in the desert call the thing that they want “<span style="color: #0433ff;"><i><a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/weekly-updates/weekly-update-obama-causes-border-crisis/">amnistía</a>,</i></span>” but its domestic defenders refuse to use the “A-word.”</p>
<p>To them it’s always immigration reform. But it’s not immigration that is being reformed; a word that comes from the Latin “<i>reformare”</i> which means to reshape.</p>
<p>It’s the United States of America that is being reformed and reshaped.</p>
<p>The consequences of that reformation are not only linguistic, but political. Amnesty’s reshaping of America will make conservative political positions untenable.  That is why some establishment Republicans are pushing for amnesty. A political shift that will bury small government as thoroughly as the gold standard isn’t just to the advantage of the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>It’s also to their advantage.</p>
<p>Many assume that illegal alien amnesty means cheap votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Republicans. But that’s only partly true.</p>
<p>There are powerful men in both parties who believe that the United States must “reform” to be more like Europe. That it must have a stronger central government and more controlling social policies.</p>
<p>Amnesty is an opportunity to reshape national politics by eliminating opposition to everything from Common Core (<a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_25623951/californians-strongly-support-common-core"><span style="color: #0433ff;">support for Common Core</span></a> in California is at 77% among Latinos and 57% among whites) to Global Warming crackdowns (<a href="http://www.latinodecisions.com/blog/2014/01/23/latinos-want-strong-presidential-action-to-combat-climate-change/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">90% of Latinos want</span></a> government action) and nationalized health care (74% <a href="http://healthpolicy.unm.edu/NEW%2520SURVEY%2520LATINOS%2520HEALTH%2520CARE%2520REFORM"><span style="color: #0433ff;">support  “public option”</span></a> government health care).</p>
<p>Super-Amnesty, many times bigger than the last amnesty, will kill conservative politics. The Tea Party will become a historical footnote. Taxes will go on rising. Government will grow unstoppably bigger.</p>
<p>There will still be a Republican Party. It will support nationalizing health care and expanding the welfare state. Think of today’s Democratic Party. That will be tomorrow’s Republican Party. Pick a radical left-wing party that barely registers on the polls. That will be tomorrow’s Democratic Party.</p>
<p>Articles that claim to be making a conservative case for amnesty are taking a left turn down a dead end street. There can be no conservative case for amnesty because there is no such thing as a conservative case for a policy that will not have a conservative outcome.</p>
<p>It’s possible to make a conservative case for just about anything by breaking conservatism down to a handful of supposed principles such as “free enterprise” or “stronger families” and then overlaying those principles on a policy.</p>
<p>That same technique can be used to make a conservative case for nationalizing health care or child slavery. The piecemeal principles argument is fine for constructing talking points, but it’s also cheap sophistry. It can be used to prove anything which means that it also proves nothing.</p>
<p>The only meaningful argument for a policy is based on outcomes.</p>
<p>If the outcome of a conservative policy is more liberalism, it was never a conservative policy to begin with. That is the simplest and most reliable acid test of any “conservative” policy agenda.</p>
<p>Will Policy X put the country on a more liberal or conservative track? That is a question that Republican advocates of amnesty don’t like answering. Their conservative case for amnesty is all about stronger families and free enterprise; they don’t want to talk about what the United States will actually look like after a generation of majority support for every possible big government gimmick.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://publicreligion.org/research/2013/09/hispanic-values-survey-2013/">72% of Hispanics in the US</a></span> <a href="http://publicreligion.org/research/2013/09/hispanic-values-survey-2013/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">believe</span></a> that the system favors the wealthy and that the government should intervene to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. 60% believe that hard work does not guarantee success. The majority want higher taxes over tax cuts and spending more while raising taxes to pay for it.</p>
<p>And for those holding out hope on the social conservative front, the majority supports gay marriage and opposes abortion by only a narrow margin.</p>
<p>These aren’t racial or ethnic differences. They are political culture differences. Immigrants from brutal totalitarian left-wing dictatorships, like Cuba or the USSR, often lean to the right. However immigrants from countries that lean to the left without being giant death camps, tend to also lean to the left.</p>
<p>The Swedish immigrants that I’ve met think that gun control is so common sense that only a complete maniac would oppose it. Mexico has universal health care and no matter how badly it works, Mexican immigrants think that it’s only natural that the government should have a public option. China spends vast sums of money on a public education system. Chinese immigrants expect the US to do the same.</p>
<p>Immigrants who don’t leave a home country with the understanding that it is completely broken and should only be mentioned as a cautionary tale will support repeating those same tragic errors here.</p>
<p>The Mexican Constitution specifies a minimum wage, unionization and low-cost housing. Those aren’t unusual things in Latin American constitutions. They may exist more in theory than in reality, but they are a baseline expectation.</p>
<p>Amnesty advocates claim that legalization will assimilate illegal aliens. It’s hard to tell if they’re kidding themselves or us. They will be “assimilated” by the same left-wing social system that they have already been living in. They will be assimilated by public schools and state universities, by community activist groups and media outlets and by all the other arms of the Democratic Party and its left-wing satellites.</p>
<p>Republican advocates of amnesty speak of this country as a beacon of freedom. And they’re right. That beacon of freedom has been offered to immigrants around the world. And it is in their interest and ours that the beacon remain lit by opposing a Super-Amnesty of illegal aliens that would drown out its light.</p>
<p>The American culture of freedom is already under siege. Immigration should serve America’s culture of freedom. Anything else would be unfair to Americans and to the generations of future immigrants.</p>
<p>There can be no conservative case for Super-Amnesty unless it can be argued that it will make the country more conservative, freer and less taxed than it is today. Instead the numbers show that Super-Amnesty will create overwhelming support for government power, less freedom and higher taxes.</p>
<p>America will become California.</p>
<p>Super-Amnesty is radical social change in a can. Conservatives don’t believe in radical social change. Amnesty supporters insist that conservatives should lay out a policy alternative to mass amnesty, but the very idea that massive social problems have easy solutions is an intellectual error of the left.</p>
<p>Conservatives accept that social problems arise from human frailty, rather than fundamental inequities. We do not believe in push-button solutions to social problems. Instead we affirm that in maintaining our ideals despite human frailties, we will become a better nation.</p>
<p>Illegal aliens will always exist because there will be people on both sides of the border who will selfishly break the law, harming themselves and others. The solution to this social problem is not to reject the law, abandon borders and citizenship, but to affirm these things in the face of their violation.</p>
<p>We do not fight theft by rejecting ownership. Instead we defend the value of human labor. We do not stop killing by making excuses for murderers, but by championing the value of human life. We do not protect marriage by redefining it so that it means nothing, but by recommitting to the family. And we do not end violations of the border by watering down American citizenship, but by strengthening it.</p>
<p>Making America more Socialist can never be a conservative policy. Authentic conservatism is not misled by talking points that speak of conservative principles.</p>
<p>It accepts nothing less than a conservative outcome.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/there-is-no-conservative-case-for-amnesty/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>109</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Detroit: How the Left Made Water More Expensive Than Cell Phones</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:56:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bankrupt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[water]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234753</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives' cruel assault on the poor unmasked. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234754" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420-450x300.jpg" alt="8734154122_8229fb3d2f_z-629x420" width="290" height="193" /></a>The latest news from Detroit, the poster child for failed progressive policies that have dominated that city for more than a half-century, is not good. In March of 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/detroit-cuts-off-water-to-thousands-of-residents-as-activists-plead-with-un-for-help-with-human-rights-abuse-9556171.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">announced</span></a> it would begin cutting off water service for customers at least 60 days overdue or more than $150 behind in their water bill payments. Activists outraged by the decision have taken their case outside the city—all the way to the United Nations.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The DWSD has targeted 1,500 to 3,000 business and residential customers every week as part of a get-tough approach that would enable them to begin recouping the $118 million owed from delinquent accounts. Accounts that comprise nearly half the city’s total number. As a result, the Department has shut off water service to <a href="http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/detroit-shuts-water-thousands-activists-ask-un-intervene"><span style="color: #1255cc;">more</span></a> than 7,500 properties in the past two months alone.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;We really don&#8217;t want to shut off anyone’s water, but it’s really our duty to go after those who don’t pay, because if they don’t pay then our other customers pay for them,&#8221; <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/06/23/nearly-half-of-detroit-water-customers-cant-pay-their-bill/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> DWSD spokeswoman Curtrise Garner. &#8220;That’s not fair to our other customers.” Garner also noted that the city has programs that help those &#8220;totally in need,” but that many of the customers who can afford to pay their bills don’t bother, &#8220;and we know this because, once we shut water off, the next day they are in paying the bill in full. So we do know that that has become a habit as well,” she contended.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not the only habit of non-payment afflicting Detroit. In 2012, it was revealed that <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130221/METRO01/302210375#ixzz35VEVs5Qi"><span style="color: #1255cc;">almost half</span></a> of the city&#8217;s 305,000 property owners failed to pay their tax bills the previous year.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet the thousands of families who no longer have access to water, along with those who will shortly follow, has generated a backlash by a coalition of leftist organizations striving for <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">“water justice,&#8221;</span></a> including the <a href="http://peopleswaterboard.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Detroit People’s Water Board</span></a>, the <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Blue Planet Project</span></a>, the <a href="http://mwro.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Michigan Welfare Rights Organization</span></a> and <a href="https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Food &amp; Water Watch</span></a>. They have submitted a <a href="http://www.blueplanetproject.net/index.php/detroit-submission/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> to Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, calling on that organization to intervene. &#8220;What we see is a violation of the human right to water,&#8221; said Meera Karunananthan, an international campaigner with the Blue Planet Project. &#8220;The U.S. has international obligations in terms of people’s right to water, and this is a blatant violation of that right. We’re hoping the U.N. will put pressure on the federal government and the state of Michigan to do something about it.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The groups have framed the argument in typically leftist terms, accusing the DWSD of attempting to rid itself of low-income customers in an effort to spur a private takeover of the utility. DWSD has denied the charge, but city officials are considering at least a partial takeover by private entities as one of a variety of strategies aimed at reducing the $18 billion of debt that has driven Detroit into bankruptcy. The DWSD accounts for $5 billion of that debt, and as of March, 150,806 out of the 323,900 DWSD accounts in the city were <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140322/NEWS01/303220010/Detroit-resume-water-shutoffs-delinquent-customers"><span style="color: #1255cc;">delinquent</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Detroit did attempt to integrate its water system with the water systems in the suburban counties of Oakland, Macomb and Wayne, hoping to <span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140406/NEWS01/304060082/Water-authority-Orr-Kevyn-Detroit-bankruptcy">create</a> </span>a jointly managed regional authority in return for a $47-million-per-year minimum lease payment. But the deal fell through when those counties wanted no part of the DWSD’s debt, its delinquent customers, or an aging infrastructure “with a history of disinvestment,” <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140406/OPINION01/304060057"><span style="color: #1255cc;">according</span></a> to the <i>Detroit Free Press</i>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Despite that disinvestment, Detroit has seen a steady rise in its water bills, including a staggering 119 percent <a href="http://www.mintpressnews.com/groups-appeal-to-un-to-stop-water-cut-offs-in-detroit-and-restore-basic-human-rights/192731/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">increase</span></a> over the last decade. The average water bill is now an outrageous $75 a month, <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/06/23/nearly-half-of-detroit-water-customers-cant-pay-their-bill/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">compared</span></a> to national average of $40. For perspective sake, the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/16/pf/cell-phone-bill.moneymag/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">average</span></a> cell phone bill is $71 per month.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Nonetheless, as recently as last week the Detroit City Council <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140617/NEWS01/306170107/City-Council-water-rate-hike"><span style="color: #1255cc;">approved</span></a> an 8.7 percent increase in DWSD rates expected to add an average of more than $5 per month to the current bills. Council President Brenda Jones cited infrastructure repair as the reason for the hike. “I do realize that in order to get the repairs done to our system, it’s going to take a lot of money to get those repairs because our system is very old,” Jones said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The activists are apoplectic, claiming those affected were given no time to prepare for a shut off and that some accounts were suspended prior to the deadline. &#8220;Sick people are left without running water and running toilets,” <a href="http://ecowatch.com/2014/05/28/water-cut-offs-detroit-violation-human-rights/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">writes</span></a> Blue Planet Project Founder and Food &amp; Water Watch Board Chair Maude Barlow.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook. Is this a small number of victims? No. The water department has decreed that it will turn the water off to all 120,000 residences that owe it money by the end of the summer although it has made no such threat to the many corporations and institutions that are in arrears on their bills as well. How did it come to this?</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, Barlow blames &#8220;decades of market driven neoliberal policy that put business and profit ahead of public good.” A less delusional examination reveals the usual suspects: free-spending, progressive Democrats, allied with labor unions.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Beginning in 1962, Detroit <a href="http://mic.com/articles/20567/america-s-future-looks-too-much-like-detroit"><span style="color: #1255cc;">elected</span></a> an unbroken string of Democratic mayors and other city officials determined to impose a progressive agenda on a city that was once the richest, per capita, in the entire nation. Democrats oversaw the failed the “Model City” program, fashioned after Soviet Union centralized efforts to transform entire urban areas at once. They were in control when the riots of 1967 destroyed black businesses and drove more than 140,000 people from the city. They bestowed outlandish salaries, benefit packages, and highly inefficient work rules on city unions, a move largely responsible for driving the city’s mainstay auto industry to right-to-work states. And they were responsible for a series of corruption scandals, culminating in a <a href="http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/23658979/kwame-kilpatrick-sentenced-to-28-years-in-prison"><span style="color: #1255cc;">28-year prison term</span></a> for former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">All of it led to the <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/system/wire/DA6TMNC00"><span style="color: #1255cc;">largest</span></a> municipal bankruptcy in the history of the nation, in June of 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And make no mistake: DWSD workers were an integral part of the problem. As recently as 2012, the DWSD employed a full-time <i>horseshoer</i> collecting $56,245 in salary and benefits &#8212; despite the inconvenient reality that the department had no horses. They also had 257 separate job classifications designed to maximize the number of workers required to do even the simplest of tasks &#8212; workers whose average compensation packages <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2013/02/21/detroit-gave-unions-keys-to-the-city-and-now-nothing-is-left/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">came to</span></a> $86,000 in 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">2012 was also the year when an independent <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120809/NEWS05/308090260/Detroit-water-department-cut-81-workers-under-new-proposal"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> concluded that the city could <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/17370"><span style="color: #1255cc;">slash</span></a> the staffing levels at DWSD by 81 percent, due to the reality that it was using twice the number of employees per gallon as cities like Chicago. In response, John Riehl, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 207 that represents many of the DWSD employees, told the <i>Detroit Free Press</i> the department needed more workers.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When the Detroit Board of Water Commissioners approved the cutbacks, 950 DWSD workers went on strike in October 2012, defying a restraining order issued by a federal judge in the process. The strike lasted five days, and Riehl declared it a victory &#8220;because it has set the precedent that unions, the community and the City of Detroit can stand up against the whole array of powers-that-be and win.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In light of Detroit’s eventual bankruptcy, it was a temporary and Pyrrhic victory.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Today, Detroit is a city with an unemployment rate of <a href="http://ycharts.com/indicators/detroit_mi_unemployment_rate"><span style="color: #1255cc;">more</span></a> than 14 percent, and a poverty rate of about 40 percent, courtesy of the very same Democratic social engineering that has driven water to unaffordable levels for many of the city’s poorest residents. Even more telling, given that Detroit’s population is <a href="http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884135.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">82.7 percent</span></a> black, this crisis disproportionately afflicts the very same minorities Democrats claim to be protecting and nurturing.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The case of water cut-offs in the City of Detroit speaks to the deep racial divides and intractable economic and social inequality in access to services within the United States,” claim the activists taking their case to the United Nations. No, it doesn’t. It speaks to 52 years of progressive Democratic policies that have destroyed the city formerly known as the &#8220;arsenal of democracy.” The very same policies these leftist groups would exacerbate in their quixotic quest for UN-sponsored “water justice.&#8221;</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/detroit-how-the-left-made-water-more-expensive-than-cell-phones/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>54</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Illiberal &#8216;Liberalism&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=illiberal-liberalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2014 04:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democratic Party]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Fred Siegel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[morality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolt Against the Masses]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Fred Siegel's new book exposes the history of the Left's hatred of ordinary Americans -- and its commitment to tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224513" alt="41eaIef4eCL" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/41eaIef4eCL-233x350.jpg" width="186" height="280" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/175281">Hoover Institution</a>. </em></p>
<p>During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama let slip his disdain for the middle-class when he explained his lack of traction among such voters. “It’s not surprising then,” Obama said, “that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Bruce Braley mocked his opponent incumbent Chuck Grassley as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” The liberal disdain for ordinary Americans has been around for a long time. Beneath the populist rhetoric and concern for the middle class that lace the campaign speeches of most liberal politicians, there lurks a palpable disgust, and often contempt, for the denizens of “flyover country,” that land of God, guns, religion, and traditional beliefs.</p>
<p>In <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em>, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow and <em>New York Post </em>columnist Fred Siegel presents a clearly written and engaging historical narrative of how nearly a century ago this strain of illiberal liberalism began to take over the Democratic Party. Along the way he also provides an excellent political history of the period that illuminates the “ugly blend of sanctimony, self-interest, and social-connections” lying at the heart of liberalism today.</p>
<p>Siegel begins with a valuable survey of the “progenitors,” the early twentieth-century thinkers and writers whose ideas shaped the liberal ideology. Those who know English writer H. G. Wells only as an early pioneer of science-fiction novels may be surprised to find how popular and widely read in America his philosophical and political writings were in the first few decades of the century. Wells’s 1901 <em>Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought</em> laid out the argument for a quasi-aristocratic elite of technocrats free of traditional values such as “monogamy, faith in God &amp; respectability,” all of which Wells’s book “was designed to undermine and destroy,” as he frankly admitted. Applying Darwinism to social, political, and economic life, Wells envisioned, as Siegel explains, “scientist-poets and engineers” who would “seize the reins in the Darwinian struggle,” so that instead of “descending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward new and higher ground.” In Wells’s work we see the melding of attacks on traditional authority and middle-class morality, with the scientistic faith in technocratic elites that still characterizes modern liberalism.</p>
<p>Wells’s kindred American spirit was Progressive theorist Herbert Croly, whose 1901 <em>The Promise of American Life </em>Siegel calls the “first political manifesto of modern American liberalism.” Croly “rejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America’s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government.”</p>
<p>As much as Wells, or for that matter Mussolini and Lenin, Croly “wanted the collective power of society put ‘at the service of its ablest members,’ who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.” Similarly, leftist intellectual Randolph Bourne wondered “whether there aren’t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with social sense.” Bourne seasoned his antidemocratic elitism with a romantic idealization of “Youth,” which was a time when the ideals “will be the highest…the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating,” an early example of the worship of adolescents that exploded in the 1960s and is still felt in our culture today. And perhaps most famously, journalist H.L. Mencken serially displayed his contempt for the American people, whom he called a “rabble of ignorant peasants.”</p>
<p>In Siegel’s reading, modern liberalism was midwifed in the 1920s by the break with Progressivism over Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States into World War I, and the “wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.” The scorn of patriotism and the American masses, brutally described by Mencken as a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob,” became the default sensibility of litterateurs, journalists, and intellectuals alike, who viewed “American society and democracy” as “agents of repression,” sentiments that “deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.” The influential literary manifestation of this prejudice remains Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 bestseller <em>Main Street</em>, which along with <em>Babbitt </em>two years later fixed the caricature of Middle America uncritically endorsed by liberals nearly a century later.</p>
<p>Siegel moves briskly through the subsequent events and developments that seemingly legitimized liberal bigotry against the middle class as objective history. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, a “contrivance from the start,” as Siegel writes, and immortalized in the historically challenged 1955 Broadway hit <em>Inherit the Wind</em>, established the meme of the brave and noble man of “science” battling slack-jawed, oppressive Christian fundamentalists. This cliché predictably surfaces in liberal commentary on issues ranging from teaching Darwinian evolution, to the validity of global warming. In the 1930s idolizing the Soviet Union and communism, a reflex of liberal disdain for capitalism and its déclassé obsession with getting and spending, began its long march through American culture and education.</p>
<p>A corollary to this admiration has been the fervent liberal belief that America is to some degree “fascist,” and in imminent danger of becoming a fascist state, a preposterous notion made famous by Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel <em>It Can’t Happen Here</em>. This hoary received wisdom has managed to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of its archives, which established beyond doubt that Communist subversion and infiltration of America’s institutions were in fact by far a greater threat to democracy than a fascist takeover. Despite that history, in 2004 Philip Roth published <em>The Plot Against America</em>, which indulged to high praise the same long-exploded fantasy.</p>
<p>Particularly valuable are Siegel’s brief portraits of once prominent liberal commentators and critics like Arthur Schlesinger, whose influence lives in the “aristocratic aping of professional liberals who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed.” They refined and perpetuated the old caricature of Americanism “as the mass pursuit of prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them,” enslaved to “their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator.” In the 1950s, the liberal critic Dwight Macdonald groused of a America blessed with “money, leisure and knowledge” that had merely given the average American “masscult” and “midcult,” the vulgar “American culture of the cheap newspaper, the movies, the popular song, the ubiquitous automobile,” fit fare for the “hordes of men and women without a spiritual country . . . without taste, without standards but those of the mob.”</p>
<p>Yet as Siegel points out, this same period saw an explosion in the numbers of average people studying and experiencing the artistic and literary masterpieces of Western civilization. Local symphony orchestras increased by 250 percent between 1940 and 1955, and in that same year “35 million paid to attend classical-music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million,” almost 10 percent of the population. Fifty million televisions viewers watched Laurence Olivier in <em>Richard III</em>, book-sales doubled, and paperback versions of highbrow novels like Saul Bellow’s <em>The Adventures of Augie March</em> or non-fiction works like anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s <em>Patterns of Culture</em> became bestsellers. Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins introduced the pricey Great Books series, which by 1951 was being purchased by 50,000 Americans a year, who met in 2,500 Great Books groups to talk about the classics of Western civilization. As Siegel mordantly observes, “<em>This</em>was the danger against which critics of mass culture, inflamed with indignation, arrayed themselves against.”</p>
