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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Progressives</title>
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		<title>Brandeis Students Threaten Journalist for Reporting Anti-Cop Statements</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bradford-thomas/brandeis-students-threaten-journalist-for-reporting-anti-cop-statements/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brandeis-students-threaten-journalist-for-reporting-anti-cop-statements</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bradford-thomas/brandeis-students-threaten-journalist-for-reporting-anti-cop-statements/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2014 05:56:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bradford Thomas]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Daniel Mael]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Khadijah Lynch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nypd]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Twitter]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248164</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Campus Red Guards on the march.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/brandeis.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248166" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/brandeis-450x253.jpg" alt="brandeis" width="297" height="167" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.truthrevolt.org">TruthRevolt.org.</a></strong></p>
<p>Pro-Israel student activist and TruthRevolt contributor Daniel Mael has come under fire from campus progressives and fellow students for writing about a Brandeis student representative’s tweet declaring that she had “no sympathy” for the two NYPD officers murdered in Brooklyn Saturday. Since the story went viral, Mael has become the target of personal threats and a campaign to see him suspended or expelled from the school.</p>
<p>In his <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers">piece</a> Saturday, Mael quoted multiple Twitter posts by Khadijah Lynch, at the time the Undergraduate Department Representative for Brandeis’ African and Afro-American Studies program, which expressed her lack of “sympathy” for the two police officers murdered earlier that day. &#8220;i have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today,&#8221; she wrote Saturday, followed by &#8220;lmao, all i just really dont have sympathy for the cops who were shot. i hate this racist fucking country.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mael followed the quotes with other inflammatory statements posted by Lynch, including posts asking “what the fuck even IS ‘non-violence’,” decrying “Zionism,” declaring “the fact that black people have not burned this country down is beyond me” and “I am in riot mode.”</p>
<p>TruthRevolt contacted Lynch for clarification about her statement about the NYPD officers; she responded by saying that any publication of her Twitter posts was “slander.” Mael reported that Lynch then returned to Twitter to say that she needed to “get my gun license. Asap.” and that “amerikkka needs an infitada” (a violent uprising).</p>
<p>This is the second time in recent weeks that TruthRevolt has been accused by left-wing activists of defamation for simply quoting them. The abortion activist and actress Lena Dunham went so far as to serve this publication with a <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/lena-dunham-threatens-sue-truth-revolt-quoting-her">cease and desist </a>for reporting statement made in her own book.</p>
<p>When Mael’s article went viral, Brandeis officials distanced the school from Lynch’s comments, calling them “<a class="external" href="https://twitter.com/DanielMael/status/547079015916642304" rel="nofollow">hurtful and disrespectful</a>,” and African and Afro-American Studies Department Chair Chad Williams issued a <a class="external" href="http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/afroamerstudies/docs/AAASstatementKhadijahLynch.pdf" rel="nofollow">statement</a> announcing Lynch’s resignation from her position as student representative for the program. Williams also denounced online criticism of Lynch, which he described as “horrifically racist, sexist, Islamophobic and threatening physical violence.”</p>
<p>Now Brandeis students supportive of Lynch are attempting to start a movement to have Mael either suspended or expelled.</p>
<p>The Daily Caller <a class="external" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/23/brandeis-students-rally-around-peer-with-no-sympathy-for-dead-cops/" rel="nofollow">reports</a> that a member of the 2014-15 student conduct board sent an email Monday to the Brandeis president, senior administrators, professors, and students calling on them to &#8220;stand up for the principle of social justice&#8221; and hold Mael “accountable.” Entitled “VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!” the email charges Mael with “expos[ing] Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website” and claims that he has “potentially” violated student conduct policies. (Full text of email below.)</p>
<p>Due to the threatening nature of much of the pushback, Brandeis law enforcement officials have met with Mael to discuss his safety on campus. WFB <a class="external" href="http://freebeacon.com/issues/brandeis-pro-israel-leader-under-threat-by-progressive-activists/" rel="nofollow">reported</a> Tuesday that Brandeis officials told them that they were “in touch” with campus law enforcement who was working to address threats against those on campus but could provide no further details due to student privacy and security policies.</p>