<p>Siegel’s survey ends with the presidency of Barack Obama. As <em>The</em> <em>Revolt Against the Masses</em> comes to a close, the policies and philosophy of Obama’s administration––best represented by the Affordable Care Act–– will strike the reader as the inevitable culmination of the ideological development Siegel has skillfully traced. The liberal elite’s disdain for a middle America of businessmen and churchgoers, which has always been linked to an uncritical admiration for Europe, has with Obama’s reelection created a political order teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse: “[Liberalism’s] sustained assault on the private-sector middle class and the ideals of self-restraint and self-government have, particularly in the blue states, succeeded all too well in achieving the dream of the 1920s literary Bolsheviks: an increasingly Europeanized class structure for America.”</p>
<p>One might argue with Siegel’s assertion of the “sharp break” between Progressivism and liberalism. On foreign policy this disagreement is obvious, and the liberals’ endorsement of illiberal identity politics in the 1960s would have horrified old-school Progressives, who were Darwinian eugenicists anxious over being swamped by the inferior races. The Progressives, even more than the liberals, disdained the masses, viewing them as an abstract collectivist “people,” Woodrow Wilson’s ideal “single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.” This conception of the “people” ignored the great variety of regional, sectional, and religious identities, Madisonian factions, and clashing interests comprising flesh-and-blood Americans.</p>
<p>Progressives, moreover, like liberals homogenized and nationalized those various interests and aims as these were defined and chosen by techno-political elites. One hears H. G. Wells’s and Randolph Bourne’s impatience with democratic self-rule and preference for a managerial elite in Wilson’s call to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration,” comprising the “hundreds who are wise” empowered to guide the “thousands” who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” What liberalism shares with the Progressives––the “living” Constitution, big government, regulation of the economy, and the redistribution of property to achieve “social justice”––far outweighs their differences.</p>
<p><em>The Revolt Against the Masses</em> is an important book, a first-rate intellectual history that clearly and crisply explains much of the political and cultural dysfunctions roiling the United States today. Siegel’s well-researched analysis of the liberal abandonment of self-government and individual freedom–– a betrayal of the Constitutional order justified in the main by social prejudice, class snobbery, and bad Continental philosophy––is a brilliant exposition of a century of bad ideas that have led to today’s bloated Leviathan state, these days on track to bankrupt the treasury and diminish our freedom.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/illiberal-liberalism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>70</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Paranoid Madness of the Democratic Party</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-paranoid-madness-of-the-democratic-party/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-paranoid-madness-of-the-democratic-party</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-paranoid-madness-of-the-democratic-party/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Apr 2014 04:50:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Extreme]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[HATE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[paranoid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223104</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Democrat may no longer believe in God, but he believes in racism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/seiu_protest_ap_218-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-223105" alt="seiu_protest_ap_218-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/seiu_protest_ap_218-1.jpg" width="289" height="218" /></a></span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Democrat may no longer believe in God, the Constitution or even motherhood and apple pie, but he devoutly believes that somewhere out there Republicans are sitting in a sealed room and plotting to bring back the 50s. </span></p>
<p>And if not the 50s, then at least the early 60s.</p>
<p>The left accuses the right of being deeply paranoid. Meanwhile the left is convinced that every Republican sneeze is a racial putdown of America&#8217;s first black president since Bill Clinton.</p>
<p>Forget about looking for Communists under every bed. The proper progressive never lies down with his or her partner of choice and their government mandated birth control from the Catholic institution with no choice in the matter without first checking their privilege and checking for conservative bigotry.</p>
<p>Sometimes, somewhere in Kentucky or Alaska, a minor Republican functionary forwards an email depicting ObamaCare as the work of a voodoo witch doctor and the first lefty to discover it dines out on that triumphant accomplishment for a year before writing a book about it. The rest of the time, the McCarthyists of the left have to work to unpack the subtext of a random remark.</p>
<p>When Mitch McConnell complained that Obama plays too much golf, MSNBC&#8217;s chief late night lunatic, Lawrence O&#8217;Donnell, barked that “Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.”</p>
<p>The Calibnasian Woods didn&#8217;t actually identify as black, but that was probably because of the way Republican racism stigmatizes black people. Will the right-wing bigotry never stop?</p>
<p>The reinvented Democratic Party runs entirely on conspiracy theories about Republican bigotry. It complains that Republicans secretly believe that they&#8217;re a Communist conspiracy to destroy America, while their entire platform is an accusation that the Republican Party is a secret conspiracy to enslave black people.</p>
<p>Or as the famous admirer of articulate, bright and clean-looking African-Americans, Joe Biden said, &#8220;He is going to put y&#8217;all back in chains.&#8221;</p>
<p>The chains would be redundant considering that he and his boss have run up the national debt to $17.6 trillion or a post-racial slavery of $55,234 by every American, regardless of race or creed, owed to China, Japan and the Muslim world.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party runs on racial paranoia, on class paranoia, on gender paranoia; obsessed with portraying the Republican Party as a Nazi cult dedicated to serving Southern racists, the Koch Brothers and Israel.</p>
<p>Conspiracy theories aren&#8217;t a fringe element in the Democratic Party; they&#8217;re the entire ticket.</p>
<p>The War on Women, the constant claims of racism (according to ex-MSNBC&#8217;er Martin Bashir IRS was the new &#8220;N Word&#8221;) and the invocation of class warfare by wealthy residents of entirely white bedroom communities is a litany of conspiracy theories. The frenzied search for new IRS and Tiger Woods &#8220;dog whistles&#8221; that prove the Republicans really are out to bring back the 50s is the psychological breakdown of an entire political party taking refuge in political paranoia.</p>
<p>The bible of the left&#8217;s conspiracy theory is a Lee Atwater interview from 1981 in which he described politics becoming post-racial. Since conspiracy theorists can always locate that one frame that proves that the plane heading for the World Trade Center was a hologram and the magic bullet that shot JFK was really fired by Jackie Kennedy, they carefully excerpted a part of the interview to make it look like Atwater <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/06/what-did-lee-atwater-really-say.php">was saying the exact opposite</a> of what he was saying.</p>
<p>The left built up its pyramid of racial paranoia, its obsession with a Republican &#8220;Southern Strategy&#8221; to prove that the real racists weren&#8217;t the Democrats who fought for segregation, but the Republicans who fought against it, and its claim that since then the Republicans hid their racism in calls for small government and lower taxes, which, if you own a special Noam Chomsky decoder ring, really means Supermegaracism.</p>
<p>If Republicans are covertly disguising their racism in low taxes and small government, anyone who believes in low taxes and small government is probably a racist. And since Republicans hide their racism in innocuous policies, any conservative policy must be another racist Trojan horse.</p>
<p>Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is a conspirator. If a Republican supports X, it must be racist. If he says Y, it must be racist.</p>
<p>Understand that and you understand why MSNBC&#8217;s cast of lunatics insist that IRS is the new N Word and that the Republican Party keeps mentioning Obama&#8217;s golf game to suggest to its base of racist voters that he&#8217;s really off having affairs with a string of blonde women.</p>
<p>Progressive racial paranoia makes perfect sense if you assume that your opponents are part of a conspiracy whose defining feature is a paranoid projection of your own racism.</p>
<p>The racial Atwaterization of the Democratic Party, its Northeastern Strategy, is typical of conspiracy theorists, whether it&#8217;s the Muslim Brotherhood&#8217;s front groups or the LaRouche zombies, who engage in byzantine conspiracies and vicious underhanded attacks that are justified by their own worldview in which a vast conspiracy is being waged against them.</p>
<p>Think of Hillary Clinton invoking a &#8220;vast right wing conspiracy&#8221; in public while justifying her husband&#8217;s adultery as being caused by Republican attacks in private, targeting women who complained about her husband&#8217;s sexual harassment in private, while claiming to be a role model for women in public.</p>
<p>That gap between ideals and actions, ends and means, is typical of the conspiracy theorist who projects every evil onto a single enemy, an Emmanuel Goldstein or Dick Cheney, and acts out every horrifying power fantasy in order to destroy him without ever acknowledging that he has become the thing he hates the most. He has become, not Dick Cheney, but Dick Cheney as he envisions him, an abuser of the Constitution who uses the IRS as a political weapon, invades countries unilaterally and destroys political enemies with lies, smears and innuendo.</p>
<p>The Dick Cheney of the left&#8217;s paranoid imagination sits in the White House.</p>
<p>Political paranoids are totalitarians&#8230; and totalitarians are political paranoids. The Democratic Party has become both. Its paranoid totalitarianism runs on conspiracy theories that justify its abuses of power. It has accepted the left&#8217;s classic formula of the conservative political opposition as a reactionary force that is the source of all evils in society.</p>
<p>If the Republican Party and the conservative opposition embody racism so thoroughly and covertly that there is nothing non-racist about them, there is nothing left to do but to destroy them. Having reduced the right to a total evil with no redeeming qualities, destroying them seems benevolent.</p>
<p>The average MSNBC viewer, <i>New York Times</i> reader and progressive suburbanite is not interested in a close look at his political movement. Instead of giving him something to believe in, his party&#8217;s media outlets give him someone to hate. His political identity is shaped not by what he stands for, unsustainable debt and an incoherent foreign policy of platitudes, but by his resistance to the Tea Party hordes who want to put black people back in chains, put women back in the kitchen and put homophobes back in the CEO’s office at the Mozilla Foundation.</p>
<p>The politics of paranoid hatred is the crutch of mental cripples who protect the source of their dysfunction by projecting it onto phantom enemies. It&#8217;s Hillary Clinton with her unfaithful husband, her list of enemies and her conviction that the Republicans made him cheat on her multiplied a million times over. It&#8217;s the frenzied MSNBC talking head who sees the N Word everywhere because it&#8217;s inside him. It&#8217;s an Attorney General who pursues racial grudges without ever admitting it while calling the country &#8220;a nation of cowards&#8221; on race.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party has been contaminated by the madness of the left through its alliance with the left and the entire country is paying the price.</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>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-paranoid-madness-of-the-democratic-party/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>77</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Glenn Greenwald: Raving Leftist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/glenn-greenwald-raving-leftist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=glenn-greenwald-raving-leftist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/glenn-greenwald-raving-leftist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 05:55:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Edward Snowden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[glenn greenwald]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libertarian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marxist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sean Wilentz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219814</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democrat historian tries to put a conservative mask on a Marxist journalist. 
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/glenn-greenwald.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220387" alt="glenn-greenwald" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/glenn-greenwald-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Adding to a long tradition of misleading the public with dubious information, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz recently unleashed a scathing attack on Edward Snowden promoter Glenn Greenwald in a 7,600-word <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116253/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-julian-assange-what-they-believe" target="_blank">essay</a> published by <i>The New Republic</i>. Although Wilentz never comes out and says it directly, the reader is left with the distinct impression that he believes neo-communist Greenwald shouldn&#8217;t be considered a member-in-good-standing of the Left. In fact, Wilentz seems to insinuate that Greenwald is an extreme right-winger at heart, a proposition that cannot survive serious scrutiny.</p>
<p>An unabashed partisan Democrat, Wilentz is known for his televised histrionics on the eve of President Clinton&#8217;s impeachment. He warned House members that if they voted to impeach Clinton, &#8220;history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.&#8221; The <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/09/opinion/immobilizing-lies.html" target="_blank">ridiculed</a> him for his outburst, editorializing that his &#8220;gratuitously patronizing presentation &#8230; marred the Democratic experts&#8217; argument that Mr. Clinton&#8217;s misconduct did not meet the constitutional tests for impeachment.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the article on Greenwald, whom Rachel Maddow calls “the American left’s most fearless political commentator,” Wilentz artfully suggests that Greenwald might be a right-wing crypto-critic of the president and the Left because he is a zealot on so-called privacy issues and has ferociously attacked the Obama administration for its NSA spying abuses. Instead of making a clear accusation of ideological infidelity against Greenwald, Wilentz cherry-picks statements from Greenwald’s past to put him in the same ideological camp as Ron Paul “paleoconservatives,” who support income tax abolition, isolationism, among other things.</p>
<p>As evidence, Wilentz cites Greenwald’s dalliances with members of the Right in the past. Despite being a crusader for gay rights, in Greenwald’s &#8220;online travels, he gravitated to right-wing sites such as Townhall, where he could engage in cyber-brawls with social conservatives,&#8221; Wilentz writes. &#8220;Over time, he met some of his antagonists in the flesh and, to his surprise, liked them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Greenwald’s work has certainly endeared him to libertarians, with whom the lawyer-turned-journalist has had associations over the years, but the simpler explanation for his outreach is that politics makes strange bedfellows. Just because Greenwald elevates the surveillance issue over all others doesn&#8217;t mean he stopped being a dogmatic leftist.</p>
<p>And there is no doubt Greenwald is a committed radical leftist.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s doubtful that America could ever move far enough to the left to satisfy Greenwald &#8212; the recipient of an award named in honor of Soviet agent and left-wing journalist, I.F. Stone. Greenwald doesn&#8217;t want to change a few policies here and there; He wants to overthrow the system and his life&#8217;s work is clearly dedicated to precisely that.</p>
<p>Greenwald’s anti-Americanism, along with his activism, writings, amply demonstrated hatred of economic freedoms and capitalism, and enthusiastic complicity in Snowden&#8217;s leaking of U.S. secrets, mark him as a Marxist-Leninist doing his best to undermine the American system of government.</p>
<p>More specifically, with his effusive praise for and work with U.S. Trotskyists, Greenwald has all but announced that he is one of them. At an International Socialist Organization-sponsored conference in 2011, <a href="http://www.aim.org/aim-column/glenn-greenwald-regularly-attends-marxist-leninist-conferences/" target="_blank">he stated</a> that</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;no event assembles more passionate activism, genuine expertise, and provocative insights than the Socialism Conference. This will be my third straight year attending, and what keeps me coming back is how invigorating and inspiring it is to be in the midst of such diverse and impressive activists.”</p></blockquote>
<p>ISO is a key Trotskyist/Marxist-Leninist party in the U.S. Its supporters want to establish what Marx called a &#8220;dictatorship of the proletariat&#8221; right here in America. Plenary sessions on offer at the 2011 conference <a href="http://www.trevorloudon.com/2013/06/exclusive-nsa-leaks-journalist-glenn-greenwald-addressed-a-marxist-leninist-conference/" target="_blank">included</a> &#8220;Lenin and the vanguard party,” “Marxism and the state,” “Marxism, war, and imperialism,” “Russia’s revolutionary process, 1905–1917,” “Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution,” “Marxism and the future socialist society,” “The politics of International Socialism” and “Enemies in blue: The police under capitalism.”</p>
<p>Greenwald made his most serious foray into political activism in 2008 when he co-founded the Accountability Now PAC (political action committee) with <a href="http://firedoglake.com/" target="_blank">firedoglake.com</a> founder Jane Hamsher, an activist and film producer who used to be closely associated with then-SEIU chief Andy Stern. The PAC grew out of a coalition of far-left and socialist groups and individuals, including the George Soros-funded group MoveOn, SEIU, the Daily Kos website, Howard Dean&#8217;s Democracy for America PAC, and the Van Jones-founded Color of Change. Although the PAC created what Greenwald appropriately called &#8220;the Strange Bedfellows coalition,&#8221; an &#8220;alliance of ideologically diverse factions,” the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://kleinonline.wnd.com/2013/06/20/anti-nsa-reporter-tied-to-soros-funded-radical-left-guardians-glenn-greenwald-pushed-for-weakening-of-america/" target="_blank">described</a> the group as focused on moving the Democratic Party &#8220;further to the left.&#8221;</p>
<p>A survey of Greenwald’s views clearly demonstrates why Greenwald would form such a group and why he has only sidled up more intensely to groups like the ISO in recent years. In a column titled &#8220;Glenn Greenwald: Man of the Left,&#8221; David Bernstein <a href="http://www.volokh.com/2012/10/15/glenn-greenwald-man-of-the-left/" target="_blank">points out</a> that, like the rest of the Left, Greenwald is in denial about the terrible fiscal condition of the country. He believes the ongoing, slow-motion bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security is a hoax perpetrated by conservatives to hurt the poor. In an October 2012 column about the vice presidential candidates&#8217; debate, he wrote,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;This claim lies at the heart of the right-wing and neo-liberal quest to slash entitlement benefits for ordinary Americans -       [Congressman Paul] Ryan predictably responded by saying: &#8216;Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts.&#8217; – but the claim is baseless.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>According to Greenwald, this is the work of a capitalist conspiracy. There is a sinister plot afoot by elites who falsely claim that the two entitlement programs are in deep trouble, he maintains. It is a &#8220;demonstrable myth being used by the DC class &#8212; which largely does not need entitlements &#8212; to deceive ordinary Americans into believing that they must &#8216;sacrifice&#8217; the pittances on which they are now living.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Now if that’s not reflective of a conspiratorial far-left perspective on domestic policy,” Bernstein writes, &#8220;I don’t know what is.&#8221;</p>
<p>Sounding like Noam Chomsky, Greenwald calls the U.S. &#8220;the country that has generated more violence and militarism in the world over the last five or six decades.&#8221; The U.S. plays a significant role in the Middle East &#8220;in order to have access to their oil and protect Israel.&#8221; America is hated because it sends its &#8220;military for six straight decades into other countries to bomb them, kill their children and women and innocent men, [and] prop up dictators.&#8221;</p>
<p>In his venomous 2008 book, <i>Great American Hypocrites,</i> Greenwald accuses conservatives of using &#8220;deceitful electoral tactics.&#8221; The &#8220;right-wing noise machine&#8221; uses tactics that &#8220;drown out both reality and consideration of actual issues, thus ensuring that elections are decided based on manipulative cultural, psychological, and gender-exploiting marketing imagery.&#8221; In other words, the American people suffer from what Marxists call &#8220;false consciousness&#8221; as they get duped over and over again at the ballot box by the rich, manipulative capitalists who rule over and exploit them.</p>
<p>Greenwald also <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/26/glenn_greenwald_on_occupy_wall_street" target="_blank">rejects</a> capitalism and the economic freedoms associated with a market-based economy.</p>
<p>It bothers him that &#8220;the wealthiest in our society are permitted to prosper without constraints,” he told Democracy Now. He calls the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats a Ronald Reagan &#8220;cliché.&#8221; It is &#8220;actually completely untrue&#8221; because as the rich get richer &#8220;nothing trickles down,&#8221; and &#8220;inequality starts to explode.&#8221; The richest conspire against the rest of society, using the political power that accompanies their wealth &#8220;to ensure that the system doesn’t work to create equal opportunity, but works only to entrench and shield their own ill-gotten gains.&#8221; In other words, profit is by definition theft, which is the position traditionally held by Marxists and left-wing anarchists.</p>
<p>A supporter of Occupy Wall Street, Greenwald wrote a book called, <i>With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful</i>. It&#8217;s not likely to be recommended in Rush Limbaugh&#8217;s &#8220;Stack of Stuff&#8221; anytime soon.</p>
<p>Poor people and average Americans can&#8217;t obtain justice in the courts, Greenwald contends. &#8220;The criminal justice system is now almost exclusively reserved for ordinary Americans, who are routinely subjected to harsh punishments even for the pettiest of offenses,&#8221; he writes. Ignoring countries like Cuba, North Korea, China, and Russia, Greenwald rails against the justice system in America, describing the U.S. as &#8220;the world&#8217;s largest and most merciless prison state for its poorest and most powerless citizens.&#8221;</p>
<p>America, he continues,</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;has an entrenched two-tiered system of justice: the country&#8217;s most powerful political and financial elites are virtually immunized from the rule of law, empowered to commit felonies with fullscale impunity and to act without any constraints, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in far greater numbers than in any other country on the planet.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>The law itself is unjust, according to Greenwald, because it &#8220;perpetuates and even generates tremendous social inequality.&#8221;</p>
<p>Greenwald also <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/26/glenn_greenwald_on_occupy_wall_street" target="_blank">blames</a> the financial services industry for the nation&#8217;s financial troubles, which led him to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. As Greenwald <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/26/glenn_greenwald_on_occupy_wall_street" target="_blank">sees things</a>, the violent Occupy protesters who regularly physically attacked police and private businesses were victimized when police fought back and tried to restore order. They, and Americans in general, are victims of the capitalist system, he believes. Like any garden-variety leftist radical, he considers police officers doing their job to be bad guys using the law to protect the &#8220;criminals &#8230; hiding in Wall Street buildings.&#8221; Occupy demonstrators, who defecated on police cars, set fire to buildings, raped and robbed with impunity, and assaulted police, were innocent angels &#8220;exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and assembly.&#8221;</p>
<p>Greenwald&#8217;s radical left-wing credentials are further burnished by his repeated condemnations of Israel and its supporters &#8212; e.g., the notion that &#8220;large and extremely influential <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.co.il/2007/02/enforced-orthodoxies-and-iran.html" target="_blank">Jewish donor groups</a>&#8221; secretly manipulate American foreign policy; the claim that most American politicians feel compelled to &#8220;<a href="http://cifwatch.com/cif-contributors/glenn-greenwald/" target="_blank">pledge</a> their uncritical, absolute loyalty&#8221; to Israel, lest their careers be ruined; the charge that “Israeli <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/nov/17/israel-gaza-us-policy" target="_blank">aggression</a> [against Gaza] is possible only because&#8221; of America&#8217;s &#8220;diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does&#8221;; and the stunning <a href="http://cifwatch.com/2013/06/17/glenn-greenwald-hamas-and-hezbollah-are-not-terrorist-movements/" target="_blank">suggestion</a> that it makes little sense to criminalize &#8220;anything that is deemed to be support for Hezbollah and Hamas,&#8221; given that those groups are &#8220;devoted to protecting their citizens against the state of Israel&#8221; and are &#8220;not in any way devoted to harming Americans.&#8221;</p>
<p>Despite the above documentation of Greenwald’s typical far-left background, Wilentz points to an article Greenwald <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/12/31/progressives_and_the_ron_paul_fallacies/" target="_blank">wrote</a> for Salon in December 2011 evaluating Ron Paul&#8217;s presidential candidacy from a far-left perspective (without explicitly endorsing him). But Greenwald only argues that, in his view, left-wingers could feasibly support Paul if they value principle over power. To do so, he acknowledges, they would have to overlook &#8220;horrible&#8221; aspects of Paul&#8217;s worldview, by which he means things such as support for cuts in social welfare spending and limiting government, which connect Paul to the Right.</p>
<p>But just as it boosts Paul, Greenwald’s column is also a scathing attack on President Obama from the far left.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s &#8220;conduct is nothing short of horrific,&#8221; Greenwald declares. The president &#8220;himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama has &#8220;vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs,&#8221; &#8220;slaughtered civilians,&#8221; &#8220;sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs,&#8221; &#8220;institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield,&#8221; and has &#8220;waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists,&#8221; he writes.</p>
<p>In a passage that ought to inspire chuckles from anyone who follows the news, Greenwald accuses Obama of &#8220;building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the &#8216;austerity&#8217; measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama has made the U.S. &#8220;as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government,&#8221; while backing &#8220;some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes.&#8221; Worst of all, in Greenwald&#8217;s view, is that under Obama &#8220;America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before.&#8221;</p>
<p>Again, if you believe, as Greenwald does, that the surveillance state is the defining issue of our time, supporting libertarian Paul over Obama isn&#8217;t hard to do.</p>
<p>Wilentz is also offended that years ago Greenwald opposed illegal immigration. To make matters worse, Greenwald dared to utilize &#8220;right-wing conceits and catchphrases.&#8221; Illegal immigration causes a &#8220;parade of evils&#8221; by wreaking havoc &#8220;economically, socially, and culturally,&#8221; Greenwald wrote, adding that it also &#8220;makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.”</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not clear how those &#8220;evils&#8221; are necessarily the concern of conservatives alone. Opposing illegal immigration on left-wing grounds isn&#8217;t difficult at all, at least in theory. The presence of illegal immigrants undermines the bargaining power of labor unions. The aliens are sometimes treated badly and are arguably &#8220;exploited&#8221; by those who hire them at below-market rates.</p>
<p>In fact, much of what Greenwald said used to be the default position of labor activists. They believed, correctly, that the influx of cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants puts downward pressure on wages.</p>
<p>Cesar Chavez, the Saul Alinsky-trained labor organizer, was a critic of illegal immigration which <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/03/cesar-chavez-wetbacks-immigrants-illegals_n_3008985.html" target="_blank">he viewed</a> as a threat to the labor movement&#8217;s power. In a 1972 interview, he used language that would no doubt offend today&#8217;s politically correct, identity politics-driven leftists. The United Farm Workers union co-founder described undocumented immigrants hired to break a strike as “wetbacks” and “illegals,” and lamented that, “As long as we have a poor country bordering California, it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes.”</p>
<p>Contrary to Wilentz&#8217;s claims, Greenwald is not unlike many others on the far left who find ready allies on the fringes of the Republican Party due to a shared worldview that puts America at the center of their hatred. This is the niche that Greenwald has occupied throughout most of his public career, and he has made the appropriate connections on the way. But time after time Greenwald has returned to the mantras of supporting massive wealth redistribution and maligning the U.S. as the source of the world’s ills. His commitment to Trotskyists and other totalitarian socialists is no accident, but an expression of his inner core.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/glenn-greenwald-raving-leftist/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>125</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Ronan Farrow Is MSNBC’s Newest Liberal Hypocrite</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/ronan-farrow-is-msnbcs-newest-liberal-hypocrite/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ronan-farrow-is-msnbcs-newest-liberal-hypocrite</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/ronan-farrow-is-msnbcs-newest-liberal-hypocrite/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:15:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[journalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MSNBC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ronan Farrow]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219812</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The new television host follows his debut by banning journalists from asking questions. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/nup_159618_0019.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219855" alt="Today - Season 62" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/nup_159618_0019-436x350.jpg" width="305" height="245" /></a>Oscar Wilde asked in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pagesix.com/2014/02/26/reporters-told-no-allen-questions-at-farrow-journalism-benefit/?_ga=1.59434539.724362131.1364905689">The New York Post</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, MSNBC’s newest liberal talk-show host, Ronan Farrow, will not answer questions about his family at a Wednesday night event and reporters making any inquiries will be thrown out of the charity event. The press release for the event said: “Any press who ask guests or Mr. Farrow about off-message topics will be immediately escorted out of the event.&#8221; As Page Six asked, “While journalists are banned from asking questions as praise is poured on Farrow for his own excellence in journalism, would he submit to such rigid interview stipulations from guests on his own fledgling show? We doubt it.” (As </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ronntorossian.com/">CEO of a PR Agency</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, I’d ask if restricted questions refer to his family life. Or also to his show. Can reporters really not ask about his show? Doubtful.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Par for the course for liberal journalists who often demand openness &#8212; and then when it is expected of them, the rules change. It’s the type of hypocritical double standard one can expect from liberals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Farrow, whose new program, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ronan Farrow Daily</i>, had awful ratings week one for his show.</p>
<p>Ratings placed his show third on cable, behind CNN and Fox, and the worst ranking MSNBC show of the day.  Farrow is famous for being the son of famous people, and reviews for the show have been simply awful.  The Daily Banter wrote: “If you missed the premiere of Ronan Farrow Daily yesterday, or watched any part of it today, chances are you avoided succumbing to an inadvertent afternoon nap. The show is, to put it bluntly, dull.” While it remains to be seen how the show will do, reviews on Monday noted many areas for improvement. Some of the harshest words came from Entertainment Weekly, which gave it a C- grade, and the Guardian said, &#8220;You’re going to have to try not to put us to sleep.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Farrow has wasted no time expressing far-left viewpoints. Hypocritically, he tweeted a few weeks ago: “New Gallup poll says 67% of Americans dissatisfied with wealth distribution. 7% are &#8216;very satisfied&#8217; and I would like what they are smoking.”  Farrow was quickly lambasted via social media, with people responding: “I know. If only people born into wealth didn&#8217;t take all the good jobs, right?”, “Says The Rich Kid,” and my personal favorite: “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://twitter.com/RonanFarrow">@RonanFarrow</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> I am dissatisfied, Ronan please send me my part of your paycheck, thanks.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Farrow in many ways is par for the course amongst rich, liberal New Yorkers.  Amazingly, I have yet to receive any money from my wealthy Upper West Side neighbors who clamor about the need for wealth redistribution.  As I have told them, if they feel guilty about their wealth, they can give me some of their money. (Memo to Ronan: If you’d like to donate to me after reading this, send it to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ronn-torossian">Ronn Torossian</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, c/o Front Page Magazine. Set the example on redistribution.)</span></p>
<p>Farrow made offensive anti-Republican comments after President Barack Obama&#8217;s January State of the Union address. While Obama said that Army Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, who suffered injuries fighting in Afghanistan, &#8220;still struggles from his left side,&#8221; Farrow tweeted: &#8220;Cory &#8216;struggles on the left side.&#8217; Congress relates.&#8221; Imagine the outrage if a conservative were to mock a handicapped military veteran?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Thankfully, good TV, led by conservative thinkers continue to achieve the best ratings on the airwaves. Fox News ended 2013 as the top-rated cable news network in America – for the 12</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">th</sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> straight year. The channel beat MSNBC and CNN combined in total viewers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Daniel Boorstin, an American historian who was the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress said, “Our illusions are the house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ronan Farrow’s house is the only reason anyone has heard of him – as a liberal journalist he’s happy to probe others, but won’t speak himself.  </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/in-obamas-era-what-would-ronald-reagan-do/">As the wise Ronald Reagan</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> noted, “Liberals don’t like me talking about liberals.”</span></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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/ronan-farrow-is-msnbcs-newest-liberal-hypocrite/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>39</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Socialism Spill on Aisle 9</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Feb 2014 05:51:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minimum wage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Unemployment]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The minimum wage hike mess and the poor workers who will have to live with it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219354" alt="1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/20101026_054910_1027_biz_WALMART_MAIN_ml.jpg_GALLERY.jpg" width="320" height="215" /></a>The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.</span></p>
<p>The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don&#8217;t know what working for a living entails and don&#8217;t even understand the concept.</p>
<p>The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it&#8217;s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.</p>
<p>A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can&#8217;t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren&#8217;t making enough money, just raise their salaries.</p>
<p>The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn&#8217;t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn&#8217;t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.</p>
<p>Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly income inequality becomes an even bigger problem that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn&#8217;t occur to them that the living standard of the poor is not defined by an infographic comparing their income to Bill Gates&#8217; spectacles budget or George Soros&#8217; villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.</p>
<p>It isn&#8217;t even defined by their salary, but by the buying power of that salary.</p>
<p>A salary is just a number. It was once possible to buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost you that hundred and the politician may cost you a hundred thousand.</p>
<p>The businesses that minimum wage workers depend on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even assuming that the pay hike would be employment neutral, which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay hike as a price hike. And then before you know it everyone is making more money that still buys about the same amount that their old paychecks did.</p>
<p>Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of interest to Marxist professors, but of very little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef.</p>
<p>The prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the working class victims of his class warfare are standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan and a grocery list.</p>
<p>The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what she can afford to take home doesn&#8217;t need income equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs is a living standard that will allow her to afford what working Americans used to be able to afford. A minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks good until it puts her out of a job or until she comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes match her new paycheck.</p>
<p>Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but progressives never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven&#8217;t already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.</p>
<p>In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over powdered milk in government stores in a country that has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region. Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other price controlled staples. But being entitled to something doesn&#8217;t mean that you can get it. Not until the government seizes control of the entire production process of powdered milk and when that is done, then no one will ever drink powdered milk again.</p>
<p>The path to Venezuela&#8217;s Aisle 9 is surprisingly similar to America&#8217;s Aisle 9. Governments can raise wages or lower food prices, but they can&#8217;t enforce the availability of food or jobs and they can&#8217;t control how the working class will work around the consequences of foodless government supermarkets and minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the marketplace.</p>
<p>Venezuela&#8217;s Friend of the Working Class, Hugo Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the Working Class are also doing comfortably well in D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an advocate for helping the working class by adding 12 million illegal aliens to the job market with illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with environmental regulations and freeing the people still working from that dreaded &#8220;job lock.&#8221;</p>
<p>For the Washington Friends of the Working Class drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the geography of the moon.</p>
<p>In Aisle 9, things are simple and inflexible, but in politics and academia everything is subjective.</p>
<p>Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully unreal. There are no hard facts, only ideas and slogans.</p>
<p>Like The Great Gatsby&#8217;s Tom and Daisy, the progressive law professors and community organizers inhabit a &#8220;vast carelessness&#8221; of conferences and cocktail parties from which they emerge to carelessly smash things up before retreating back into it with no real awareness of what they have done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9 whose lives they have smashed up ought to be grateful to them.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>365</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>ObamaCare&#8217;s Ruthless Assault on the Middle Class</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:15:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219272</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And our health. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219279" alt="healthcare.gov__0" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/healthcare.gov__0-450x310.jpg" width="270" height="186" /></a>Liberals are winning wild praise for their candor in admitting problems with Obamacare. It shows you the level of honesty people have come to expect of our liberal friends. Now, liberals are applauded for not lying through their teeth about something.</p>
<p>What are they supposed to say? <i>This Obamacare website is fantastic! And really, haven&#8217;t you already read all the magazines in your current doctor&#8217;s office anyway?</i></p>
<p>The New York Times has described Obama&#8217;s repeated claim that you could keep your insurance plan and keep your doctor under Obamacare as a mere slip of the tongue: &#8220;Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that.&#8221;</p>
<p>Misspoke? How exactly does one misspeak, word for word, dozens of times, over and over again?</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t misspeaking &#8212; it was a deliberate, necessary lie. Even Democrats couldn&#8217;t have voted for Obamacare if Americans had known the truth. It was absolutely vital for Obama to lie about people being able to keep their insurance and their doctors.</p>
<p>Of course, it was difficult for voters to know the truth because every time Republicans would try to tell them, the White House and the media would rush in and call the critics liars.</p>
<p>The White House posted a specific refutation of the &#8220;disinformation&#8221; about not being able to keep your doctor or insurance plan. That claim, the website said, was being disseminated by Republicans &#8220;to scare people.&#8221;</p>
<p>Their proof consisted of a video of Obama <i>clearly </i>stating, &#8220;If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you&#8217;ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor.&#8221;</p>
<p>A video of someone asserting the very fact in dispute does not rise to the level of &#8220;evidence,&#8221; but it was more than enough for MSNBC.</p>
<p>Even when pretending to be critical of Obamacare, liberals lie about the real problems. They tell us they&#8217;re worried about the percentage of young people signing up for Obamacare. The mix of young and old people in Obamacare is completely irrelevant. It won&#8217;t help if a lot of young people sign up because their premiums are negligible.</p>
<p>To keep the system afloat, what Obamacare really needs is lots of healthy people, preferably healthy older people. Their premiums are astronomical &#8212; and they won&#8217;t need much medical treatment.</p>
<p>Premiums are set by your age, not your health. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you never go to the doctor. Obamacare punishes you for having a healthy lifestyle. The Obamacare tax is a massively regressive poll tax on the middle-aged and the middle class.</p>
<p>Apart from those who are subsidized, everyone pays the exact same amount in penalties or insurance premiums for his age group. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you don&#8217;t make as much money as Bill Gates. Any 58-year-old male who doesn&#8217;t qualify for a subsidy will pay the same Obamacare tax as Gates.</p>
<p>When Margaret Thatcher tried to impose the same tax per person, as a &#8220;community charge,&#8221; there were riots in the street.</p>
<p>Our extremely progressive tax system, where nearly half the country pays no income tax at all, and the other half pays about 40 percent of their income, may not be fair. But most people also don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s fair to tax a guy making $80,000 a year the identical amount as one making $80 million a year. That&#8217;s exactly what Obamacare does.</p>
<p>With Obamacare, the Democratic Party has foisted the most regressive tax possible on America. This ruthless assault on the middle class is all so we can have a health care system more like every other country has.</p>
<p>Until now, the United States has had the highest survival rates in the world for heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Cancer comparisons are the most useful because all Western countries keep careful records for this disease.</p>
<p>For all types of cancers, European men have only a 47.3 percent five-year survival rate, compared to a 66.3 percent survival rate for American men.</p>
<p>European women have only a 55.8 percent chance of being alive five years after being diagnosed with any type of cancer, compared to 62.9 percent of American women.</p>
<p>American survival rates for breast, prostate, thyroid and skin cancer are higher than 90 percent. Europeans do not have a 90 percent survival rate for one of those cancers.</p>
<p>The European rates are even worse than they sound because many cancers are not discovered until the victim&#8217;s death &#8212; twice as many as in the U.S. All those cancers were excluded from the study.</p>
<p>Canadian cancer survival rates aren&#8217;t much better than the European rates &#8212; and they&#8217;ve been able to sneak into to the U.S. for treatment! Women in the U.S. have a 61 percent survival rate for all cancers, compared to a 58 percent survival rate in Canada. Men in the U.S. have a 57 percent survival rate compared to 53 percent in Canada.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s why your insurance premiums have to go through the roof and your Obamacare tax is the same as Bill Gates&#8217;. So across the world, we&#8217;ll all be equal, dying of cancer, heart disease and diabetes as often as everyone else.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not that Obama doesn&#8217;t believe in American exceptionalism; it&#8217;s that he wants to end it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/obamacares-ruthless-assault-on-the-middle-class/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Did I Move?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/did-i-move/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=did-i-move</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/did-i-move/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2014 05:30:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[demographic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mass immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vote]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218714</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Or did America become different through mass immigration? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/vote-aqui2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218732" alt="vote-aqui2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/vote-aqui2-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>With all the smirking on the left about their electoral victories, it&#8217;s important to remember that Democrats haven&#8217;t won the hearts and minds of the American people. They changed the people. If you pour vinegar into a bottle of wine, the wine didn&#8217;t turn, you poured vinegar into it. Similarly, liberals changed no minds. They added millions of new liberal voters through immigration.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So why are Republicans like Trey Gowdy, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and John Boehner making fools of themselves in order to spot the Democrats three more touchdowns?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The House Republicans&#8217; &#8220;Standards for Immigration Reform,&#8221; for example, contains this fat, honking nonsense: &#8220;One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the kids say: </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">WTF?</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That may be a pleasant-sounding sentiment, but it has absolutely nothing to do with our country&#8217;s history. Not the first thing. Did Republicans really think they could pawn off the idea that our forefathers fought and died at Valley Forge so that illegal aliens wouldn&#8217;t have to live in the shadows?</span></p>
<p><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah, it was a long shot. We didn&#8217;t know you guys had read the Constitution. We&#8217;ll be quiet now.</i></p>
<p>Apart from the fact that protecting children from the mistakes of their parents has not the slightest connection with the nation&#8217;s founding, it&#8217;s a ridiculous concept.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes, children suffer when their parents break the law. Also when their parents get divorced, become alcoholics, don&#8217;t read to them at night, feed them junk food and take them to Justin Bieber concerts. None of that is the child&#8217;s fault.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But it&#8217;s not the country&#8217;s fault either.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If we have to excuse lawbreaking so as not to &#8220;punish the children,&#8221; there&#8217;s no end to the crimes that have to be forgiven &#8212; insider trading, theft, rape, murder and so on.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How do you think kids feel when their father has to &#8220;live in the shadows&#8221; because he committed a rape? The kids did nothing wrong, but they have to go to bed every night wondering: </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is tomorrow the day Dad is going to be caught?</i></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">How do you function like that? And how awful it must be when their dad is sent to prison! How do you think Jack Abramoff&#8217;s kids felt? What about Martha Stewart&#8217;s kid?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Why not just forgive the crimes of all perpetrators who have kids? At a minimum, shouldn&#8217;t we allow criminals to defer their sentences until their kids turn 26 so they can stay on Dad&#8217;s health insurance? Or at least until their kids have gone to college? Chris Christie can give them in-state tuition!</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;It&#8217;s not the kids&#8217; fault&#8221; proves too much. People can get away with anything if they&#8217;re willing to use their children as trump cards to avoid the force of law.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The once-respected Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., compared illegal aliens brought here as kids to children who steal a grape or scream in a restaurant:</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;When children wander into neighborhood yards, we don&#8217;t call that trespassing. When children cry and yell and scream at restaurants or on airplanes, we don&#8217;t call that a violation of the noise ordinance. When children eat a grape at the grocery store or eat a piece of candy waiting in line before Mom or Dad pays for it, we don&#8217;t have them arrested for petty larceny.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes, but in those cases, both the child and his parents had a right to be where they were &#8212; the yard, restaurant or grocery store &#8212; when the child suddenly behaved like a child. With illegal aliens, the parents are more like gypsies teaching their kids to beg and pick pockets. The parents forced the kids into being lawbreakers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Similarly, Palestinians use their children to commit acts of terrorism against Israel, so that when Israel responds, the parents can wail, &#8220;They&#8217;re bombing children!&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(I thought only liberals couldn&#8217;t do analogies.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Americans are under no moral obligation to admit huge numbers of people who have no particular right to be here just because the Democrats need 30 million new voters.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Why shouldn&#8217;t Republicans oppose mass immigration on the grounds that immigrants will vote Democratic? The only reason the Democrats </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">want</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> mass immigration is because they know immigrants will vote Democratic. (Also for the cheap nannies and gardeners.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Immigration is the &#8220;single issue&#8221; that decides every other issue. If this country were the same demographically today as it was in 1980, Romney would have won a bigger victory in 2012 than Reagan did against Carter. And we wouldn&#8217;t have to hear about soccer all the time.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We&#8217;re living in a different country now, and I can&#8217;t recall moving! Had I wanted to live in Japan, I could have moved there. Had I had wanted to live in Mexico, Pakistan or Chechnya &#8212; I could have moved to those places, too.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(Although maybe not. They all have stricter immigration policies than we do.)</span></p>
<p>I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;re lovely, but I wanted to live in America. Now I can&#8217;t. At the current rate of immigration, it won&#8217;t exist anymore. The Democrats couldn&#8217;t win elections there, so they changed it.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With the repeal of Obamacare in the balance, I have argued that it&#8217;s insane for Republicans to waste resources primarying their own guys in 2014. Even the most heinous Republican can usually argue, &#8220;Would you really rather have a Democrat in this seat?&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But any Republican who supports mass immigration &#8212; whether with Marco Rubio&#8217;s amnesty bill, or idiotic arguments about &#8220;not punishing the children&#8221; &#8212; has forfeited that claim. If the country is going to be ruined anyway, it could not matter less who wins any particular seat on this Titanic.</span></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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/did-i-move/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>51</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Center of What?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/the-center-of-what/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-center-of-what</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/the-center-of-what/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 05:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Gottfried]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[middle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214730</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The disturbing encroachment of leftism into the political center. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/political-moderates1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214731" alt="political-moderates1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/political-moderates1-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Lately I’ve become annoyed by the fumbling attempt of historically ignorant journalists to define the “center.” The way they do this is by assigning Republicans to the right and Democrats to the left. One of our two national parties supposedly monopolizes all conservative qualities and the other all liberal ones. Those who consider themselves “undecided” or “swing voters” apparently belong to some shifting center. But as I like to remind my younger readers, both parties are well to the left of where they stood even twenty years ago on social issues.  Supporting gay marriage, which now seems acceptable to everyone but traditional Christians, would have sounded like a weird, radical idea to Republicans and Democrats alike as late as the 1980s. The feminist revolution that I have witnessed in my lifetime would have once sent Democrats for their barf bags, that is, at a time when the Democratic Party still had a very traditional Southern Protestant and Northern Catholic working-class base.</p>
<p>I won’t bother affirming all the trendy social changes as “good things” since I’m not running for political office, and since I really don’t care what the national media think of me, or even if they’re aware of my existence. I’m simply noting the obvious here, which is that this country, like other Western societies, has moved decidedly to the left over the last fifty years on major social issues. This has happened under the influence of the media, public education, and expanding government bureaucracy dedicated to fighting “discrimination.”</p>
<p>Our political culture has also gone in the same direction because “conservative” parties here and elsewhere have tried to keep up with the other side. These increasingly non-descript other parties have focused on those differences that the media and the center-left still view as “discussable.”  Obamacare is one such issue, on which sensitive people are still allowed to differ. By directing all their fire on the Democrats’ health plan, the GOP has been able to abandon truly “divisive” issues, that is, social ones that the media, entertainment industry and public educators have already decided for us. This strategy of abandonment doesn’t always work, as we saw in the last presidential race when Romney, especially during the debates with Obama, tried slavishly to take the same social positions as his Democratic rival. But at least Romney lost “with dignity,” as I heard from more than one Republican.  The Dems of course won by fighting with bare knuckles under the black flag.</p>
<p>Curiously Republican commentators have no idea of how far to the left they’re drifting, partly because they’re historical illiterates. I was flabbergasted to find one self-described conservative critic in the New York Post characterize the predecessor of the current New York City mayor as a “right of center” executive. The former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is a lifelong liberal Democrat, who endorsed Obama, but who agreed to run as a Republican for mayor because it was a useful launching pad for his campaign. Where exactly is this “center” located that former Mayor Bloomberg moved to the right of? I’m still looking for it in vain.  Certainly Bloomberg was not as reckless in adding to the pensions of public employees or dealing with the power of the police to apprehend criminals as the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is likely to be. But I can’t imagine what sense there is in designating someone as a “right of center” politician who holds the same views as many liberal Democrats.</p>
<p>Similarly, I was astonished to hear Jonah Goldberg on TV describe de Blasio as “so leftwing he’s almost like a Jacobin, but not quite that bad.” Goldberg, who was straining for effect, compared the newly elected mayor, who seems radical even by the standards of the Obama administration, to the radical wing of the French Revolution. The Jacobins, who took over France in 1793, were hardly moderates by late eighteenth century standards. They fell in 1794, after having produced considerable chaos and a bloodbath internally. But the Jacobins were utterly reactionary in their social views as compared to the dominant ideas of the present age. They were unabashed sexists, ultranationalists, and expressed racial opinions that Goldberg would undoubtedly denounce as fascist.  Although I don’t begrudge Goldberg his views, it is foolish to belittle those who sound only slightly more progressive than the speaker by comparing them to people who did not even operate in the same political universe.</p>