<p>As of the time of publication, the administration at Brandeis has made no public statement in support of Mr. Mael&#8217;s first amendment rights or, as with the statement from Department Chair Chad Williams, denouncing the racist and sometimes violent statements being made by actual Brandeis students against him.</p>
<p>Text of email from Brandeis student conduct board member:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong><em>Subject:</em></strong><em> <strong>VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!</strong></em></p>
<p><em>Hello to all,</em></p>
<p>This email is similar, but not identical, to one that had been sent out previously today. The first was to call attention to the issue, whereas this one is a request from many members of the Brandeis community that the student responsible for the incident be held accountable for his actions. We apologize for any redundancy.</p>
<p>As you may have been made aware, the safety of one member of the Brandeis community, Khadijah Lynch, has been compromised by the actions of another Brandeis student, Daniel Mael. Those of us within the Brandeis community who value the safety and integrity of all members of our community are requesting that action is taken to hold this student accountable for his actions, which have directly put Khadijah in danger and continue to do so.</p>
<p>Mael, a regular contributor on a website called &#8220;TruthRevolt&#8221;, a popular conservative-oriented political website designed, according to its mission statement, to &#8220;unmask leftists in the media for who they are, destroy their credibility with the American public, and devastate their funding bases,&#8221; wrote an article targeting Khadijah for a series of tweets she made on her own personal Twitter over the last month. In doing so, he posted a photo of her as well as information about her as a student as well as giving people access to her Twitter username. The article can be seen here:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers" target="_blank">http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-no-sympathy-executed-nypd-officers</a></p>
<p>Whether one agrees or not with the very blunt comments Khadijah made on her Twitter account, the audience of these postings was originally those who frequented her Twitter. We do not propose to offer any opinion on the posts themselves, but it is important to note the sequence of events and intended audiences. After having posted the aforementioned article, Mael has exposed Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website on which he posts, which has led to harassment, death threats, rape threats, and excessive hate speech directed to her personal Twitter (now private), Facebook (now deactivated), and Linkedin. People who frequent TruthRevolt have also gained access to Khadijah&#8217;s personal email address and her Brandeis mailbox number, and have threatened to contact her persistently. We have taken screenshots of some of these threatening comments and have attached them to this email, although more will likely be posted after this has been sent.</p>
<p>As can be seen in the article itself, Khadijah specifically requested that her personal comments be removed from the website and the article in question taken down, but her wishes were ignored and Mael continued to post updates to the article until Khadijah made her Twitter private.</p>
<p><strong><em>In doing so, he has potentially violated multiple parts of Section 2.10, particularly 2.10.f of Rights and Responsibilities, and we have screenshot and uploaded as an attachment the relevant portion. It is essential that this be taken into consideration. Other sections potentially violated are 3.2a (stalking), and attention may also be warranted about Section 17, 20, and 21.4. </em></strong></p>
<p><em>A Facebook page has also been made on which hate speech, directed toward Khadijah herself as well as a plethora of racist comments, have been made, and there has been word that professional hackers may have now stated plans to target specific members of the Brandeis community. The safety of the Brandeis community has been placed in jeopardy also by another student named Ben Vizlakh, who posted an article to this Facebook page telling its members that this email was going to be sent out, mentioning one student by name (a screenshot of his post has been attached here). <strong>Vizakh has potentialy violated 2.13 (retaliation) with regard to spreading the word of this email to people who pose a threat to the safety of Brandeis students. </strong>Here is the relevant Facebook link:</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/340022509539521/?pnref=story" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/groups/340022509539521/?pnref=story</a></p>
<p><em>Upon Khadijah&#8217;s resignation as a UDR, Mael also posted the following, which did little more than to spur more negative comments about her (including another rape threat) as well as Brandeis University and its faculty:</em></p>
<p><a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-resigns-after-stating-she-has-no-sympathy-murdered-cops" target="_blank">http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/student-leader-resigns-after-stating-she-has-no-sympathy-murdered-cops</a></p>
<p><em>Additionally, if you go to Google and type &#8220;Khadijah Lynch Brandeis&#8221; this story has been reposted all over the Internet, with similar hateful comments and threats directed toward her. Not only does the posting of this article put Khadijah in danger, but also the Brandeis community at large, given the volume of hateful messages being posted about the school on social media by strangers.</em></p>