<p>This may be partly an attempt to hide how far we’ve moved in a particular political direction over the last half century. Those who take for granted what have been radical changes understate their impact and try to fit them into their own spectrum of opinion. But I only wish that I never again have to encounter someone’s made-up parallels with the past and or someone’s invented political center. Enough is enough.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-gottfried/the-center-of-what/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>10</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Study Says Movies Make You Liberal</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/study-says-movies-make-you-liberal/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=study-says-movies-make-you-liberal</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/study-says-movies-make-you-liberal/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2014 05:22:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Films]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hollywood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[influence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214397</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left picks up the propaganda battle where the Nazis and Lenin left off. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ag.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-214399" alt="ag" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ag.jpg" width="214" height="317" /></a>Conservatives have long known and complained that movies and television shows are shot through with overt progressive messages, although the Hollywood left downplays that concern as paranoid. But they may not be aware that even seemingly apolitical entertainment can contain subtle left-leaning messages, and those messages are effective at nudging audiences – even conservatives – to the left.</p>
<p>The science is settled. According to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/sentimental-films-can-influence-political-attitudes-and-make-you-more-liberal-scientists-say-9028375.html">research</a> published in the December edition of <i>Social Science Quarterly</i>, viewers who are “not prepared” to be critical about what they see onscreen are more likely to experience a temporary politically “leftward shift” when watching Hollywood movies with an “underlying liberal message.”</p>
<p>A team of political scientists at the University of Notre Dame set out to investigate the power of political messages in popular films. Dr. Todd Adkins, the lead author of the <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12070/abstract">study</a> “<i>Moving</i> Pictures? Experimental Evidence of Cinematic Influence on Political Attitudes,” <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.12070/abstract">wrote</a> that: “Media effects research has generally ignored the possibility that popular films can affect political attitudes,” an omission he described as “puzzling” for two reasons:</p>
<blockquote><p>First, research on public opinion finds the potential for persuasion is highest when respondents are unaware that political messages are being communicated. Second, multiple studies have found that entertainment media can alter public opinion. Together, this suggests that popular films containing political messages should possess the potential to influence attitudes.</p></blockquote>
<p>That concept is a no-brainer. The left has understood the power of film to sway audiences at least as far back as the Nazis. Lenin once said that “for us, the cinema is the most important of the arts” – important, of course, in terms of propagating their agenda. Over the decades, the less culturally savvy conservatives increasingly ceded that arena to them; the result is that the left owns the culture, and whoever owns the culture dominates the political arena as well.</p>
<p>Considering what a divisive political issue healthcare currently is in the United States, the authors of the study wondered if subjects watching films with pro-healthcare reform messages would become more liberal on the issue. To test the theory the authors <a href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/PressRelease/pressReleaseId-109934.html">surveyed</a> 252 students at Notre Dame – 54% of whom regard themselves as conservative – on their political views, randomly assigned them one of three films, then questioned them again.</p>
<p>The movies had either a strong and explicit political message (<i>The Rainmaker</i>, in which healthcare is a central part of the storyline), a subtle political message (<i>As Good as it Gets</i> starring Jack Nicholson, in which healthcare is less prominent, but still plays a role in the story), or no political message (Tom Hanks’ <i>That Thing You Do!</i>, which has nothing to do with healthcare). <i>The Rainmaker</i>, for what it’s worth, stars Matt Damon, arguably Hollywood’s most politically outspoken big star, considering his support for radical historian Howard Zinn, his many public statements about income inequality, and his appearance in overtly political films like the “Bush lied, people died” action thriller <i>The Green Zone</i> and class warfare sci-fi flick <i>Elysium</i> (both box office bombs).</p>
<p>The tests revealed that viewers of both <i>As Good as it Gets</i> and <i>The Rainmaker</i> did indeed become experience a “leftward shift in attitude” on the healthcare topic, <i>regardless of their stances beforehand</i>, and this change persisted for two weeks after viewing the films. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but Adkins and his group found that such movies “possess the ability to change political attitudes, especially on issues that are unframed by the media,” and that “such influence persists over time and is not moderated by partisanship, ideology, or political knowledge.” He concluded by recommending that more study on the political influence of popular movies “is clearly warranted.”</p>
<p>Why was even the movie with a subtle message so effective? Because the audience subjects weren’t on their guard: “Viewers come expecting to be entertained and are not prepared to encounter and evaluate political messages as they would during campaign advertisements or network news,” said Adkins. “In an age where the biases of network news and talk radio programs are accepted facts, the movie theater may prove to be one of the last sources of cross-cutting exposure to political messages.”</p>
<p>This is not an argument for conservatives to avoid theaters for fear that they might unwittingly be steered left; too many on the right have already washed their hands of Hollywood as it is, and disengagement is not how you win a culture war. Instead, this should be an argument for conservatives to make themselves more aware of how Hollywood uses pop culture as a Trojan horse to manipulate and indoctrinate. Awareness enables resistance. Be aware of what a movie’s political position is, even in a seemingly apolitical film, and how it is being presented.</p>
<p>This study is also an argument for realizing that such political messaging can cut both ways. Powerful storytelling can compel audiences to embrace the values of the right as well as the left. Nobody likes to be preached to, not even the left. People are seduced and changed by great stories. That must be our mission: compelling storytelling, not political lectures.</p>
<p>The cultural battle is the critical one. Unless and until the right starts thinking in terms of waging a vigorous cultural campaign, we will continue to lose presidential elections. Winning that critical conflict requires that we get into the fray, understand and embrace pop culture, and commit to reclaiming it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/study-says-movies-make-you-liberal/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>30</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Left-Wing America Stands Alone</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-left-wing-america-stands-alone</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Dec 2013 05:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213911</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While Europe goes right, America stays left back.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-biden.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213914" alt="obama-biden" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-biden-438x350.jpg" width="307" height="245" /></a>American progressives like to think of their country as backward and reactionary compared to Europe. And they have never been more right than now when Europe and the rest of the First World have gone right while America under Obama has been left back.</p>
<p>Recently Australia, Japan and Norway welcomed in conservative governments. Tony Abbott, Australia’s new prime minister, is a former heavyweight boxer who attended Oxford and is putting a spoke in the wheel of the Global Warming ecohoax. Japan is casting off its pacifism and standing up to the People’s Republic of China and Norway gave its left-wing government the boot and moved in “Iron Erma” in a coalition with the libertarian Progress Party which opposes taxes and immigration and supports free enterprise.</p>
<p>Australia, Japan and Norway are not outliers. The majority of First World countries now have conservative governments.</p>
<p>Canada has embraced a patriotic foreign policy and energy exploration under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party have continued to move Israel’s economy toward free enterprise. And even in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron, for all his follies, is a conservative, even if he is more McCain than DeMint, and has pushed for deregulation and welfare reform.</p>
<p>Sweden’s center-right coalition government has won re-election for the first time in a century. Norway and Sweden, countries that Americans used to consider the very embodiments of Socialism, now both have conservative governments.</p>
<p>In Germany, Angela Merkel will serve a third term as chancellor.  The Netherlands still has a conservative government which has come out against multiculturalism and the welfare state.</p>
<p>In Spain, the center-right People’s Party won the biggest majority of any party in three decades and is projected to win reelection. In Poland, the center-right Civic Platform continues to govern. In Greece, it’s the center-right New Democracy. In Portugal, it’s the Social Democratic Party and the People’s Party (somewhat on the right, despite their names). In Iceland, it’s the conservative Independence Party and the Progressive Party (also on the right, despite its name.)</p>
<p>Even Europe’s left-wing parties have had to adapt to the new economic environment. Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons, has suffered a severe setback in municipal elections and is scrambling to hold her left-wing government together. And even Thorning-Schmidt only made it this far by embracing welfare reform, cutting corporate taxes and slashing unemployment benefits.</p>
<p>The rule of the radical left in the United States is very much an outlier in the rest of the First World where conservative and center-right parties predominate. The conventional First World response to the economic crisis has been to cut spending and reform welfare, while in the United States has spent more money than ever before and expanded welfare.</p>
<p>Much of Europe now favors less federalism and less immigration. The United States has expanded its federal government dramatically and both Democratic and Republican leaders support amnesty for illegal aliens at a time when immigration is politically toxic everywhere else.</p>
<p>The American left insists that historical inevitability is on its side, but it has lost nearly everywhere else.</p>
<p>America stands alone under the rule of the left, in uncontrolled spending, uncontrolled immigration and the iron hand of the welfare state.</p>
<p>America’s massive wealth and resources have allowed the left to act as if it could borrow against them indefinitely to finance its big government schemes. Smaller countries don’t have the luxury of running up infinite debts and not worrying about how they will be paid back or pretending that impossible rates of economic growth will compensate for trillion dollar deficits.</p>
<p>America is the left’s economic fantasyland because it has so much that they imagine that it will take a long time to bankrupt.</p>
<p>Europe is dominated by parliamentary democracies where it would have been difficult for an executive to stay in office on popularity and racial guilt after his actual policies had been completely discredited. In a parliamentary democracy, the 2010 midterm elections wouldn’t have just meant a Republican House of Representatives, but would have booted Obama out of the White House.</p>
<p>Conservatives denounce populist politics in America, but it’s actually the remnants of the system that safeguards political power from populist elections that has kept the Senate and the White House in the hands of the left while turning over the House of Representatives to the Republicans creating a crisis in which the populist body could do nothing, while Obama unilaterally ushered in an imperial presidency.</p>
<p>Another major difference is that America has a higher percentage of minorities than most other First World countries. In many First World nations, the left has assembled minorities into a welfare coalition. But such a coalition is much more potent in the United States because of demographics.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the Obama factor.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton would probably have lost in 2012. Most Democratic hacks would have. But the cult of personality built around Obama by the news and entertainment industry has been very hard to breach. Only the “If you like your health plan” lie has finally put a serious dent in his likability and trust ratings.</p>
<p>Obama is something unique. He’s the end product of a venture by liberal billionaires from the financial and tech sectors to build a radical Trojan horse politician. They invested a great deal of money into their project and the dividends have been huge. No other First World country has been victimized by such a calculated scheme or had so many resources invested in hijacking its democracy.</p>
<p>Some 6 billion dollars were raised and spent in the 2012 election. Those are astronomical amounts of money and they are probably only the tip of the iceberg. Beating that kind of spending isn’t easy.</p>
<p>While the rest of the First World moves on, America remains trapped in the defunct economic and political grip of the left. After dedicating enormous resources to taking over the Democratic Party and then the country, the left has turned the United States of America into its Soviet Union, a country out of time, its economy and society wracked by the discredited political and economic theories of the left.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/a-left-wing-america-stands-alone/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>76</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Jonestown Revisited</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/jonestown-revisited/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jonestown-revisited</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/jonestown-revisited/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Dec 2013 05:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Lloyd Billingsley]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cult]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jim Jones]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Podesta]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jonestown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213689</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Podesta’s putdown proves educational.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Brown_Jones1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213690" alt="Brown_Jones" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Brown_Jones1.jpg" width="256" height="198" /></a>Clinton veteran John Podesta recently joined the Obama White House and quickly caught the spirit of the place, describing the house GOP as a “cult worthy of Jonestown.” Podesta apologized to House Speaker John Boehner, who duly accepted the apology, but the matter should not end there. Indeed, it abounds in educational value.</p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/18/obama-adviser-podesta-under-fire-for-comparing-gop-to-jonestown/">this news report</a> on the putdown, Jonestown emerged as a “Guyana cult colony where, in 1978, a member of Congress was killed. Nearly 1,000 people died in what was described as a mass suicide days later.” It actually was an enforced mass suicide, with armed guards making sure the victims, most of them African Americans, drank a deadly brew of kool-aid and cyanide. The murdered member of Congress, one of five people killed that day, was Leo Ryan, a California Democrat. One of the survivors was Ryan staffer Jackie Speier, now a member of Congress. But there’s still more to it.</p>
<p><a href="http://crimevictimsmediareport.com/?p=4206">Jim Jones was an orthodox Stalinist and member of the Communist Party USA</a>. He was a true believer in “revolutionary suicide” and left the assets of Jonestown and its followers to the Soviet Union. Before that, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/366727/someone-remind-podesta-jim-jones-was-democratic-vote-fraudster-john-fund">as John Fund has noted</a>, Jones was a big hit with those Jeane Kirkpatrick called the “San Francisco Democrats.”</p>
<p>Jones launched the People’s Temple in his home state of Indiana but headed west to San Francisco in the 1960s. He drew rave reviews from California Assemblyman Willie Brown, who compared Jones to Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Tse-Tung. The late Chairman Mao is the most appropriate comparison, with the possible exception of Davis, who twice ran for vice-president with the Communist Party USA, on the bottom of the ticket with white Stalinist Gus Hall.</p>
<p>Jones also hung out with Jerry Brown, governor at the time and already making unsuccessful bids for the White House. Walter Mondale met with Jones, as did Rosalynn Carter. Federal HEW boss Joseph Califano hailed Jones’ contributions to freedom and “human dignity.” Closer to home, San Francisco mayor George Moscone appointed Jones to the city’s powerful housing commission. Fund cites evidence that Jones was deeply involved in electoral fraud.</p>
<p>So from his base in San Francisco, supposedly a place of political sophistication, Jim Jones easily faked out Democrats at the local, state, and federal levels. The key was not the bogus healings and such but Jones’ “progressive” credentials. Adulation aside, Jones had another place in mind for the “purest communist” settlement on earth.</p>
<p>He decamped for the remote reaches of Guyana, taking nearly 1,000 followers with him. He ruled the Jonestown gulag in true Stalinist style, but news of Jones’ repressions managed to leak out. When <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/11/18/leo_ryan_jonestown_the_forgotten_non_kool_aid_drinking_victims_of_the_jonestown.html">Leo Ryan and his congressional delegation</a> showed up, Jones gave them the tour. They left with a group of defectors, but Jones loyalist Larry Layton opened fire, gunning down Ryan, defector Patricia Parks, NBC reporter Don Harris, NBC photographer Don Brown, and Greg Robinson, a photographer for the <i>San Francisco Examiner</i>. Jackie Speier was wounded but survived by hiding behind an airplane wheel and playing dead. Jim Jones had already ordered the mass suicide that claimed nearly 1,000 victims. It was November 18, 1978.</p>
<p>In 1983 President Ronald Reagan awarded Leo Ryan the Congressional Gold Medal. In 2008, 30 years after Jonestown, Jackie Speier was elected to Congress from Ryan’s district. She has not exactly gone public with any thoughts on John Podesta’s equation of the House GOP to the Jonestown cult, which John Fund called “political malpractice of a high order.” For other observers it was as dirty and low-down as it gets. But maybe Podesta, who was 29 at the time of Jonestown, simply didn’t know what he was talking about.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/lloyd-billingsley/jonestown-revisited/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Big Dem Cities, Big Dem Poverty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:57:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Newt Gingrich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213333</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The startling truth about America's biggest poverty centers and the politics that produces them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213335" alt="110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/110811-national-homeless-poverty-poor-450x312.jpg" width="270" height="187" /></a>On Sunday&#8217;s ABC <i>This Week </i>telecast, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2013/12/15/gingrich-schools-reich-every-major-city-which-poverty-center-run-demo">squared off</a> with former Clinton Labor secretary Robert Reich, who tried to blame the increase in poverty over the last five years on the GOP. “Here’s the baloney,&#8221; Gingrich fired back. &#8220;Every major city which is a center of poverty is run by Democrats. Every major city. Their policies have failed, they’re not willing to admit and the fact is it’s the poor who suffer from bad government.” Unfortunately for the millions of Americans, Gingrich is right on the money. Here is a breakdown of the ten cities with populations above 250,000 that have borne the brunt of Democratic ideology.</p>
<p>St. Louis&#8217;s poverty rate is 26 percent overall, and <a href="http://www.deaconess.org/ChildreninSt.Louis_5.aspx">four-in-ten</a> children live in poverty. Like Detroit, the city has <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/2013/07/bankruptcy-risk-st-louis-is-not.html">experienced</a> a major population decline, from 850,000 in the mid-20th century to 318,000 in 2013. Last year&#8217;s Annual Performance Report <a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/st-louis-schools-score-unaccredited-range-under-new-grading-scale-wont-lose-accreditation">gave</a> the city&#8217;s public schools a rating of 24.6 percent on a scale of zero to 100 percent. The city, which is also reeling from $640 million in unfunded pension liabilities, is currently rated the <a href="http://lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/crime/10-dangerous-large/">third</a> most dangerous large city in the nation. St. Louis&#8217;s current mayor is Francis G. Slay, who has served since 2001. There hasn&#8217;t been a Republican mayor in St. Louis since 1949.</p>
<p>Newark, New Jersey&#8217;s <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/34/3451000.html">poverty rate</a> is 26.1 percent. Its former mayor, Cory Booker, who was recently elected to the United States Senate, was the latest in a long, unbroken line of Democratic mayors dating back <i>106 years</i> to 1907. Former Newark Mayor Sharpe James was <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/swamps-jersey-69529">convicted</a> of five counts of fraud in 2008. Yet he is hardly an anomaly: with the exception of Booker, <i>every</i> Mayor of Newark since 1962 has been indicted for crimes committed during their tenure in office. Between 2005 and 2012, the city&#8217;s population declined from 281,063 to 278,906, while violent crime totals increased from 2,821 to 3,219.</p>
<p>The residents of Cincinnati, OH are afflicted by a <a href="http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39/3915000.html">poverty rate</a> of 27.4 percent overall, with a staggering 53.1 percent child poverty rate as of 2012. Former Democratic Mayor Mark Mallory left recently-elected Democrat Mayor John Cranley a $60 million deficit throughout 2012, and an annual budget shortfall of 20 percent, leading many to believe that bankruptcy is imminent. Cincinnati&#8217;s last non-Democrat mayor, Charter Party member Arnold L. Bortz, served until 1984.</p>
<p>In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/11/21/246413432/weighing-the-role-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-s-schools">28 percent</a> of city residents overall live in poverty, a number that balloons to 40 percent in terms of child poverty. Democratic voter registration <a href="http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/philadelphia/61597-no-surprise-democrats-cruise-to-big-wins-in-philly">outnumbers</a> Republican registration by a six-to-one margin in a city where the last Republican mayor to hold office, Bernard Samuel, was <a href="http://thesis.christopherwink.com/thesis-paper/part-two-the-past/">voted</a> out in 1952. Current mayor Michael Nutter is presiding over a city with the lowest credit rating of the country&#8217;s five most populous cities ($8.75 billion in outstanding debt) and a pension system that is only funded at a level of 47.6 percent. Last March, city officials voted to close 9 percent of the city&#8217;s public schools due to a five-year $1.35 billion spending gap.</p>
<p>Milwaukee, Wisconsin sports a <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/milwaukee-poverty-a-regional-problem-mayor-tom-barrett-says-b99101258z1-224346311.html">poverty rate</a> of 29.9 percent overall, including 42.6 percent of children under 18. Like Camden, Milwaukee boasts a track record of non-Republican mayors going back 105 years to 1908. But they weren&#8217;t all Democrats. In 2011, the city <a href="http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/tp-043/?action=more_essay">marked</a> the 101st anniversary of the election of Emil Seidel, the first of three <i>Socialist</i> Party mayors of Milwaukee. Current Mayor Tom Barrett claims the poverty experienced in his city is a &#8220;regional problem,&#8221; but 71 percent of those who live in poverty in a four-county area were concentrated in Milwaukee.</p>
<p>In Buffalo, New York, 29.9 percent of residents overall are living below the poverty level, with children enduring a poverty rate of <a href="http://www.buffalonews.com/20130628/buffalo_kids_living_in_poverty.html">46.8 percent</a>, third highest in the nation behind Detroit and Camden. Mayor Byron Brown presides over a city that has lost 11 percent of its population over the last dozen years, due in large part to a stagnating economy. Buffalo&#8217;s last Republican mayor served until 1965.</p>
<p>In El Paso, Texas, one-in-four live in poverty, rising to <a href="http://blog.metrotrends.org/2013/02/high-rates-child-poverty-hidden-smaller-metro-areas/">35 percent</a> for children. Oscar Leeser is the 53rd mayor of that city, whose history dates back to 1873. In all that time, the city has <i>never</i> elected a Republican mayor. The proposed 2014 budget asked a 4 percent tax increase, due to what City Manager Joyce Wilson <a href="http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_23553901/el-paso-city-officials-propose-tax-increase">characterizes</a> as &#8220;a budget gap too extensive to overcome without significant impact to existing service levels.&#8221; El Paso&#8217;s current debt level <a href="http://newspapertree.com/articles/2013/08/22/city-approves-$801-million-budget-increase-tax-rate-by-2-cents">stands</a> at $893 million.</p>
<p>In Cleveland, Ohio, <a href="http://www.wfmj.com/story/23480704/18m-people-in-ohio-fall-below-poverty-line">36 percent</a> of its residents live in poverty. In 1978, when current U.S. House of Representatives Democrat Dennis Kucinich was mayor, the city became the first one since the Great Depression to default on its debt. It remained in default until 1987. In 2011, the city&#8217;s credit rating was <a href="http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/04/fitch_ratings_downgrades_city.html">downgraded</a> by Fitch, due to concerns about the city’s struggling economy and shrinking population. Cleveland, whose current mayor is Frank G. Jackson, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1989. During Jackson&#8217;s tenure, the police, fire and sanitation departments have been <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/cityhall/index.ssf/2013/10/cleveland_mayor_frank_jacksons_4.html">cited</a> for excessive use of force, payroll abuse, and chronic billing problems, respectively.</p>
<p>And then, there is Detroit, Michigan, in a class by itself, with 36.2 percent of residents living in poverty, along with an astounding <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/01/24/report-childhood-poverty-high-in-detroit-but-teen-pregnancy-down/">60 percent</a> of the city&#8217;s children in the same boat. The city itself is <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-21/25-facts-about-fall-detroit-will-leave-you-shaking-your-head">utterly dysfunctional</a> with $20 billion of debt, 78,000 abandoned homes, collapsing or nonexistent municipal services, and 47 percent illiteracy rate. It is also the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/10/22/detroit-again-tops-list-of-most-dangerous-cities-but-crime-rate-dips/">most dangerous</a> city in the nation. Yesterday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/16/detroit-bankruptcy-eligibility-appeal/4044607/">allowed</a> his rulings declaring the city eligible for bankruptcy, and leaving public employee pensions systems vulnerable to cuts for retirees, to proceed to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Detroit is on track to becoming the largest city in the nation to go bankrupt. Democrat Dave Bing is the current mayor, representing an unbroken string of Democrats going back to 1962.</p>
<p>Camden, New Jersey rounds out the top ten, with a poverty rate of <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/camden_flow/170812236.html">42.5 percent,</a> and child poverty rate of 56.7 percent. In one poll, Camden was rated the <a href="http://www.curiosityaroused.com/world/the-10-most-dangerous-cities-in-america-in-2013/">second</a> most dangerous city in the nation, with gang violence cited as a chief contributing factor. Democrat Dana Redd is the current mayor of the city. Frederick Von Nieda was Camden&#8217;s <a href="http://www.dvrbs.com/people/camdenpeople-FrederickVonNieda.htm">last</a> Republican Mayor &#8212; he served until 1936.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s the line up regarding poverty. Yet there are also <a href="http://moneymorning.com/2013/07/23/eight-new-cities-on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy/">eight</a> large American cities facing bankruptcy, a reality that would undoubtedly exacerbate each city’s poverty rate. Cincinnati and Camden hold the distinction of being on both lists. The other six cities are Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Note that the last four are in California, the nation&#8217;s foremost Democratic stronghold. As for Baltimore, it has been <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/toxic-government-by-democrats-baltimore/">run</a> by Democratic mayors and city councils since 1967. Since Washington, D.C&#8217;s home rule began in 1975, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/colbert-king-a-dc-mayor-whos-not-a-democrat/2013/11/22/e5a97f18-531e-11e3-a7f0-b790929232e1_story.html">every</a> mayor has been a Democrat.</p>
<p>Democrats like to make the case that the poorest states are run by Republicans. Yet they conveniently ignore the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/06/07/are-the-10-poorest-u-s-states-really-republican/">history</a> of those states, where two facts loom large. First, most of them were part of the Old South, where the vestiges of slavery, combined with national policies that favored highly industrialized northern states (one of the factors leading to the Civil War, produced economic stagnation by comparison. Furthermore, most of those states were staunchly Democratic for over a century following the Civil War.</p>
<p>Dr. Mark W. Hendrickson<i>, </i>adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, illuminates the glaring difference between the comparisons. &#8220;The most fundamental difference between the data that conservatives prefer&#8211;that the 10 poorest cities are longtime Democratic strongholds&#8211;and the data that liberals will be more inclined to cite&#8211;that the 10 poorest states are predominantly Republican, is that conservatives can point to actual policies that Democrats implemented that contributed to the impoverishment of the cities, while the liberals cannot point to specific GOP policies that have caused the poorer states to lag behind,&#8221; he explains.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a shame Gingrich didn&#8217;t have more time to educate Robert Reich. It&#8217;s even sadder that millions of poor Americans are forced to endure their own “education” regarding poverty on a daily basis, even as Reich and his fellow Democrats refuse to recognize, much less admit, that their odious policies are responsible for it.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>84</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Liberals Talk Race and Crime &#8212; And Hilarity Ensues!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/liberals-talk-race-and-crime-and-hilarity-ensues/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=liberals-talk-race-and-crime-and-hilarity-ensues</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/liberals-talk-race-and-crime-and-hilarity-ensues/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Dec 2013 05:08:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[knockout game]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212393</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's answer to the "Knockout Game." ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/knockout-Game.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212394" alt="knockout-Game" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/knockout-Game.jpg" width="279" height="202" /></a>On a break from pretending to believe they live in a country bristling with violent white racists, the Non-Fox Media have been trying to debunk stories about the &#8220;Knockout Game,&#8221; in which young black males approach random strangers and try to knock them out with one punch.</p>
<p>The left&#8217;s leading line of defense against the Knockout Game is to argue that young black males have always been violent, so, hey, this is nothing new.</p>
<p><i>You&#8217;re welcome, black America!</i></p>
<p>In Slate, Emma Roller wearily recounted other episodes of black-on-white violence in order to announce: &#8220;The &#8216;Knockout Game&#8217; is a myth.&#8221;</p>
<p>Reminiscing about the flash mobs that shook many parts of the country a few years ago, Roller wrote: &#8220;I remember the summer of 2011, a story about a crowd of (black) teenagers at the Wisconsin State Fair randomly attacking fairgoers went viral as a sign of a burgeoning race war.&#8221;</p>
<p>So you see, stupid right-wingers, young black males have <i>always</i> been violent, so what&#8217;s the big deal about the Knockout Game?<i>Your honor, my client&#8217;s not a killer; he&#8217;s a serial killer.</i></p>
<p>MSNBC&#8217;s Chris Hayes reached for a different example of monstrous black-on-white violence in order to dispute that the Knockout Game is anything new.</p>
<p>Looking like a translator for the deaf with all the air quotes he had to make for &#8220;supposed&#8221; &#8220;trend&#8221; and &#8220;Knockout Game,&#8221; Hayes compared it to what he called the fake trend of &#8220;wilding&#8221; after a mob of black youths violently attacked and raped a white woman jogging in New York&#8217;s Central Park in 1989. According to Hayes, &#8220;there never was such a thing&#8221; as wilding.</p>
<p>Whether the boys who were convicted of the crime did it or, as liberals now claim, a man already sentenced to life in prison did it, the Central Park jogger was brutally raped and nearly murdered by either one or several young black men. (They all did it &#8212; see Chapter 13 of my book &#8220;Demonic.&#8221;)</p>
<p>The following year, 1990, blacks committed 57 percent of all the violent crime against whites, while whites committed only 2 percent of the violent crime against blacks, according to the Department of Justice&#8217;s annual Victimization Report.</p>
<p>Thanks for the memories, Chris!</p>
<p>Oh, and contrary to Hayes&#8217; proclamation, black men raping white women is something of a &#8220;trend&#8221; &#8212; at least according to FBI crime statistics. At least since 1997 (I got bored and stopped looking any farther back) blacks have raped several thousand white women every year, while white-on-black rapes have numbered between &#8220;0.0&#8243; and &#8220;Sample based on 10 or fewer.&#8221; (See Chapter 11 of &#8220;Mugged.&#8221;)</p>
<p>In a particularly incomprehensible defense of black America in Mediaite, Tommy Christopher denounced the &#8220;sketchy&#8221; news reports of &#8220;the so-called &#8216;Knockout Game&#8217;&#8221; by citing the video of a group of black teenagers walking past teacher Jim Addlespurger, when one of the black teens steps from the group and knocks the teacher out cold, and then they all laugh about the assault as they continue walking.</p>
<p>But Christopher helpfully notes that a cop said this &#8220;was just a random act of violence.&#8221; So don&#8217;t worry about the Knockout Game, white people &#8212; this is mostly just ordinary, everyday black-on-white violence.</p>
<p>Flash mobs, wilding, day-to-day black violence &#8212; talk about damning with faint praise!</p>
<p>Liberals have to work so hard to avoid noticing the astronomical crime rate among young black males that their brains freeze.</p>
<p>Roller attributed public interest in a story about mobs of young black males attacking families at a state fair to white people&#8217;s need to validate their &#8220;fear&#8221; that black people are dangerous. (Milwaukeeans hardly even notice when mobs of whites surround their families at a state fair, punch them, kick them and smash their cars, while shouting racial slurs.)</p>
<p>But Roller implied that blacks engaging in violence is wildly unusual: &#8220;When a few YouTube videos are able to convince terrified white folks that young black people are dangerous, they may as well assume that all cats can play the keyboard.&#8221;</p>
<p>Is a disproportionate amount of keyboard playing in the country being done by cats?</p>
<p>According to the FBI, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, who are about 12 percent of the population, committed 53 percent of all felony murders and 56 percent of non-felony murders. The Centers for Disease Control recently reported that young black men are 14 times more likely to commit murder than young white men.</p>
<p>White liberals know this. Blacks certainly know it. Despite the hoo-ha over George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin, most black people&#8217;s experience is not that white vigilantes are shooting them. For every one of those, there are 1,000 black teens killing other black people.</p>
<p>But if liberals took the first step toward sanity and admitted that young black men commit an awful lot of violent crime, they might have to ask why that is.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s a dangerous question for people who refuse to acknowledge the devastation of fatherless boys caused by liberal welfare policies. (See Chapter 6 of &#8220;Never Trust a Liberal Over 3&#8243; to see how the British welfare system has created the same social disaster among hordes of white people.)</p>
<p>Unable to consider the obvious explanation &#8212; single-motherhood &#8212; liberals are left with nothing but genetic determinism.</p>
<p>So liberals defend young black males from the charge of playing a Knockout Game by telling us young black men are always violent.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t worry, black America. White liberals have your back.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Colin Flaherty</strong> about &#8220;White Girl Bleed A Lot&#8221;:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xbE4MLnAIeQ" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/liberals-talk-race-and-crime-and-hilarity-ensues/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>12</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Changing the Narrative</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/changing-the-narrative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=changing-the-narrative</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/changing-the-narrative/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Nov 2013 05:52:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[language]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[narrative]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=211778</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An all-star panel explains how to take the fight to the Left at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the panel discussion &#8220;Changing the Narrative,&#8221; which took place at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80321616" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80321616">Changing the Narrative</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: My name is Tracy Connors.  I am the Director of Media for David&#8217;s new organization, Go for the Heart.  And we&#8217;re here today to talk about changing the cultural narrative.  So think of this as part two of the culture panel from earlier today.  But we&#8217;re going to take a different tack than they did.</p>
<p>I spent seven years working in Hollywood production and all this stuff before joining the Right Wing Conspiracy.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll tell you something.  I figured &#8212; and I was telling this story earlier today &#8212; I was the one person on that side of the world that saw Andrew Breitbart stand up and say we need to take back the culture.  And at that time, I was working on a reality television show, chasing around eight midgets and two retired professional wrestlers.  And I said &#8212; you know, maybe I can do the reverse, and bring the culture into the Right.</p>
<p>And the main thing that I think needs to be done is changing the stereotypes that exist.  And I wasn&#8217;t like Ben Shapiro, infiltrating and pretending to be a liberal when I worked in film.  I was open about it.  And it was interesting to see my friends when it would come up in conversation.  Because typically on a film set, they don&#8217;t talk politics, because they assume everybody agrees.</p>
<p>So when it came out, people were shocked.  They&#8217;re like &#8212; but you&#8217;re not mean.  You&#8217;re not evil.  You&#8217;re not racist.  You&#8217;re not a rich, old white man.  No.  I&#8217;m really not.</p>
<p>So we need to turn that on its head and, at the same time, turn the stereotype of liberals as the caring, compassionate people that just want to build these wonderful social programs that will save everybody.</p>
<p>So here today, we have James O’Keefe, who I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;re all familiar with.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And James has been sabotaging this leftist narrative.  Right?  Who would&#8217;ve thought a kid with his grandmother&#8217;s chinchilla coat &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; could bring down ACORN?  And now, I&#8217;m sure that most of you are aware of the videos that he&#8217;s released this week.  Going after another one of their sacred cows.</p>
<p>And then, next to James, we&#8217;ve got Gavin McInnes.  If you don&#8217;t know who he is, I weep for you.  He&#8217;s one of our funniest, most outspoken people that you&#8217;ve probably never heard of.  He was a punk rocker in the &#8217;80s.  He started Vice magazine.  He now writes for &#8212; how do we say &#8212; it&#8217;s Taki Mag?</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Taki Mag, yes.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: He also has his own production and ad company called Rooster.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: All right.  Video man, can you switch the screen?</p>
<p>So my name is James O&#8217;Keefe.  I&#8217;m the President of a group called Project Veritas.  And we do investigative journalism, usually on video.  And we showcase waste, fraud and abuse.  We catch people in the act on tape committing the fraud.</p>
<p>And I have just about a minute of video I want to introduce to you, just to kind of show you what we did this week.  Can we get this screen turned on?</p>
<p>While that&#8217;s being set up &#8212; we basically have two missions.  Number one is to break news.  We focus on breaking news, making the news.  What most people in the media do is they comment on the news.  They go on defense.  They respond to what the government is doing.  We don&#8217;t adhere to that.  In fact, you&#8217;ll probably never even see me on the news.  I don&#8217;t comment, I don&#8217;t interpret, I don&#8217;t respond.  I get the government to respond to us.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I&#8217;m going to give you a couple examples before I show you this one.  Over the last four years, Project Veritas has prompted multiple governors, attorneys general, to react to us.  2012, we did all these voter fraud videos.  We went in and got offered the attorney general&#8217;s ballot to vote.  That forced him into a congressional hearing.  We got governor of New Jersey to respond to our Teachers Union videos.  We&#8217;ve gotten the President of the United States to respond to these ACORN videos that I did with Hannah Giles four years ago.  We&#8217;ve got Congress to sign a measure to defund NPR.  We&#8217;ve gotten all of this attention for putting facts online, for exposing the truth.</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m just going to show you first this &#8212; I&#8217;m going to show you this video.  This is something we released this week on the Obamacare navigators.  It got 400,000 views on YouTube within 24 hours.  It made the front page of every single newspaper in the state of Texas.  It made the bottom and top of the hour on all the TV affiliates.  If you were to buy the [earned] media, it would cost you a few million dollars.</p>
<p>If I were to tell you what my operating budget was in 2012, your mouth would drop.  Because maybe you would think there&#8217;s a different way to go about achieving political change.  Andrew Breitbart used to tell me that politics is downstream from culture.  You can spend billions of dollars electing politicians who either will betray you or don&#8217;t care about you, or who will probably lose.  Or you can give me 0.01 percent of that, and I can get [scouts].</p>
<p>So let me show you this video, and then we&#8217;ll talk about the follow.</p>
<p>(Video begins)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: &#8212; receives millions of dollars of federal taxpayer money, telling applicants to lie about their health status.</p>
<p>Obamacare Navigator Assistant: You lie because your premiums will be higher.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Okay.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Obamacare navigators advising applicants that they always lie.</p>
<p>Sabrina Hill, Obamacare Navigator: Don&#8217;t tell them that.  But don&#8217;t tell them.</p>
<p>Obamacare Navigator Assistant: I always lie on mine.</p>
<p>(Video ends)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: These navigators saying &#8212; I always lie on my application to the federal government.  This particular office got something like $400,000 of federal taxpayer money.  This office got your taxpayer money.  They&#8217;re on tape committing a felony.</p>
<p>(Video begins)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Obamacare navigators counseling applicants how to defraud the federal government.</p>
<p>Mrs. Dorothy, Obamacare Navigator: You making on a cash basis business.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Okay.</p>
<p>Mrs. Dorothy: Don&#8217;t get yourself in trouble by declaring it now.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Exactly.</p>
<p>Lakisha Williams, Obamacare Navigator: Yeah, it didn&#8217;t happen.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Okay.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Lakisha Williams: Definitely with that other [unsupported cash business], just act as if that did not happen.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Didn&#8217;t happen, okay.</p>
<p>Lakisha Williams: Never report it.</p>
<p>PV Investigator: Okay.  Okay.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Days after President Obama thanked navigators in Dallas for signing people up on the new government-run healthcare exchange &#8211;</p>
<p>President Barack Obama: If people can&#8217;t get through the website, people can apply in person, if they&#8217;ve got committed folks who are out there helping people to sign up.</p>
<p>(Video ends)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: I actually think that one of the guys in the audience in Dallas &#8212; this is last week &#8212; was one of the navigators that we caught on tape.  He&#8217;s talking to this audience about &#8212; he&#8217;s thanking these navigators.  And I think that&#8217;s Brian Pendleton, in the upper right-hand corner.  So, this was days before we released the video.</p>
<p>(Video begins)</p>
<p>Obamacare Navigator Assistant: You lie because your premiums will be higher.</p>
<p>VP Investigator: Okay.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Project Veritas heads to Texas to expose Obamacare navigator fraud.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Want to turn Texas into a battleground state &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Turn Texas blue.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: There are a few navigators here in town &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I haven&#8217;t [nailed] anybody [off 10].</p>
<p>(Video ends)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: It goes on.  I dressed like a cowboy and danced around.  And people say &#8212; why did you do that?  Why did you dress like a cowboy?</p>
<p>You know, Gavin and I were talking about this this week, and talking about how antiquated the Republican Party has become.  We have got to try to reach beyond the political bubble using any means necessary.</p>
<p>I got into a debate with someone who was talking to me &#8212; maybe we just need to write policy research papers about the Obamacare fraud.  Maybe that would solve the problem.  But I&#8217;m competing against Miley Cyrus twerking. and Hot 97 in New York.  I mean, these people don&#8217;t care about Obamacare fraud.  One percent of the population watches Fox News, if that.  So I&#8217;m trying, in my own way, to transcend the political bubble.  And I think we have.</p>
<p>Because when you get covered by every single local TV affiliate in the entire state of Texas, some people are going to be paying attention that don&#8217;t care about politics.</p>
<p>What was the fallout?  They fired the workers.  They suspended three of the workers, and they fired &#8212; in fact, they had to de-license them.  Because they were federal navigators.  And it makes the TV news.</p>
<p>(Video begins)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Let me tell you, no on-camera interview from the folks here at the Urban League.  In fact, just moments ago, they said everything is on hold here.</p>
<p>Also, no word today from County Judge Clay Jenkins.  That&#8217;s significant because he has been the voice and face of Obamacare in Dallas County, but he would not talk to me about this episode which we all saw last night.</p>
<p>I did today, though, talk to the man who wore that undercover camera into two Urban League offices.  He says the employees he talked to about filling out the healthcare applications were trying to steer him into fraudulent waters.</p>
<p>So how do you feel today?</p>
<p>Lawrence Jones: I feel good.  You know, I feel good.  The cause has been a lot, you know &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Meet Lawrence Jones, the man who entered two Urban League offices testing employees on the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>Lawrence, tell me about how you became the undercover uninsured.</p>
<p>Lawrence Jones: Well, you know, I decided [to take] Project Veritas, which is with James O&#8217;Keefe &#8211;</p>
<p>(Video ends)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: So we have about a dozen, if not more, of these individuals, these very brave and courageous young people who decided to work with us.  Lawrence is 20 years old.  He has a full-time job, but he had to work with me outside of his job.  And look at all these local TV stations which are dying to interview him.  I mean, not only are we doing the media&#8217;s job for them, but they&#8217;re showing up to these locations knocking on the door of these clinics, saying &#8212; did the workers get fired yet?  So they&#8217;re playing catch-up.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not all.  What we do then is that we say okay.  Like Alinsky said, we need to keep the pressure on.  So we drop the second video.  We dropped the last video last night.  And we do an exclusive with some of these local TV stations, for example.  And now, more news breaks.</p>
<p>This video might lead to a call for inquiry into Enroll America.  A letter has been sent to the Attorney General asking for an inquiry into Enroll America&#8217;s tax status.  And this is the second video.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>By the way, we have about 20 such videos.  We have videos of leadership, we have videos of Enroll America, we have videos of a group called Battleground Texas.  And we&#8217;re going to roll them out one by one.  Each time we do, there&#8217;ll be a reaction, and the media will be forced to cover it.  And that&#8217;s pretty much what I do.  We go on offense, we get the media to report.  I just wanted to show you a little example of how that happens.</p>
<p>And I think the most important thing is to infiltrate the mainstream media.  A lot of conservatives &#8212; let&#8217;s destroy the mainstream media.  No, I disagree.  We need to be covered by the mainstream media, fairly.  How do we do that?  By breaking news.  By going on offense.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s pretty much what I believe in.  I would encourage you &#8212; I&#8217;m here &#8212; I could be &#8212; I should be in my video bay, like producing the next video.  But I came here looking for financial support for Project Veritas.  If you &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You know, I&#8217;m not a fundraiser, I don&#8217;t like fundraising.  I&#8217;m an artist.  But I&#8217;m here to raise money.  So if you believe in this cause, if you want to help us, if you want to create another controversy, a firestorm, pull me aside.  I&#8217;ll give you my card.  And think about making a contribution to us.  I will take the Pepsi challenge with any other organization in politics.  If you can find any other group that, dollar-for-dollar, has done more with less than a million dollars, don&#8217;t give me money.  But I promise, you won&#8217;t be able to do that.  Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Hello.</p>
<p>Group: Hello.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: My name is Sonnie Johnson, and I have a confession to make.  I&#8217;m black.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Okay?  I do not want reparations.  Just wanted to throw that out there.  I love gardens.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I hate Section 8 housing.  They&#8217;re ghettos of poverty, death and destruction.  I hate EBT cards.  Because not only now have they inflicted poverty upon a whole generation of women with lower standards; they are now inflicting an entire population of young able-bodied men, which should be the real war on women.  Because now you can&#8217;t find a husband with a job; instead, you find one with an EBT card.  I, above everything else, understand that we cannot win this war if we do not infiltrate the culture in America.</p>
<p>Everyone knows that Obama&#8217;s policies are destructive.  But yet, he wins.  How did he win?  We went out, we bashed Obamacare, we bashed the economy, we told the truth about all the issues.  And while we were doing all of that, Obama was on &#8220;Leno&#8221; and &#8220;Letterman,&#8221; and &#8220;Pimp with the Limp.&#8221;  And we wonder why we can&#8217;t win.  Because they&#8217;ve learned what we refused to recognize &#8212; the low-information voter is still a voter.  And you can&#8217;t win if you have more low-information voters voting for cultural Renaissance rather than policies that actually affect change in America.</p>
<p>One thing that really ticks me off more than anything is hearing that blacks have so much in common with conservatives, especially on the social issues.  I&#8217;ll ask you &#8212; how far as that gotten us?  I&#8217;ll let that linger for just a second.  How far has that gotten us?</p>
<p>Group: Nowhere.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: When you have the simplest thing of people walking around saying &#8212; it&#8217;s the economy, stupid.  Understand, black people are a part of the economy.  We have wallets.  We have kitchen table issues.  They matter to us.  But over the last election &#8212; I&#8217;m in Virginia, and I spent some time with Ken and EB in Virginia.  And it was abortion.  Let&#8217;s talk about giving felons their rights back.  Let&#8217;s talk about gay marriage.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m like, these people live in poverty.  Why don&#8217;t you talk about how they can get a job?  Their kids are going to jail.  How about you talk about how you change that from happening?  How about you talk about how to stop them from becoming felons, instead of talking about how to restore a felon&#8217;s rights?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>We sit, and for some reason, we think that we can&#8217;t penetrate the black community.  Okay?  I am a lover of hip-hop.  And I dare people all the time to tell me one hip-hop song that says &#8212; I like being broke.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One hip-hop song that says &#8212; I want to ride the bus.  One hip-hop song that says &#8212; I pay for my dinner with my EBT card.  They don&#8217;t exist.  Our songs are filled with &#8212; I can change the weather by jumping on a plane.  Our songs are filled with &#8212; I got my [whips], my cars, my rides.  Our songs are filled with &#8212; I live in a gated community.</p>
<p>Now, I wonder why I hear more free-market principles coming from hip-hop than I hear from the Republican Party.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I get it back &#8212; well, hip-hop is this, that or the other.  Well, guess what?  It&#8217;s nationwide.  It&#8217;s in college campuses all over this country.  It is the culture of America at this moment, and yet we treat it like it&#8217;s a disease.  So everyone who comes along and they say, it&#8217;s this, it&#8217;s that, or it&#8217;s the other; I can challenge you time after time &#8212; I do it all the time &#8212; for every Ronald Reagan quote you can give me, I can give you a Jay-Z quote that mirrors it.</p>
<p>Because I didn&#8217;t learn conservative principles from Ronald Reagan.  I learned them from Jay-Z.  I didn&#8217;t become a conservative by listening to Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Sean Hannity.  I became a conservative when my father told me &#8212; if you don&#8217;t have the cash to pay for something, then you don&#8217;t get it.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I became a conservative when my mother told me &#8212; you look for a man that wants to be the head of his household.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I became a conservative when my grandmother told me &#8212; one day, you&#8217;re going to have a child, and that child is going to be your responsibility.  So you better wait until it&#8217;s a responsibility that you can handle.  That&#8217;s how I became a conservative.</p>
<p>And what ticked me off more than anything is &#8212; no, I am not your prototype black conservative.  And I know that.  I&#8217;m a little loud.  I see Ann came in &#8212; I like that.  But it has to be a change in the way we target this generation that is coming up.  Because with the policies that are in place now, they will be in a socialist utopia.  And I find it always funny because we say &#8212; the Left wants utopia, the Left wants utopia.  Well, I say conservatives think you live in utopia.  You think that the way things should be are the way things are.</p>
<p>No.  We&#8217;re nowhere near what our founders wanted for us.  We&#8217;re nowhere near what our founding principles set out for us.  They have moved us so far from that football field that when you say you&#8217;re a conservative, people think you want to conserve what is.</p>
<p>They don&#8217;t understand that we have to peel back so many layers of this liberal onion before we get to a place where we say &#8212; now, this is what we want to conserve.  We want to conserve the father as the head of his household.  We want to conserve the child that comes out of school not knowing Common Core curriculum but knowing how to think for themselves, that knows how to dream, that knows how to inspire.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But we can&#8217;t do it using the same tactics that we have seen time and time again fail.  It makes people like me throw my hands up like &#8212; what part of failure don&#8217;t they understand?  Aren&#8217;t they tired of losing yet?</p>
<p>And I&#8217;m going to leave it.  But I&#8217;ll tell you one thing I really, really, really despise is the crybabies.  And I don&#8217;t understand this.  The Left calls me names.  Okay?  I&#8217;m not an Uncle Tom.  But I&#8217;m not an Uncle Tom because I don&#8217;t like Uncle Tom.  Uncle Tom was nice.  I&#8217;m not that nice.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They call me a sellout.  Well, excuse me, I know how money works.  So when you hold me to false liberal policies that fail, yes, I sell out.  But none of these things are going to make my cry.  Nor are they things that I&#8217;m going to spend my time, effort or energy fighting liberals about.  Because it is a waste of time.</p>
<p>Some people are perfectly fit to be Democrats.  They love dependency, or they&#8217;re on the other end of the spectrum, and they love looking down their noses at people who they think &#8212; you can&#8217;t do it like I do it.  I got here because I&#8217;m special; you can&#8217;t.  Those people are perfectly fit to be Democrats.</p>
<p>But I will tell you there&#8217;s an entire generation that does not want to hear from crybabies.  They want to hear from people who became millionaires.  And they want to know how to become a millionaire themselves.  We do this by not letting the Left control the conversation.  We need to go into these groups and start talking about money.</p>
<p>So I have just one suggestion.  When they call you a racist, don&#8217;t back down.  Don&#8217;t cry, don&#8217;t run, don&#8217;t do any of that.  Simply say to them &#8212; I&#8217;m a colorist.  So when white, black, brown, purple little aliens, whoever you are, come for my wallet, we have a problem.  Because my color is green.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>That&#8217;s how you defuse a situation.</p>
<p>And if I stay up here any longer, I&#8217;m going to keep going.  So I&#8217;m going to go ahead and let Gavin come up now.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Whew.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Hi, everyone.  I was a little concerned when Sonnie was talking about crybabies.  And it reminded me about the common allegation that Republicans are homophobic.  Because I was almost crying like a little fag &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; when she was talking about fatherhood and the importance of family.  I could feel my nose do that little pinch.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And right when the waterworks were coming, she goes &#8212; and I&#8217;m sick of these crybabies.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Oh, it&#8217;s allergies.  Must be cats in here.  Why do they have cats in a hotel?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Oh, my God.</p>
<p>I think that &#8212; this is considered part two of culture speech.  Because I feel like despite the Island of Misfit Toys that sits up here, I want to argue that we are conceivably the future of the Right.  And I know there&#8217;s a lot of dubiosity from the elders.  And I know it has a lot of do with the fact that we make up words.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think you can even conceive of the kind of education we had.</p>
<p>I am a Canadian, which is like a canary in a coalmine of socialism.  If you want to see what&#8217;s going to happen to us, just look north.  And I got my degree in Montreal, where our professor was the head of the Canadian Communist Party.  So it&#8217;s not like you go &#8212; hey, I find you pretty left-wing.  That&#8217;s not even an insult.  He&#8217;d go &#8212; yeah, I&#8217;m the leader.  I am the boss of them.</p>
<p>So we were talking about abortion in philosophy.  And this is just to explain the young person&#8217;s brain, because it&#8217;s my brain.  And we were told &#8212; we were talking about abortion, and when is it okay; when is a baby a human being.  And our professor told us &#8212; this is a guy we&#8217;re paying thousands of dollars to for information.  Okay?</p>
<p>So you think of a chemist, who&#8217;s going to tell you not to mix two chemicals, because you&#8217;ll blow up.  This is the kind of authority we&#8217;ve imbued to this gentleman.  And he said &#8212; it&#8217;s okay &#8212; and you&#8217;re sitting there just &#8212; you know, you&#8217;re taking notes.  Okay, I got a bunch of knowledge coming from the smart guy that I&#8217;m paying tons of money.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Going to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt for this information, but it&#8217;s going to be very valuable.  And I&#8217;m going to be rich.  And what is the information?  It&#8217;s okay to have an abortion up until a year after the baby is born.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I remember, as a 20-year-old, going &#8212; I&#8217;m sorry?  Like, 11 months and 29 days?  Yes.  The reason that&#8217;s perfectly viable is a monkey is more human than an 11-month-old.  Ergo, an 11-month-old is not a human being.  And I was the only person in my class going &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I wasn&#8217;t even necessarily prolife back then.  I was a child.  I didn&#8217;t even have a stance at that point.</p>
<p>And, so hold on.  I&#8217;m going into debt here to learn that it&#8217;s perfectly reasonable to just take a ball-peen hammer, and just walk up to a kid in a crib.  And, sorry lady &#8212; whack!  What have you done to my child?  He&#8217;s 11 months.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And don&#8217;t think I did anything wrong.</p>
<p>And this is the kind of brain that young people have been trained to use.  And it makes for an unusual generation.  And that&#8217;s why we have a President who was elected just because he&#8217;s cool.  And let&#8217;s not lie &#8212; he&#8217;s cool.  He&#8217;s a very cool guy.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m a lot more optimistic about the younger, younger, younger generation.  And I think they are so hit with information with the Internet that this bullshit is no longer working.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Because they can look it up.  You know.</p>
<p>I work in advertising.  And I was working with these black kids called D and Ricky.  And they grew up in Statin Island with their grandmother.  And they would just start making their own clothes at home, because they&#8217;d see her making them clothes.  So they started learning how to use a sewing machine.  They&#8217;re not gay.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Be funny if I was super-mad about that &#8212; they&#8217;re not gay!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Who was thinking that?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Part of this story, too, is that that&#8217;s like &#8212; to them, to that generation, that&#8217;s like saying &#8212; you&#8217;re a Scorpio.  You were born in June.  Okay.</p>
<p>So they started making their own clothes.  And they had, you know, multicultural friends.  And they would go from Statin Island.  They&#8217;d sneak into clubs late at night.  And this is New York culture.  It&#8217;s not a great culture, by the way.  Don&#8217;t get me wrong, I live there.  I&#8217;m the only sane person in the entire city.</p>
<p>But they would sneak around and get up to all kinds of high jinks that the kids are up to these days.  And they kind of blew up.  Because they went from selling clothes to their fellow students in high school to making jewelry out of LEGO.  I&#8217;m not advocating it; I&#8217;m just saying that it seemed to work.</p>
<p>And apparently, by the way, that&#8217;s fine with copyrights.  Because LEGOs are just bricks.  So you&#8217;re just building a house with bricks.  They don&#8217;t have any sort of copyright authority on you.  You can make whatever you want out of LEGO.  Who knew?  They did it by trial and error.</p>
<p>So Kanye West loved one of their things.  And he put it on his album.  And then Marc Jacobs loved their stuff so much that he put their LEGO jewelry in his runway show.  And now, they&#8217;re rich as shit.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And they have a restaurant in Brooklyn.  And they design bikes and G watch clocks.  And they&#8217;re always on their phones, like the kids are.  And they&#8217;re really successful, really endearing guys.  Not that I can understand a third of what they say.  We gotta&#8217; get back to the hall the different stuff (inaudible), and was freakin&#8217; out, like what?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re saying.  Sounds great, sounds very upbeat.  I like that.  But I don&#8217;t understand the actual words.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So we had this guy &#8212; Sacha Jenkins was his name.  And he&#8217;s my generation.  So he&#8217;s a black dude, and he went to school when I went to school, when you could kill babies with hammers.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And so, he&#8217;s in this like &#8217;60s crap, right?  The silent spring.  Oh, the birds are all going to die.  The birds will be gone tomorrow.  Oh.  And if black people walk outside, they&#8217;ll get eaten by German Shepherds.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Really?  Because I&#8217;ve been outside.  It doesn&#8217;t seem that bad.  Oh, it&#8217;s bad.</p>
<p>The drinking water you&#8217;re drinking?  It&#8217;s flammable.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Isn&#8217;t it flammable because there&#8217;s methane in it, and it&#8217;s been there for a hundred years?  And that&#8217;s why this town is called Burning Springs?  Because it&#8217;s a 200-year-old town?  No.  That&#8217;s from fracking.  But the town&#8217;s 200 years old, and fracking is like an hour old.  They got in a time machine.  And the named the town a fracking name.</p>
<p>And that kind of liberal logic is the beauty of the information age.  Because people go &#8212; that doesn&#8217;t make any sense.  Oh, Burning Springs, 200 years old, they lit their tap water on fire because there&#8217;s tons of methane, which is actually why people are doing fracking there.  Because there&#8217;s gas in the water, idiots.</p>
<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m off on 19 tangents.  But Sacha &#8212; basically, black me, not brainwashed &#8212; no, sorry, brainwashed &#8212; took D and Ricky aside.  And they told me this story, because we were working with them, were doing commercials with them.  And they go &#8212; these crackas.  By the way, what&#8217;s crackas?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Are you in &#8220;Shaft?&#8221;  Where did you get that accent from?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Did you import your accent from the &#8217;70s?  You like foxy ladies, too?  Yo, these crackas.  No one has said that word in, I don&#8217;t know, 20 years?  He goes &#8212; these crackas, they want you.</p>
<p>And they told me the story later, and it really gave me optimism.  Because they go &#8212; first of all, I didn&#8217;t know that word.  What is that word?  Like a cracker that you eat?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Oh, because it&#8217;s white.  Like, they worked it out on their own.  Oh, I get it.  That&#8217;s not a very insulting epithet.  Hey, paper.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Well, looked who just walked in, it&#8217;s Mr. Whiteout.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Yeah, I&#8217;m paler than other people who don&#8217;t have melanin.  Yeah, exactly.  Yeah, exactly.  Yeah.  Yeah.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Yeah, coconut flakes.  Those are also very light, which I am, I guess, compared to someone who&#8217;s darker.  Yeah.  Where we going with this?</p>
<p>So, he goes &#8212; these crackas, they want you.  Meanwhile, Marc Jacobs, a white dude, is the guy who got them his amazing gig and made him rich.  And Kanye West, who&#8217;s black, whatever, also made him rich.  So these kids don&#8217;t understand that concept.</p>
<p>So when Ann is saying, you know, we need to be pure &#8212; actually, I didn&#8217;t really &#8212; I love Ann to death.  In fact, bordering on, like, Scott Petersen like.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Like, when I talk to her, I imagine my wife in Tupperware, in the San Francisco Bay.  Ugh, I&#8217;m not proud of that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>That&#8217;s no good.  You&#8217;re contemplating murder.  Ugh.  But it pops in there.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m that fond of her.  But in her speech, I wasn&#8217;t sure if she was saying we have to be puritans about the Right, or we can&#8217;t be picky.  Because I heard both.  And I know she hates libertarians.  And I&#8217;m here to say &#8212; let&#8217;s just bet on the winning horse.</p>
<p>Whoever&#8217;s in the front &#8212; if Chris Christy is with a gay black midget with facial tattoos &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; and they seem to be doing well, let&#8217;s put our eggs in that basket.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Because we need to win.  And you know, I have problems with libertarians, too.  They say the only reason there&#8217;s borders is to make maps more colorful.  Milton Friedman, their god &#8212; he never said that.  He said that immigration is fine until it becomes a burden on the tax system.  It&#8217;s a burden.  It&#8217;s pretty brutal, actually, as far as burdens go.  So Milton is out.</p>
<p>So we can embrace libertarians without having to say open borders are fine.  We can embrace conservatives without saying that rap music is evil or that gay marriage is evil.  How about this?  I don&#8217;t even &#8212; I no longer care if it&#8217;s good or bad.  I just realized that that debate seems to be done.  So let&#8217;s let it go, just to win.  You know, if &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re in the ring, and they got you in the right eye, and your right eye&#8217;s sealed shut, well, we&#8217;re not using the right eye anymore.  And I used to &#8212; I have a bit of a verbal diarrhea problem, so I probably should&#8217;ve ended like one minute ago, but I&#8217;m probably going to go for another two hours.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Gay marriage &#8212; I never was really against it.  But it seemed like a tranny who wanted to go into the women&#8217;s bathroom.  And I don&#8217;t give a shit who goes to the women&#8217;s bathroom.  But I just thought &#8212; uh, no.  You can&#8217;t do that, you&#8217;re a dude.  You can&#8217;t just put on a dress and go to the women&#8217;s bathroom.  Yes, I can.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then I thought, I&#8217;m standing in front of the women&#8217;s bathroom.  Because I have a feeling you don&#8217;t even believe what you believe, and you&#8217;re just trying to get into the women&#8217;s bathroom.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Just to make a point.  You don&#8217;t really care about sitting down.  You know a urinal&#8217;s way more convenient when you have a penis.  Let&#8217;s cut the shit.  So you&#8217;re not coming in.</p>
<p>And then, it was push, push, shove, everyone was screaming.  And I thought &#8212; all right, you know what?  It&#8217;s four in the morning &#8212; go piss in the women&#8217;s bathroom.  Fine.  You win.</p>
<p>And I also realized they&#8217;re trying to do something traditional.  They&#8217;re trying to get married.  Now, they&#8217;re lying.  And that&#8217;s worth noting.  They don&#8217;t really want to get married.  If you can have sex with anyone you want, you don&#8217;t want to get married.  The only reason I&#8217;m married to my wife is I ran out of options.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>That&#8217;s what marriage is.  I thought we were all on the same page.  Like people go &#8212; would you ever cheat on your wife?  And I go &#8212; it never comes up.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>They&#8217;re not exactly kicking down the door.  That&#8217;s why we do that.  But they don&#8217;t have that.  So why would they bother?  But okay, pretend to bother.  It&#8217;s a traditional thing.  And straights are not exactly killing it on the marriage scene.</p>
<p>And that is another reason why I think we have to have more faith in youth in Islands of Misfit Toys like us.  Because these people have sort of gone through this.</p>
<p>I remember being a kid.  My parents are still together.  But I remember seeing my dad&#8217;s friends get divorced.  And I saw the carnage it wreaked.  And I saw them living in my dad&#8217;s basement, and that weird smell that men have when they stay on your couch when you&#8217;re a kid.  And you&#8217;re like, what &#8212; did you ejaculate into the cushions?  What is this weird testosterone emanating from our couch now, that I watch &#8220;Batman&#8221; on?  What did you do in here?  And it&#8217;s just alcohol and cigarettes, and all that man stuff.</p>
<p>And so, my generation has sort of gone &#8212; yeah, divorce didn&#8217;t work.  And that might be one of the reasons why we&#8217;re marrying so late, is because we saw this failed experiment.</p>
<p>And I honestly believe that liberalism, the way the boomers have defined it, has become a failed experiment.  And I think we have to have more confidence in the truth.  Because it is rising to the top of the heap.  And Thomas Jefferson said &#8212; there&#8217;s no truth which I fear or would want unknown to the whole world.  And the information age is giving that to the youth.  And they are finally realizing they&#8217;re not partisan, they&#8217;re not liberals or libertarians, or &#8212; they just know that the government ain&#8217;t all it&#8217;s cracked up to be.</p>
<p>And I think the way that we can ride that wave and surf it is to embrace them and say &#8212; we&#8217;re not going to get hung up on the establishment.  As long as you hate the government, we&#8217;re in.  And I think that&#8217;s the future of America.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: All right.  We have time for some questions.  So there&#8217;s the mic right in the middle.  If you&#8217;ve got any, bring them on.  Oh, come on now.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Hey, Steve, could we get the mics on the table on, please?  Thank you.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: First of all, I want to thank all three of our panel members.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Truly, for all of us.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Right?  Right?  I mean, come on!</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I think you showed to me that we can have and share the same philosophy, but we can relax a little bit, folks.  And we can join that cultural movement.  And we have to, to survive.</p>
<p>I really was only familiar with James O&#8217;Keefe.  My husband and I are supporters of him and love what he does.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to help you keep doing it, James.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Thank you.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: And Sonnie and Gavin, you&#8217;re wonderful.  Please keep up the good work.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Thank you.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Thanks.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I also would like to repeat my thanks to the three of you.  I thought you spoke very rationally and intelligently.  And I hope for you the very, very best.</p>
<p>Now, the negative.  And I don&#8217;t wish to be negative.</p>
<p>I think you guys are fighting an uphill battle, and I&#8217;m not too sure you can win.  And I say this because Brigitte Gabriel said &#8212; how come we have so many of these reporters that are so liberal and leftist, et cetera?  Because Saudi Arabia, with the Chastain Foundation, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to all the universities, so that they could input their people in the political party, so that they can talk to the students who are now the reporters.</p>
<p>So you&#8217;re fighting a major force as far as money is concerned.  You&#8217;re fighting a Common Core.  I&#8217;ll get to the question right now, okay.</p>
<p>I was in education.  And I&#8217;m not too sure we&#8217;re succeeding at all.  Twenty percent of my students in the eighth grade were pregnant.  Okay?  So now, when you have a situation like that &#8212; and I would speak to them, tell them how important it is to get good marks, they would say &#8212; we don&#8217;t have to get good marks; we&#8217;re on welfare.  All right?  So that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re basically fighting.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re winning the battle when somebody from Fox News goes into California and says &#8212; please sign the petition.  Obama wants you to sign the petition.  And they say &#8212; what&#8217;s in the petition?  Oh, he wants you to vote for Karl Marx.  Oh, he wants you to vote for Karl Marx?  I&#8217;ll sign the petition.  They don&#8217;t know who Karl Marx is.  And they don&#8217;t know the history of Obama and the healthcare plan.  So you&#8217;re dealing with a terribly, terribly uneducated, almost illiterate group of people.</p>
<p>Now, my question to you is &#8212; do you really think &#8212; or maybe you&#8217;re not advertising in the right areas?  Maybe you should advertize in the baseball games where these people go, or home and gardens.  Maybe the money should be directed there, where you will reach these people who don&#8217;t understand, and you&#8217;re spending money where they&#8217;re already part of our [thoughtful] group.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s my question &#8212; are you distributing the money in areas where you can reach people who are very low-educated?</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: One of the reasons I wanted to focus on an optimistic ending is because I knew this crowd would be a little bit older than my demo.  And there is an innate cynicism with that which I think is just genetic old people.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I think that &#8212; honestly.  I bet 300 years ago, they&#8217;d be saying &#8212; the kids today, it&#8217;s all going to hell.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I&#8217;m glad I&#8217;m going soon, or whatever.</p>
<p>And there&#8217;s a lot of merit to that.  And I don&#8217;t want to sound disrespectful of my elders.  But I honestly think &#8212; you know, lifespan is longer than ever.  We&#8217;re in the information age.  Yes, the pendulum has swung away from truth right now.  What I&#8217;m telling you, as someone who works with people in their early 20s &#8212; they are more dubious of this boomer-silent spring dogma that my generation has been so brainwashed.  So I&#8217;m here to say, please, don&#8217;t be so cynical.  Things are getting better.</p>
<p>And as far as distributing money goes, I keep that all to myself.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: No.  I think that what is not understood is that we live in this nonsense.  I mean, that&#8217;s the point &#8212; we live in it.  And we know it sucks.  Our generation knows that it sucks.</p>
<p>Our job is to show them that there&#8217;s something that&#8217;s different, that it can be done.  And one of the most cynical things that I hear all the time is &#8212; it is the way it is, and it can&#8217;t be changed.  And you can&#8217;t do nothing about it.  It is the way it &#8212; you know, well, let me tell you, those eighth-graders that were pregnant?  Guess what?  Now they get to see what life is like.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: And it sucks.  And their children will grow up realizing that it sucks.  So we&#8217;re having an entire generation now who has grown up in the &#8212; I grew up in the ghetto.  I know it sucks.  I experienced poverty; I know it sucks.</p>
<p>So we don&#8217;t come in now with the conversation of saying &#8212; well, you know, it&#8217;s loading the deficit if we keep on spending on social &#8212; no!  You&#8217;re destroying your future if you depend on government.  You&#8217;re limiting yourself if you depend on government.  You will end up in death and destruction if you depend on big government.</p>
<p>Our message is change, because we&#8217;re not talking about what might happen, what could happen.  We&#8217;re saying look where you live.  And tell me this is what you want.  If this isn&#8217;t what you want, then come with me.  Come eat at my table, and let me show you how we do it on this side.  They said we&#8217;re the party of the rich?  Yeah!  Come get rich with us!</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t run from it.  Don&#8217;t be afraid of it.  I could show you how to get rich, too.  That should be our message.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: If I could just add one thing &#8212; you&#8217;re talking about education in America with public schools.  Charter schedules were virtually unheard of 10, 15 years ago.  Now, in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, in New York, it&#8217;s getting more and more common.  And they are like military schools, these charter schools.  And it&#8217;s the free market, getting an education and kicking ass.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: Yes.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Okay.  So you four rock.  I just want to say that officially, as an old person &#8212; you four rock.  And there&#8217;s nothing worse than an old guy sucking up to young people.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But you truly do rock.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: What are you, like &#8212; I&#8217;m 43.  What are you, 44?</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Like I said, you&#8217;re a young person.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I love you young year-ago whipper-snappers.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Because I&#8217;m 75.</p>
<p>A question to you &#8212; I live in Oxford, Mississippi.  I purposely picked a college town to live in; I love living around college people.  And the number-one show in the colleges across this country right now is &#8220;Shark Tank.&#8221;  They watch this in house parties, they watch this together, they watch it on Hulu, and they&#8217;re streaming it.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the amazing thing about &#8220;Shark Tank.&#8221;  All five of those folks &#8212; Barbara Corcoran &#8212; her husband leaves her, she has nothing, she&#8217;s a waitress; she becomes a millionaire.  Mark Cuban had nothing.  All these folks had nothing.  Including someone from Queens, the fufu guy, who came from nothing and came from a project.  And here are these people with their dreams coming to these rich people.  And for the first time, I think young people are seeing that capital is good, that dreams are good, and learning how to get rich is good.</p>
<p>And these are shows that give me proof that young people get it.  Young people are yearning for this kind of education.</p>
<p>Thanks for what you&#8217;re doing.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Two thirds of the world&#8217;s billionaires started out with nothing.  And that&#8217;s why &#8220;Shark Tank&#8221; is appealing to people.  Because they all want to be rich.  And what I forgot to mention up there is &#8212; what makes America unique is that we don&#8217;t like being working class.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: No.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: And working-class people vote Republican because they don&#8217;t want taxes on their money when they&#8217;re going to be rich soon.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>In 20 years.  And you go to Britain, and they&#8217;re like &#8212; well, I got Manchester Uni&#8217;ed, I&#8217;ve grew up here, my dad grew up here.  That&#8217;s the way it goes.  I don&#8217;t like anyone with an accent that&#8217;s slightly different from mine.  And I&#8217;m going to grow up on this street, on this avenue, forever.  Well, fuck you, that&#8217;s why we left.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Actually, we kicked you out.  That&#8217;s not us.  We&#8217;re not sedentary, the way Europeans are.  We&#8217;re pioneers.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Yes.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: And to get rid of this machismo and this sort of tough love is quintessentially un-American.  And I&#8217;ll tell you what &#8212; if you look at human happiness, it derives from taking risks and having balls, and sticking your neck out.  And to try to usurp that from American culture is to try to make us unhappy.  And I&#8217;m not standing for that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Sue Sharkey: Hi there.  My name&#8217;s Sue.  And my world is in higher education, and I serve on the Board of Regents at the University of Colorado.  And I can tell you &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Uh-oh.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Sue Sharkey: I&#8217;m not one of them.</p>
<p>So I see at the university, you know, just a great group of young people who are conservatives.  And obviously, we all know about the liberals and so forth at the University of Colorado In Boulder.  I don&#8217;t need to talk about that.  But there are some solid, great, young conservative students on our campus who are out there really fighting this battle.  And I applaud them and always want to acknowledge them.</p>
<p>My question to you is &#8212; and I want to applaud the four of you and thank you for being here.  Us old folks need to hear from you.  And we may not always like the way you deliver the message, or the words [you choose].</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But you know, that is the reality.  And that message that you have you can deliver to the university campuses and be heard and understood.  And so my question to you is &#8212; are you doing that?</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Well, I can speak personally.  I&#8217;ve been boycotted on a few campuses.  The young people absolutely love what I do.  When I show them the videos, their mouths drop.  In fact, I went to Fordham a couple weeks ago.  And the campus Democrats showed up with signs; they were going to protest me.  And when they saw the &#8220;Daily Show&#8221; clips of the government workers, they dropped the signs.  And &#8212; it&#8217;s a true story, you can Google it &#8212; the president of the campus Democrats said &#8212; everything I thought about you, James, is wrong.</p>
<p>But to get there, I had to deal with the old people who control all the money.  Young people, young people young &#8212; well, young people don&#8217;t have any power, and they don&#8217;t have any money.  To get to speak to them, I have to go through the universities, which always are trying to get me off their campuses.</p>
<p>So how do you solve that problem?  By just keep doing what I&#8217;m doing.</p>
<p>Sue Sharkey: Call Sue Sharkey at the University of Colorado.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: I should call you.</p>
<p>You know, you got to act like a &#8212; you can be a conservative, you can think like a conservative; but you really have to act like a guerilla.  You have to use their &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Use their own rules against them.  You know, negative campaigning.  What I do is I just expose them.  I make it about them.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: Right.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: So the conversation becomes about them.  But how do we get in front of them?  How do we infiltrate the culture?  How do we make a difference?  I think that they&#8217;re doing it.  And we just need to do more of it.  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.</p>
<p>The amount of hopelessness from old people is unbelievable.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: Yes.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Constant cynicism.  You give billions of dollars to politicians who keep losing.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: Yes.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Start supporting us is what my message is to you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I also think it&#8217;s worth noting that these terms are done.  I think that there was Democrat and there was Republican two generations ago.  Then the boomers thought that they had unveiled that.  And that really just &#8212; oh, sorry, it was Protestant-Catholic first.  Then it was Democrat-Republican.  And now, everyone is stuck in this sort of obsession with naming your team.</p>
<p>But young people, they go issue by issue because of the Internet.  And I think that&#8217;s the healthy way to embrace things.</p>
<p>I mean, I could argue I&#8217;m a liberal.  I don&#8217;t like sexism.  So when Islam is stoning women to death, I want to raise my hand.  You know, I don&#8217;t like homophobia.  So when it&#8217;s illegal in a country in Africa, I want to raise my hand.  I don&#8217;t like &#8212; I appreciate the working class, so I don&#8217;t think everyone has to take Homophobia in Star Trek at UCLA and spend 60 grand getting a liberal arts degree.  What&#8217;s the matter with a trade?</p>
<p>But in this day and age, to have those sort of liberal ideals is to be considered a conservative.  Okay, fine.  Conservative it is.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Well, I would just say &#8212; what I think is happening now is that, especially with the HBCUs, historically black colleges &#8212; they got smacked.  Because Obama let their grants fail.  They let their financing fail.  So a huge number of the scholarships they had, or a huge number of the federal government funding that they once had at one time, has been sucked dry.  And they are now realizing that maybe the black man in the Oval Office doesn&#8217;t really care about the black college universities.</p>
<p>So I think that we&#8217;re going to be having a real outlet and cry when they understand that these colleges are no longer going to be financed to the extent that they used to be financed.</p>
<p>But one thing that I would really love to speak on is the fact that Republicans don&#8217;t even understand their own history.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: Right.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: These HBCUs &#8212; who started them?  They weren&#8217;t Democrats.  They were Republicans.  All across the South.  They came in, and they said &#8212; look, we&#8217;re going to give you money, to well-known, well-established black leaders in the community.  We&#8217;re going to give you money, and then we&#8217;re going to get out of your way, and let you build your colleges.  And let you fill your colleges, and let you teach in your colleges.</p>
<p>So schools like Tuskegee down in Alabama put out a generation of teachers, of scientists &#8212; George Washington Carver &#8212; a whole generation.  Matter of fact, in 1907, Tuskegee had graduated more self-made millionaires than Harvard, Yale and Princeton combined.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I ask a Republican about that fact, and they look at me like &#8212; huh?  This is your history.  Just like it&#8217;s my history.  It&#8217;s not black history.  It&#8217;s American history.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And while we&#8217;re so fond of saying what blacks don&#8217;t know, look in the mirror.  Maybe it&#8217;s some things that you don&#8217;t know.  And that is something that &#8212; we really need to get over that hurdle that maybe it&#8217;s just not them that are uninformed; maybe we&#8217;re a bit uninformed ourselves.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: So first, I&#8217;d like to thank you all for what you do for our country.</p>
<p>You said in your past, you were taught liberal principles in school.  And I attend a private high school where we are taught that the transgender can go into the bathroom and that abortion is moral.  And myself &#8212; I don&#8217;t believe that way, and a lot of my friends don&#8217;t believe that way.  But most of our school is taught that.  And they don&#8217;t learn that, they don&#8217;t watch the news, they don&#8217;t read the Drudge Report.  Or they just don&#8217;t follow politics at all.</p>
<p>So what are some ways for people to step up and fight against what we&#8217;re being taught, and think for ourselves?</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I forgot, that was the end of my speech I didn&#8217;t do.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Living in New York is sort of like living in Canada, in that it&#8217;s a canary-in-a-coalmine socialist utopia, where no one is rational.  And yeah, you lose money when you go.</p>
<p>And people I work with &#8212; they say to me &#8212; how can I say what you&#8217;re saying?  I don&#8217;t want to lose my job.  And what I&#8217;m noticing is that over time, it&#8217;s not that bad.  I would compare it to probably a sex change.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve never had one, but I would wager the first month is pretty rocky.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then you get some brown nylons and a skirt that fits great.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And you have your hushpuppies.</p>
<p>By the way, just as a slight tangent, why do these guys get sex changes and then they look like slobs?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I thought you were dying to be a woman.  You have jeans and New Balance on.  You&#8217;re a tomboy trapped in a man&#8217;s body?  Shouldn&#8217;t you have stilettos on every day if you spent all that &#8212; anyway.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So I&#8217;m living proof that being a conservative in a liberal world is a little bit rocky at first.  But it works.  And I&#8217;ve made millions of bucks, despite all these people tweeting my clients and sabotaging my Wikipedia page and, you know, giving my wife panic attacks; threatening my family even sometimes.</p>
<p>But you know, you talk to Robert Spencer here about his years of Jihad Watch.  And a lot of the loudest, shrillest opponents are exactly that &#8212; it&#8217;s just bluster.  And if you can have the courage to plow through it, you realize &#8212; ah, it wasn&#8217;t so bad.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s &#8212; I wish a lot of these liberals &#8212; the vast majority of all these left-thinking people believe what we believe.  Because we just believe facts.  It&#8217;s like Charles Krauthammer said &#8212; they think we&#8217;re evil; we just think they&#8217;re wrong.  We want to talk about the facts; let the fact speak for themselves.</p>
<p>So if that is your dogma, that&#8217;s your religious belief, just keep going with it, and you&#8217;re not going to get crucified.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: I would say &#8212; are codewords.  Left love to say &#8212; he said this, that was a codeword.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Yeah.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: And you know, that meant something, you don&#8217;t know what it actually means.  And the thing that we do is &#8212; I&#8217;ll take the issue of abortion.  So as soon as you say &#8220;abortion,&#8221; it triggers in someone&#8217;s mind a woman&#8217;s right to choose.  That&#8217;s their codeword.  They have built in these codewords.  So as soon as you say &#8220;abortion,&#8221; it&#8217;s a woman&#8217;s right to choose.  No.  That&#8217;s the secondary argument.</p>
<p>If you want to be a fan of Margaret Sanger, then I&#8217;m going to make you a fan of Margaret Sanger, okay?  Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate black people in America.  Don&#8217;t tell me it was a woman&#8217;s right to choose!</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You don&#8217;t want me here is the reason you are pushing abortion.  You tell that to someone &#8212; no, it&#8217;s not.  Yes, it is.  You don&#8217;t get to win with a secondary argument on me.  Planned Parenthood wasn&#8217;t built for a woman&#8217;s right to choose.  It was so black women couldn&#8217;t reproduce.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: But what about the part where at least 50 percent of women in America are prolife?  So how is it a war on women to be anti-abortion?</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Because it&#8217;s a codeword.  That&#8217;s the point.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: It&#8217;s just a given to them.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: It gives you the right to say &#8212; you&#8217;re taking something from me.  No.  We want you to give something to our country.  Life!</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>New people!  We don&#8217;t need immigration if you have babies!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You want the population to stay at a normalized, great level?  Have babies!  Love your babies, raise your babies.  You don&#8217;t get to have a secondary argument and tell me it&#8217;s about a woman &#8212; she had a right to choose to keep her legs closed.  That was her right.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>It is not a right to choose when you put a Planned Parenthood in every other block in every black community.  That is extermination.  So you don&#8217;t get to have your codewords with me.  You don&#8217;t get to have your secondary argument with me.  If you&#8217;re going to be a fan of Margaret Sanger, then you&#8217;re going to be honest with me, and say that the mission of Margaret Sanger was black termination.  Now, you argue that point with me.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Can I say something?  Because I flew down here, and I have verbal diarrhea?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One thing we never talk about &#8212; two subjects we never talk about with abortion, is &#8212; who are these idiots ejaculating into women?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know when it&#8217;s coming.  You masturbate once a day.  So who are these guys who just go &#8212; oh, here we go &#8212; ohh.  Oh, sorry.  Do you poo your pants as well?  How do you not know how to work your genitalia?  We learned about that in third grade.</p>
<p>Anyway.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Like seriously (multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: No one makes fun of those guys.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Didn&#8217;t actually (inaudible) oh, my goodness.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: One more thing.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You talk to liberals about abortion, and they go &#8212; you can&#8217;t say the word &#8220;retard.&#8221;  Really?  When I was a kid, there was one retard in every family.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And we called him retard, and he was our friend.  You obliterated them from the populace.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Yes.  You care so much.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: But you can&#8217;t be sanctimonious about a people that you have committed genocide on.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Yes.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Sorry.  I can say &#8220;retard,&#8221; I&#8217;m cool with them.  You killed them.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Exactly.  And that&#8217;s how you change it.  Stop letting them get away with that secondary argument.  It&#8217;s always a secondary argument.</p>
<p>Even with guns, it&#8217;s a secondary argument.  Everything &#8212; no, the first gun laws were put in place so blacks couldn&#8217;t protect themselves from the KKK in the South.  In other words, gun laws were put in place so that Democrats could kill blacks in the South, and we had no way to defend ourselves.  That was the gun laws.</p>
<p>And so you have these liberals now who say &#8212; well, everything switched in the &#8217;60s.  You know, all the people switched.  Well, guess what?  All the policies stayed the same.  Y&#8217;all kept abortion, y&#8217;all kept gun rights.  Everything that the Democrats did with the intent of stopping the black population &#8212; all of them stayed on the Democratic side.  So maybe the people changed, but the policies didn&#8217;t.  None of the policies.</p>
<p>The unions were started so blacks couldn&#8217;t take white jobs.  Where they at now?  Gun laws were started so we couldn&#8217;t protect ourselves.  Where they at now?  Abortion was started so we couldn&#8217;t reproduce.  Where they at now?</p>
<p>Every single racist policy Democrats passed before the &#8217;60s is still on the Democratic platform.  Every single one.  The only difference is now, we allow them to get away with the secondary argument.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Young people want to be inspired.  What I&#8217;m hearing here is a lot of sense, a lot of tactics; but very little in the way of inspiration.  People &#8212; they flock to inspiration.  They flock to the wrong inspiration very often, as they flock to Obama.</p>
<p>So what can we then get out of the conservative &#8212; I hate that word.  We&#8217;re the real liberals.  We&#8217;re the real, authentic liberals.  We believe in freedom.  We believe in the free market.  We believe in the emancipatory effects of the free market.  It&#8217;s not such that we think everybody should fight to become millionaires, but to let the message out there that by people becoming millionaires, the best charity of all, good jobs, are created.  That&#8217;s an inspirational effect of free-market capitalism.</p>
<p>We too often leave aside these inspirational messages and deliberately say we&#8217;re the party of free market, freedom, liberty.  But we don&#8217;t tell them what free market and liberty really amount to &#8212; that by joining this kind of movement, even those who don&#8217;t become millionaires can be taken care of by good jobs and can be taken care of by people who are privately charitable, and that we must foster the idea of private charity as part of the Republican message &#8212; and that we encourage the formation of private charity, of noblesse oblige, of taking care of people because we want to and not because we have a gun stuck to our head by some taxman and we&#8217;ll go to jail if we don&#8217;t become charitable according to the government dictate.</p>
<p>So we &#8211;</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: That doesn&#8217;t sound very interrogative.  Is there a question mark at the end of this?</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: The question mark is &#8212; how do you guys, who want to infiltrate the culture, get that kind of inspirational message over, rather than simply kicking the shins of the Democrats, who have taken the high ground on this idea?  And let&#8217;s get the high ground back with you guys helping us.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Well, I think I can point to some examples of how we&#8217;ve done that.  I think that you can&#8217;t say &#8212; this is my perspective here; these guys might have a disagreement &#8212; but you can&#8217;t say &#8212; you can&#8217;t talk about free-market economics with these people.  They don&#8217;t care about free-market economics.  I don&#8217;t speak their language.</p>
<p>As Gavin said, I consider myself more liberal than them.  These people are not liberal; they&#8217;re fascists.  They&#8217;re left-wing fascists.  They want to stop a dialogue, they want to stop debate.  Debate is bad to them.  So they&#8217;ve tried to shut me down and put us in jail, and all these lawsuits.  They want to stop me from having a conversation in the first place.</p>
<p>The reason why I&#8217;m speaking &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: (Inaudible &#8212; microphone inaccessible)</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: Well, I&#8217;m talking broadly.  I can show you thousands of emails from young people who have been inspired by what we&#8217;ve done.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>When I go to the University of California Los Angeles, I have 18-year-olds tell me &#8212; I wasn&#8217;t even involved in politics until I saw your videos.  I can show you that.  But I have to break through, pun intended, a massive government and media firewall to get there.</p>
<p>Gavin said you got to go through a world of shit to get to the destination.  And that&#8217;s the message.  It would be wrong of me to neglect to give that message to audiences.  Oh, it must be great, going out there and changing the world.  No, it&#8217;s really hard to do what we do.  And I have to tell you.</p>
<p>But in terms of the language, I don&#8217;t use free-market capitalism.  Let me give an example. When I went to Rutgers University, I was in college.  And instead of talking about how wonderful Milton Friedman &#8212; and Milton Friedman graduated from Rutger&#8217;s University.  1932, I bet you didn&#8217;t know that.  Went to University of Chicago afterwards.  And I tried to erect a status of Milton Friedman on my campus.  But they didn&#8217;t want to do it.  They named the economic cell after Paul Robison, who was a Stalinist.</p>
<p>So instead, so instead of complaining about it and trying to petition, I went Saul Alinsky on them.  I researched my professors, and how much money they made.  And some of those professors at Rutgers University are making a quarter million dollars a year.  And I found out what cars they drove, and some of them were driving Bentleys.  And I created a newspaper.  And I had a headline, I said &#8212; Lifestyles of the Rich and Marxist.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: And that is such a huge part of what&#8217;s being said.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: And I&#8217;m going to just say one more thing, and then I want to let Gavin talk.</p>
<p>You know what happened with all the young people in the cafeteria?  They were opening up my newspaper, pointing and laughing at their professors.  That&#8217;s what you have to do.  That&#8217;s the type of thing that we have to do, and nobody&#8217;s doing it.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I mean, if you&#8217;re talking about hubris, this is the least hubristic &#8212; possibly another made-up word &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; young person around.  I mean, he doesn&#8217;t just sit and vent on his blog, or do a podcast no one listens to.  He literally shuts down government organizations.  And when ACORN got shut down, all the young people who saw him do it go &#8212; oh, that&#8217;s the guy who&#8217;s lying, and he was wearing a pimp coat?  Why did it get shut down, then?  Oh, it must&#8217;ve been an effective attack.  So he gets results.</p>
<p>And I think young people see those results and go &#8212; oh, this isn&#8217;t just bullshit.  This guy is really doing it, and he&#8217;s doing it for a thousand bucks.  I might want to try this.  And I think James personifies this return to true journalism, which is just &#8212; go knock on doors.  Go try it.  And don&#8217;t just Google and tweet what is already happening.  And that&#8217;s really inspiring to young people.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: And I&#8217;ll take a cultural aspect on this.  The first lesson I learned about free-market principles &#8212; and I&#8217;m going back to the hip-hop on this one &#8212; Jay-Z said &#8212; your single was 99 cents; mine was four bucks.  That was the first economic principle that had ever hit me &#8212; that if you have a superior product, you can charge more for that product than someone with an inferior product.</p>
<p>So we know free-market principles.  And when I go and I talk to groups, especially with younger black kids then, I don&#8217;t go in and say &#8212; well, I want to discuss with you free-market principles.  I can say to them &#8212; how many of you know a drug dealer?  And they all raise their hands, because we all know one.  They all start small, and build, and save.  And build, and save.  And build.  And save, and build.  The problem is what they&#8217;re doing is illegal.</p>
<p>Now, what if you take those same principles to say &#8212; you can start small, and build?  And save, and build, and save, and build; and do it legally?  The answer you always get back is &#8212; we can&#8217;t start.  Because it&#8217;s so expensive.  Opening for you to explain to them what a regulation is.  Why they are in place.  Who they&#8217;re meant to stop.  Because it prevents this generation, who can maybe start a business with a thousand dollars.  You can&#8217;t.  Because the regulations cost you $40,000.</p>
<p>And now you have &#8212; we are inspired &#8212; my generation is inspired by our culture.  Everyone thinks Obama was so cool.  No.  It was that he had Katie Perry, it was that he had Jay-Z.  It was that he had the people that an entire generation looks up to like &#8212; I want to be them.  That&#8217;s the inspiration.</p>
<p>Well, what is it about them that you want so much?  And it&#8217;s the economic freedom.  There is our opening.  That&#8217;s our message.  How do they get our message and win with it?</p>
<p>These are the rich people.  I thought rich people were evil.  This is our message.  And we let it &#8212; oh, well, they don&#8217;t know anything, they&#8217;re not [this, this]; but they&#8217;re millionaires.  And they got there by talent.  They got there by hard work.  Who says any of these people don&#8217;t work hard?  Touring is hard work.  Performing is hard work.  They work hard for their money.  And the question is &#8212; how much of it do you deserve to keep?</p>
<p>And I&#8217;m going to leave you with &#8212; this is the simplest way that I can &#8212; I always come back to them, and they were like &#8212; well, the rich people &#8212; they should have their money taken away.  And I simply quote Jay-Z again, and say &#8212; like I&#8217;m a give a chick &#8220;half my trap, like she wrote half my raps, yeah, I&#8217;m havin&#8217; that.&#8221;  Meaning, you don&#8217;t want to give someone 50 percent of what you make, and why are you giving it to the government?  Why is it okay for you to give it to the government?</p>
<p>These are our messages.  And the Left effectively steals them from us, and it beats us over the head with them.  And we say &#8212; well, we really want to talk about free-market &#8212; no.  We want to talk about getting rich, even if your definition of getting rich is having a house, and taking care of your two kids, and sending them to college, and then having money to retire on.  That could be your definition of rich.  And that&#8217;s okay.  That&#8217;s our message.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: All right, you got two minutes, guys.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I think we got to wrap it up.  Let&#8217;s hear from Howdy Doody&#8217;s grandson.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Thanks.  Thanks, Gavin.</p>
<p>Very simple question &#8212; why are young people so dumb?  I mean, we&#8217;ve all got young friends who live on their parents&#8217; couches.  Why are they so dumb?  Why do they continue to vote for this stuff?  Because we know, and we have friends whose lives aren&#8217;t very good right now.  And so, why do they continue to support them?</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Two reasons.  One, they did not do summer jobs, because illegal aliens did all their work.  So they don&#8217;t know the value of money, and they don&#8217;t know anything about how any kind of a system works.  Two, they&#8217;ve been brainwashed by these moronic liberal professors who have created this Marxist dystopia that doesn&#8217;t exist in the real world.</p>
<p>And a thing I forgot to bring up is they are so convinced that America&#8217;s a racist, horrible hellhole that when they get into media, they go &#8212; all right, we&#8217;re going rock some boats here.  We&#8217;re going to send a guy dressed up as a Muslim with a turban on and a woman in a burqa to NASCAR.  And you&#8217;re about to see some anarchy.  Watch &#8212; and you might die, by the way, actor.  But it&#8217;ll be worth it.  You&#8217;ll be a hero, like a freedom rider.</p>
<p>So they go to NASCAR &#8212; ABC did this.  And everyone at NASCAR goes &#8212; hey man, how&#8217;s it going?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>All right.  Well, then another network, I forget &#8212; I think it was NBC &#8212; had this anti-Muslim guy start screaming at another actor who was playing a Muslim in a fast food place.  Like &#8212; what are you doing here, Muslim?  We don&#8217;t need your kind here.  Some soldier in uniform goes &#8212; shut the fuck up.  Okay?  I&#8217;m wearing this uniform so anyone can work here and have any beliefs they want.  Oh, that didn&#8217;t work out.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Then, &#8220;The Daily Show&#8221; sends two actors as gays to walk through the horribly homophobic South.  And everybody goes &#8212; what&#8217;s going on?  You guys look like you&#8217;re in love, kissing and stuff.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And they go, okay, well, up the ante.  They go to a diner, and they propose to each other.  What happened?  Yay, you guys are in love!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So, the summer jobs thing is a permanent problem.  But as far as the liberal brainwashing goes, reality keeps slapping them in the face.  And it&#8217;s only a matter of time before they realize that their professors have taught them a planet that does not exist.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: All right, we got to wrap it up.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: And another thing &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: &#8212; what&#8217;s with jelly beans?</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: No &#8211;</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: There&#8217;s all these flavors?  They don&#8217;t correspond to the color.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: I swore to offer my services next time you need a translator.  Because you don&#8217;t understand what some black person says, just give me a call, I&#8217;ll let you know.  I&#8217;ll fill you in that one.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Margaret Sanger was also anti-Semitic.  She began on the Lower East Side with Jewish immigrants.  She practiced ethnic cleansing.  Where does the UN Agenda 21 of sustainable development fit into Margaret Sanger&#8217;s philosophy?</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: That&#8217;s an excellent question.  If you meet me outside in two minutes, I&#8217;ll get into it with you.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: She also had the libido of a horse.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Very horny gal, and quite attractive.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: Oh no, and I love to make sure people know that one of her &#8212; my favorite quotes of Margaret Sanger is &#8212; if you want to be compassionate to a child, kill it.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: All right.  If it&#8217;s really quick, we can do it.  We got to wrap it up.</p>
<p>Ron Krudo: I promise it&#8217;ll be brief.  It&#8217;s actually &#8211;</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: Better be good.</p>
<p>Ron Krudo: It&#8217;ll be good, I promise.  It&#8217;s tagging onto Howdy Doody, actually.</p>
<p>My name&#8217;s Ron Krudo.  I work for a new nonprofit &#8212; that&#8217;s Future Leaders for Israel.  We network pro-Israel students from all around the country to engage and educate on Israel.</p>
<p>And so you say that our age group &#8212; and I fall within your group, actually &#8212; that it&#8217;s very naïve and brainwashed.  So we&#8217;ve been pretty successful in engaging students from both ends of the aisle and talking about Israel.  But I wanted to hear some of your strategies or techniques on how to take these students that are brainwashed, and how we can educate them or talk to them, inspire them.  Just like someone had said earlier.</p>
<p>Sonnie Johnson: I really, just really quick, because this is funny.  You know, when Reverend Wright came out, and he&#8217;s like &#8212; the Jews this, and the Jews that.  And I had a couple black &#8212; my family around, you know.  So I asked them, I was like &#8212; how can you tell a Jew?  And they all looked at me like &#8212; I don&#8217;t know.  I was like, me neither.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So is this really the fight that &#8212; our fight?  If you can&#8217;t even look at a person with any distinguishable way to tell any &#8212; why is it something you even care about?  And in the end, you have to ask yourself &#8212; why is it something that a pastor can stand up &#8212; a pastor of a church, which is absolutely hilarious &#8212; stand up and talk about God&#8217;s people?</p>
<p>And you have to make sure to say &#8212; you know that the Jews are Israelites, right?  You know who they are and what they are, they&#8217;re significance in the Bible that you hold so dear.  When your pastor gets up and says these things, does it ever cross your mind to think about what his intent really is?  And if you can&#8217;t tell the difference, then what is the point?</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: I think that the best way to promote Israel, as far as young people go, is maybe a calendar of the women who were volunteers in the army.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>They all seem to be at least 10.</p>
<p>Gavin McInnes: I think Hustler already did that.  Hustler already took that on, I&#8217;m sorry.</p>
<p>James O’Keefe: They range from 10 to 10.5.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Just focus on that, and maybe not have you do the talks.  Maybe have them come out with their fatigues and, you know, changing an AK.  I don&#8217;t know.</p>
<p>Tracy Connors: All right.  Thanks, everyone, for coming out and listening to us today.</p>
<p>(Applause)</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/changing-the-narrative/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Fact, Democrats, and the JFK Legend</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/fact-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fact-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/fact-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Nov 2013 04:55:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[JFK]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[legend]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[March on Washington]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211218</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Was Kennedy a liberal in today’s sense of the word?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/leg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211229" alt="leg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/leg.jpg" width="280" height="211" /></a>The mythologizing of John F. Kennedy in the 50 years since his death has verified the adage in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The JFK legend recycled all these years is of a liberal icon, the glamorous martyr whose violent death has validated and sanctified big government, redistributive economic polices, and quasi-pacifist internationalism. The facts, however, belie this myth, which also obscures the true significance of JFK’s brief administration.</p>
<p>In reality, Kennedy was not a liberal in today’s sense of the word, but a conservative Democrat, a Cold-War warrior and tax-cutter, as documented by Ira Stoll in JFK, Conservative. Far from the civil rights saint portrayed in the legend, his support for civil rights legislation was lukewarm, driven by the momentum for desegregation started before him by Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces, and codified by Eisenhower in the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights acts, the first civil rights legislation since 1875. In fact, Kennedy believed that over-hasty progress on civil rights would alienate the conservative Southern wing of the Democrats. That’s why he advised Martin Luther King against his groundbreaking March on Washington in August of 1963, and put little effort into passing additional civil rights legislation.</p>
<p>Nor was Kennedy a tax-and-spend liberal. The Revenue Act of 1964, one of Kennedy’s economic goals he proposed before his assassination, cut tax rates by 20% across the board, based on an argument redolent of the much-derided “supply-side” economics promoted by Ronald Reagan. As Kennedy said in a 1962 speech, “The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system . . . I am not talking about a ‘quickie’ or a temporary tax cut, which would be more appropriate if a recession were imminent. Nor am I talking about giving the economy a mere shot in the arm, to ease some temporary complaint. I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last 5 years that our present tax system . . . exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.”</p>
<p>Similarly, despite attempts to claim Kennedy as a promoter of détente and coexistence with the Soviet Union, he was hawkish on confronting the Russians, vowing in his inaugural address, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In his famous speech in Berlin on June 26, 1963, he sounded like liberal bogeyman Ronald Reagan. “There are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin,” Kennedy orated to a million Germans. He continued, “There are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress . . . Let them come to Berlin.” He taunted the Russians by saying that democratic citizens “have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” And he called communism “an offence not only against history but an offense against humanity.” When Ronald Reagan spoke in these terms, the liberal admirers of Kennedy called him a war-mongering simpleton.</p>
<p>Nor does the historical record support the view that Kennedy intended to reduce U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In his brief tenure he increased U.S. advisors from 900 to 16,000, which makes the reduction of a 1000 before his death less impressive. There is nothing in his Cold War hawkishness to think he would unilaterally surrender in a geopolitical duel with the Soviet Union and China––not when he fomented rebellion in Cuba and plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro, or when he took this country to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile crisis over weapons that did not substantially alter the strategic nuclear balance.</p>
<p>Finally, Kennedy’s “big government” initiatives like the Peace Corps and the program to send a man to the moon within a decade were subordinated to his Cold War aims. Even desegregation was in part a response to the negative effect on the U.S.’s image as a bastion of freedom and equality compared to the oppressive Soviet Union. As the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland writes, “He believed the Peace Corps program would win back some of that lost public-relations ground in those parts of the globe. Kennedy didn’t care about space exploration, but instead viewed the moon program through the lens of U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.” To make Kennedy a pacifist-leaning internationalist requires long residence in the Oliver Stone fever-swamps.</p>
<p>As a result of this legend, many today believe that JFK was one of the best presidents in history, as routinely asserted in presidential popularity polls that consistently put him in the top 10, and occasionally rank him first or second. Once again, the facts don’t support this estimation. As Joseph Epstein wrote recently, “John F. Kennedy turned out to be a most mediocre president. He was at best hesitant in his support of the civil rights movement, the clearest moral event of the second half of the twentieth century. Nor did he pass any domestic legislation of major importance. In foreign policy, he made a great mess of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and with a less than ept bit of brinksmanship brought the Soviet Union and the United States as close to nuclear war as they ever got. He was the man who first put the American toe in the swamp of Vietnam, though his successor Lyndon Johnson would take the heat of liberal history for that misbegotten war.” Epstein could have mentioned as well the disastrous decision to remove South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, which damaged the counterinsurgency efforts against the Viet Cong guerrillas and cadres. We can quibble with some parts of Epstein’s evaluation, but the liberal icon of presidential excellence for the most part is made of rhetorical tinsel and greasepaint.</p>
<p>Equally important to dismantling that icon is recognizing the other significant developments that followed the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy was the first modern president whose image, constructed from the new media of mass communication like television and monthly magazines like Life, was more important than his thin record of accomplishment. The mythmaking began even before his death, with those glossy photographs and video footage of the glamorous young president and his stylish bride wafting through “Camelot” and supposedly elevating the intellectual and artistic tenor of the White House. This process accelerated after his assassination, when courtiers like Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote hagiographies that created the image forever frozen by Kennedy’s gruesome death, forever captured on Abraham Zapruder’s 8-millimeter footage. Movies and television shows over the last half-century have repeated and reinforced this sentimental myth, gliding over Kennedy’s political failures and sexual peccadillos. Indeed, the celebrity legend has become historical fact. But the larger legacy of this mythmaking is that now, fabricated image and slick marketing (see Scott Thomas’s Designing Obama) have replaced experience and knowledge in qualifying someone for the presidency, as the current occupant of the White House demonstrates. Moreover, the Kennedy myth has validated the imperial presidency in which manufactured charisma and glamour justify violating the Constitution’s separation of powers––once more illustrated by Barack Obama.</p>
<p>More important, the true record of Kennedy’s political beliefs stands as a marker for judging just how far left the contemporary Democratic Party has veered. Though Kennedy was a mediocre president, he was still a conventional centrist and anti-communist Democrat. But since 1968, the party of Kennedy has transformed itself from a classical liberal party of individual rights, citizen autonomy, and personal freedom, to a left-wing party that endorses an intrusive, patronizing Leviathan state financed by punitive tax rates on producers of growth, and sold to the people with class-warfare rhetoric evocative of Pravda and sweetened with metastasizing character-eroding entitlement transfers. Rather than a defender of the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and religion, it has institutionalized censorship in hate-speech and sexual harassment laws, and declared war on Christianity and Judaism and attempted to drive those faiths from the public square––excluding of course Islam, the faith of most of the terrorist murderers active across the globe. Instead of championing entrepreneurship and innovation, it has favored economic policies and coercive regulatory regimes that stifle both. And it has become the party of invidious racialist grievance politics that enriches hustlers like Al Sharpton while ignoring the ongoing destruction of black people in blue-state inner cities, even as it transforms a once-noble civil rights movement into a divisive grievance industry.</p>
<p>Worst of all, contrary to Kennedy’s robust, if sometimes inept, foreign policy that recognized the true nature of the communist enemy and actively opposed its adventurism, the Democrats are now a crypto-pacifist party of appeasement, retreat, apology, and subordination of American sovereignty to feckless and incompetent internationalist outfits like the U.N. and the European Court of Justice. Instead of seeing a strong, confident America as a power for good in the world and an enabler of freedom and justice, the Democratic Party considers America as complicit in all the crimes and oppression troubling the planet, reducing America’s global role to “a partner mindful of his own imperfections,” as Obama said, no more exceptional than any other country.</p>
<p>Obama, of course, embodies perfectly the degeneration of the Democratic Party, and so more than anything else marks how far it has fallen from the beliefs of JFK. For Democrats today to claim John Kennedy as one of their own is not just a violation of historical fact, but a shameful masking of their own radicalism.</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>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/fact-democrats-and-the-jfk-legend/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>126</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Whitewashing Amsterdam&#8217;s Islamization</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whitewashing-amsterdams-islamization/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whitewashing-amsterdams-islamization</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whitewashing-amsterdams-islamization/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2013 04:43:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amsterdam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[netherlands]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York Times]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210481</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book puts a pretty face on a grim and tragic reality.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Muslim_Lakemba-420x01.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210482" alt="Muslim_Lakemba-420x01" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Muslim_Lakemba-420x01.jpg" width="252" height="171" /></a>I love Amsterdam. I&#8217;ve loved it ever since I first visited it in 1997, and when I moved there from New York a year later, after three more visits, I was still bewitched. Not until I&#8217;d lived there for several months did I grasp that this beautiful city, which had played such a pivotal role in the development of the modern concept of individual liberty, faced a serious threat from a certain pre-modern, liberty-hating religion to which I realized I&#8217;d been paying insufficient attention. I haven&#8217;t lived in Amsterdam for fourteen years, but I&#8217;ve returned to it many times, and I&#8217;ve witnessed the dire consequences of its steady, and increasingly manifest, Islamization. I still love it, but I tread more carefully now on those cobbled streets; and precisely because I <i>do</i> love it, I worry about what&#8217;s happening to it.</p>
<p>Russell Shorto also professes to love Amsterdam. A longtime <i>New York Times Magazine </i>contributor<i>, </i>he&#8217;s lived there since 2008, serving (until recently) as director of the city&#8217;s John Adams Institute, which, according to its <a href="http://www.john-adams.nl/theinstitute/index.html">website</a>, seeks to reinforce Dutch-American cultural ties by hosting talks by “interesting American thinkers and writers&#8230;such as Al Gore, Toni Morrison, Jesse Jackson, Jonathan Franzen, Madeleine Albright, Spike Lee, Paul Auster and Francis Fukuyama.” (Don&#8217;t worry: as its website is careful to underscore, it&#8217;s not the kind of “&#8217;patriotic&#8217; organization” that “waves a little American flag and tries to promote America.”)</p>
<p>A few years back, Shorto wrote a book about the Dutch influence on New York City – and, by extension, on the entire U.S. Now he&#8217;s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amsterdam-History-Worlds-Most-Liberal/dp/0385534574">written</a> a book called <i>Amsterdam: The History of the World&#8217;s Most Liberal City. </i>It&#8217;s receiving the kind of adoring reviews in the usual places that strong suggest that, whatever its other merits or demerits, it doesn&#8217;t vigorously challenge any mainstream-media orthodoxies about the current state of affairs in Europe. When I read Janet Maslin&#8217;s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/books/amsterdam-by-russell-shorto.html?hpw&amp;rref=books">review</a> in Monday&#8217;s <i>Times, </i>one sentence, in particular, jumped out at me. Shorto, Maslin wrote, “cites two contrasting approaches to tensions between Islam and the West: the radical position of the outspoken Somali-Dutch feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and a two-man Muslim-Jewish team of leaders who tilt toward conciliation.” “Radical”? “Outspoken”? <i>These</i> are the two adjectives Maslin chooses to describe the courageous, principled Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Also, I knew which “two-man Muslim-Jewish team” Maslin was referring to: the Jewish half of the team, Job Cohen, is the man who, while mayor of Amsterdam (2001-2010), urged “accommodation with the Muslims,” up to and including toleration “of orthodox Muslims who consciously discriminate against their women. (As I asked in my book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Surrender-Appeasing-Islam-Sacrificing-Freedom/dp/B00DIKVLQ6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1384265439&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=surrender+bawer"><i>Surrender</i></a><i>:</i>“Where would he draw the line? At forced marriage? Wife-beating? Rape? Honor killing?”) Plainly, I needed to take a look at Shorto&#8217;s book, and pronto.</p>
<p>And so I did. Most of the way through, it&#8217;s not a bad book, although its contours and highlights will be familiar to anyone who&#8217;s read earlier histories of the city. Shorto explains, as other writers have done before him, how Amsterdam&#8217;s position as a hub of international commerce bred a culture of tolerance that, over time, spread far beyond its precincts, helping to lead the Western world out of the Middle Ages and into modernity. Hence, he argues, we should regard Amsterdam, more than France or Britain or anyplace else, as the cradle of the Enlightenment – the place where the medieval world of nobles and serfs first began to be transformed into the world we know today. It&#8217;s no stretch, indeed, to describe Shorto&#8217;s book as a celebration of free-market capitalism as the foundation of modern freedom: “while feudalism held sway elsewhere in Europe,” he writes, “people in these low-lying provinces were protocapitalists” whose innovations in business and trade would liberate economies around the globe.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s curious, then, that instead of using the word “freedom” or “liberty” or “capitalism”  in his subtitle, Shorto uses “liberalism,” which obliges him to explain, early in the book, that he&#8217;s not talking about the statist, social-democratic values that go by that name in America today, but, rather, about the ardent belief in the individual&#8217;s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that is at the heart of America&#8217;s founding documents. Why, then, not just use the word “freedom” or “liberty” or “capitalism” in his subtitle? Could it just possibly be because, in the cultural-elite circles Shorto apparently moves in, no one is viewed with more contempt than a cheerleader for capitalism, and a subtitle that spun “freedom” or “capitalism” in a positive way would come dangerously close, in the eyes of <i>New York Times </i>book-review editors and their ilk, to sounding like (horrors!) Ann Coulter?</p>
<p>Shorto spends a lot of time pondering – as I did, too, when I lived in Amsterdam – what can, at first blush, seem like a paradox: how, as he puts it, can a people with such a “collective sensibility” be, at the same time, so “tied to what we think of as extreme individualism”? His example of this paradox: generations ago, the Dutch came together in communities to construct dikes and reclaim land from the sea – but instead of deciding to own and cultivate that land communally, they opted to parcel it out among themselves. But this isn&#8217;t really as much of a paradox as it appears: the more you look at such behaviors on the part of the Golden Age Dutch, the more they bring to mind American pioneers who, for instance, got together to raise somebody&#8217;s barn. What we&#8217;re talking about here are voluntary, grass-roots initiatives driven by a genuine communal need, not projects imposed from on high by some distant, all-powerful authority – although, yes, this openness to collective activity eventually made it easier to persuade the Dutch to buy into social democracy. (Shorto, for one, certainly buys into it: he considers the Netherlands “freer” than the U.S. because its government pays him a child subsidy plus an annual sum of vacation money equivalent to eight percent of his salary; it doesn&#8217;t seem to occur to him that all that cash isn&#8217;t falling down from the skies but is pinched from the pockets of childless self-employed people some of whom undoubtedly earn far less than he does. Just saying.)</p>
<p>Shorto&#8217;s book is mostly history, but also contains personal passages in which he tries to explain his enthusiasm for the city. Some of them resonate with me pretty strongly. Visiting Paris, he observes that its</p>
<blockquote><p>grandiosity is to Amsterdam&#8217;s canal house cityscape what mythological figures are to ordinary people. Amsterdam relates to who we are today: it is, in a sense, where we began, we as modern people who consider individual human beings to be more important than institutions. These sleepy canal-side streets, with boats moored on one side and gabled brick houses on the other: this is the cradle of our focus on ourselves. It can&#8217;t help but seem charming to us.</p></blockquote>
<p>True, and nicely put. Then again, as I wrote myself when I visited the City of Lights while living in Amsterdam:</p>
<blockquote><p>Paris is built on a scale that makes Amsterdam, by contrast, seem insubstantial, a toy town, a train set&#8230;.You couldn’t replace those delicate-looking old canal houses with buildings of any size: they’d sink. The city is built on land that is only barely land. The whole place – unlike Paris – is one step from being a total illusion.</p></blockquote>
<p>Paris reminded me, I wrote, “of what a city can be; I’m reminded that I’m a New Yorker.” Which brings to mind the character in <i>The Fountainhead</i> who says he&#8217;d “give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York&#8217;s skyline&#8230;.The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?” All of which is simply by way of saying that Amsterdam may be modernity&#8217;s cradle, but New York is its apex, its crowning achievement.</p>
<p>Shorto&#8217;s book contains so much that&#8217;s smart and engaging that one is especially appalled by his take on the trials and travails of the Netherlands today, because he quite obviously knows better. The first hint of how he&#8217;s going to handle these issues comes early on, when he tells us about his kid&#8217;s babysitter&#8217;s relatives in Morocco, who had trouble securing Dutch tourist visas because immigration authorities thought they might try to stay on illegally. Reading this, I was pleased to know that the Netherlands, after decades of massive and incredibly damaging illegal immigration from Islamic countries, was taking serious steps to try to get it under control. Shorto, however, professes to be outraged that “a city famed historically for championing the notion of tolerance now seemed to be charting odd new frontiers of intolerance.”</p>
<p><i>Okay, </i>one thinks. <i>So it&#8217;s going to be like that, is it? </i>And, indeed, so it goes. Recalling his first days in Amsterdam in 2005, he writes that “immigration was the big issue&#8230;.After years of relative openness, Amsterdam&#8230;now wanted to close the doors. People with white skin were talking bluntly and angrily about the unwillingness of nonwhite newcomers to integrate.” Not until he&#8217;s managed, in this wily way, to place firmly in the reader&#8217;s mind the suggestion that racism was in the air does he acknowledge that the Dutch people&#8217;s concerns about integration <i>weren&#8217;t</i> race-based. Moving on, he claims that “anti-immigrant talk has since died down” (well, the “talk” definitely <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/weekinreview/14bawe.html?pagewanted=print&amp;position=">spiked</a> after Theo van Gogh&#8217;s murder in November 2004, but I wouldn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s “died down” when viewed over the long haul), but adds that “the underlying issue – how and to what extent Western societies should welcome immigrants – remains.” Again, the issue isn&#8217;t immigration generally; it&#8217;s Islam. But Shorto doesn&#8217;t want to go there.</p>
<p>When the time comes to mention Geert Wilders, Shorto doesn&#8217;t identify him as a champion of the Dutch liberty that he&#8217;s been celebrating throughout these pages but, on the contrary, reviles him as – what else? – a “golden-haired far-right” leader of “the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam movement” who “preaches a gospel of intolerance of outsiders.” Shorto is no kinder to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose frank talk about the religion of her birth catapulted her into the Dutch Parliament but ultimately – in one of the most disgraceful episodes of modern Dutch history – spurred the cowardly political establishment, including her own party&#8217;s leaders, to turn against her, revoke her citizenship, and drive her from the country. Yes, admits Shorto, Hirsi Ali was “a near-perfect advocate for Amsterdam and its liberal tradition,” and, yes, “[r]eligious absolutism <i>has </i>been a huge force for ill,” and “we all need as many Voltaires – and Spinozas – as we can get.” You can hear the <i>but </i>coming, and you know exactly what form it&#8217;s going to take: “But Hirsi Ali&#8217;s attack on Islam itself, and on all who practice it, was too much for me.” Of course it was! For a <i>New York Times Magazine </i>contributing editor, and an aspiring member of the Dutch cultural elite, it&#8217;s permissible to rap “[r]eligious absolutism” in vague, general terms, but it&#8217;s <i>verboden</i> to venture any specific criticism of the one faith that&#8217;s far more absolute than any of the others, and that represents a colossal menace to the Dutch liberty that Shorto claims to cherish so dearly.</p>
<p>“In the Netherlands,” he continues, “where she didn&#8217;t shrink from the attention but used it to further her strident attacks on Islam, she became too controversial to be endured.” Let&#8217;s set aside the snotty word “strident” and the suggestion that Hirsi Ali&#8217;s an attention hog (he goes on to call her a “fashionista”), and go straight to the question: exactly what is Shorto saying here? The sentence seems deliberately ambiguous – written in such a way that it&#8217;s impossible to be sure whether Shorto approves or disapproves of the fact that, in today&#8217;s Netherlands, anyone who refuses, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, to compromise Enlightenment values one iota will be deemed “controversial” and read out of polite society (or, if possible, kicked out of the country) for having “gone too far.” Certainly Shorto seems eager to avoid facing up to the fact that when the Dutch establishment kicked Hirsi Ali to the curb, it was betraying the same Dutch heritage of liberty that of which this book is supposedly a celebration. You&#8217;d think the saga of Hirsi Ali would be front and center here – that Shorto would recognize it as the ultimate illustration of just how imperiled Dutch liberty is in this era of rampant Islamization and rank appeasement. But – again – Shorto doesn&#8217;t want to go there.</p>
<p>Contrasting sharply with his mendacious smearing of Wilders and Hirsi Ali is his depiction of the aforementioned Job Cohen, whom he portrays as a veritable wonder-worker, a “conciliator.” But “conciliator” isn&#8217;t the <i>mot juste</i>. Try “appeaser.” Or, if you like, “dhimmi.” Alas, Shorto does such a slick job here that if you didn&#8217;t already know the real history, you could easily end up convinced that Wilders and Hirsi Ali are bums and that Cohen&#8217;s a hero. Shorto is exceedingly skilled at juggling the facts to make his heroes – and his case – look good. It&#8217;s a shame, because this book, with a few small but significant changes, could have amounted to a stirring defense of the Dutch legacy of freedom and an indictment of the political and media establishment that has sold it down the river. Instead, Shorto has chosen to toe the establishment line. No big surprise there, I guess. Not only is he a <i>Times </i>stalwart who knows what&#8217;s fit to print and what isn&#8217;t; by book&#8217;s end it&#8217;s clear that he&#8217;s won a prime spot on the lap of the Dutch elite that he&#8217;s not about to risk losing. His acknowledgments pages are a glittering catalogue of that elite, up to and including “their Royal Highnesses Willem-Alexander and Máxima,” whom he thanks “for the courtesies they have extended me at various points over the past eight years.” Ugh. Willem-Alexander, of course, is the recently crowned king of the Netherlands – the man who, back in 2007, publicly (and quite improperly) chided Geert Wilders, an elected Member of Parliament, by saying: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” Jerk.</p>
<p>Oh, well. There are two basic choices for a writer in Shorto&#8217;s position: you can be a truth-teller, or you can be a courtier. He&#8217;s made his choice – and, it appears, is reaping the rewards.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whitewashing-amsterdams-islamization/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>47</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Brown&#8217;s Abuse of Ray Kelly: A Metaphor of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:27:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[boo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cancel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[heckle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ray Kelly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210317</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The totalitarianism permeating higher education.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210426" alt="ray-kelly" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1-422x350.jpg" width="295" height="245" /></a>Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly arrived at the prestigious Brown University to deliver a speech.</p>
<p>It never happened. Student protesters, determined to silence Kelly, shouted him down.</p>
<p>In an attempt to abate the hostility of his audience, Kelly is said to have remarked:  “I thought this was the Academy…where we’re supposed to have free speech.”  A Brown administrator on the scene also expressed incredulity regarding the “inability” of these Brown students’—self-avowed “social justice activists” —“to have a dialogue[.]”</p>
<p>Jenny Li, the (Brown) student who organized the anti-Kelly demonstration, explained that in advance of Kelly’s appearance, she and other students petitioned the university to cancel the event. However, when administrators refused to accommodate them, Li and her fellow activists “decided to cancel it for them.”  Their victory in doing so, Li adds, is “a powerful demonstration of free speech.”</p>
<p>Christina Paxson, President of Brown, expressed her “deepest regret” to Commissioner Kelly and assured everyone that the protesters’ conduct is at once “indefensible” and “an affront both to civil democratic society and to the university’s core values and the free exchange of views.”</p>
<p>To date the disrupters have not faced any disciplinary action.</p>
<p>The significance of this episode has little to do with its specifics and everything to do with the fact that it supplies us with a microcosmic perspective on <i>the contemporary university. </i></p>
<p>First of all, <i>no one</i>, much less an eminently sensible man like Ray Kelly and seasoned academics like the aforementioned Brown administrators, can possibly believe that the contemporary Academy is an oasis of “free speech” and open-ended dialogue.</p>
<p>In fact, as anyone who’s spent any amount of time there knows all-too well, the university is much more like a <i>puddle </i>of free speech and dialogue than an oasis.</p>
<p>While the incident in question admittedly involves <i>students,</i> the latter are simply marching to the beat of the drums of the faculty and administration, not just of Brown, but of colleges and universities throughout the country.  They at once reflect and reinforce an academic <i>culture</i> that has been at least a half-of-a-century in the making.  <i> </i></p>
<p>It is at once tragic and scandalous—and let there be no mistakes about it, this <i>is </i>one of the great scandals of our age—that there is far <i>less </i>individuality and “free speech” in our country’s liberal arts and humanities departments than can be found among any random collection of construction workers or plumbers.</p>
<p>While there <i>are</i> exceptions (yours truly is a case in point), the overwhelming majority of academics in the liberal arts are left-wing ideologues.  This is no criticism—just a brute fact.  There is indeed a prevailing ideology, an <i>orthodoxy, </i>really, that draws the lines of acceptable inquiry, of discourse.  For lack of a better name, we can call this orthodoxy “Political Correctness,” for it is the same orthodoxy that has long drawn the lines of acceptable discourse in the popular culture.</p>
<p>The only difference is that non-academics, like construction workers and plumbers, say, have the daring and imaginativeness to transgress the orthodoxy’s boundaries.  Academics, in contrast, seek to <i>strengthen </i>these strictures on speech.</p>
<p>In other words, the relationship between the academic and his society has been radically subverted.  Worse, the lion’s share of the blame for this subversion rests upon his (or her) shoulders.</p>
<p>There is another point that can’t be lost upon us.</p>
<p>Traditionally, a liberal arts education was intended to render students preeminently <i>civil </i>by making them into articulate, knowledgeable conversationalists capable of both drawing upon the inheritance of their civilization—Western civilization—as well as enriching it.  It was an education that required great humility from those who would undertake it, for the present generation, it was understood, was just one voice in this millennia-old conversation linking the past with the present and future.</p>
<p>The attitude on display at Brown and exemplified by Jennifer Li is not only entirely incompatible with a traditional liberal arts education; the former and the latter are mutually antithetical.  There are two reasons for this.</p>
<p>For one, today’s students, like their teachers, are generally contemptuous toward the past.  The past is viewed as a “dark age” ridden with “white racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “speciesism,” “xenophobia,” etc.  The present bequeathed to us by our past, as Barack Obama memorably remarked, is something the needs to be “fundamentally transformed”—i.e. <i>destroyed.</i>  As for future generations, while lip service is routinely paid to them, it is not difficult to show that if the interests of unborn human beings threaten to impede present designs, then they too must be marginalized.</p>
<p>Secondly, academics and the student activists who they are busy away creating are <i>angry. </i> And they spare no occasion to express that anger.  Since at least the time of the 1960s the expression of anger has been treated as tantamount with the expression of <i>authenticity.  </i>However, since no one cares to try to reason with an angry person—regardless of how authentic he may fancy himself to be—about any topic, much less controversial topics, conversation is impossible with the perpetually angry.</p>
<p>And so too is a genuine liberal arts education impossible as long as pride and anger are the emotions that the academy insists upon fostering.</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>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>29</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1490/1573 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 12:10:07 by W3 Total Cache -->