<p>The most pressing concern ought to be the safety of our students, and as such we request that action is taken to ensure Khadijah&#8217;s safety. A large part of this involves holding the student responsible who callously disregarded her safety. With the speed at which information is spread digitally these days and the fact that her personal information has been compromised and is in the hands of strangers, it is essential that action is taken. As students and community members who know Khadijah personally, we neither condone nor condemn the statements she had made, but we must understand the intent with which her posts and personal information were made accessible by a fellow Brandeis student to the general public, especially on a website frequented by white supremacists that seek to threaten and intimidate anyone with views that differ from their own. It is unfathomable to many within the Brandeis community that such an action could have been carried out with anything but malicious intent, as contributors to websites are perfectly aware of the following their websites receive. As a journalist, he must be aware of the impact that publishing such articles could have on other people&#8217;s safety, and it is important that he be held accountable for his actions.</p>
<p>Included in this email are students within the Brandeis community who stand in solidarity with Khadijah in this difficult time and who wish to see action taken to hold the student in question responsible and to protect her safety. As Chad Williams, Chair of the African and Afro-American Studies Department mentioned in his statement on this situation, &#8220;While it may be easy and convenient at this emotionally charged moment to condemn Ms. Lynch, we must also strive to understand why she would make these comments. This means openly and honestly recognizing the very real pain and frustration that many young people of color struggle with in trying to navigate their place in a society that all too often delegitimizes their existence.&#8221; While Khadijah has taken responsibility for her comments and has withdrawn from her position as a UDR, it is the responsibility of our community to condemn the threatening and hateful comments she has received and stand up for the principle of social justice on which Brandeis was founded.</p>
<p><em>Thank you so much for your time and we hope that you have a Happy Holiday!<br />
Best wishes,<br />
The Brandeis Community </em></p></blockquote>
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		<title>Video: Sonnie Johnson on &#8220;Change the Game&#8221;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/video-sonnie-johnson-on-change-the-game/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=video-sonnie-johnson-on-change-the-game</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/video-sonnie-johnson-on-change-the-game/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:20:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Change the Game]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[freedom-center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jamie glazov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sonnie Johnson]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245689</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The CEO of the Freedom Center's new website and activist program exposes the failure and racism of progressive policies.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cth.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245691" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/cth-450x274.jpg" alt="cth" width="291" height="177" /></a><em>Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPage Magazine, interviews Sonnie Johnson, CEO of <a href="http://www.ctghq.org/">Change the Game</a> </em>[<span data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}" data-reactid=".10.1:3:1:$comment1500117523597345_1501080166834414:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".10.1:3:1:$comment1500117523597345_1501080166834414:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><a dir="ltr" href="http://www.ctghq.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow" data-reactid=".10.1:3:1:$comment1500117523597345_1501080166834414:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.$range1:0">ctghq.org] </a></span></span><em>&#8211; at the Restoration Weekend at The Breakers, West Palm Beach, FL, November 15th, 2015:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vjidrVc4JQ0" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss Sonnie Johnson&#8217;s powerful testimony in <span id="eow-title" class="watch-title " dir="ltr" title="A Trip Through Liberalville"><strong>A Trip Through Liberalville</strong>:</span></em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EBR0a6lRhfg" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>Janet Yellen Shills for the Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/janet-yellen-shills-for-the-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=janet-yellen-shills-for-the-democrats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/janet-yellen-shills-for-the-democrats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:42:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[campaign slogans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[myth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War on Women]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243311</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Chairman of the Federal Reserve indulges a destructive leftist lie. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243314" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/janet-yellen-450x337.jpg" alt="janet-yellen" width="278" height="208" /></a>At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”</p>
<p>Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” claim depends on ignoring numerous data that contradict it. For one thing, it glosses over the mobility among the 5 income cohorts over time, assuming that the same people are rich or poor year after year. But as Stephen Moore and James Pierson <a href="http://spectator.org/articles/58135/dont-eat-rich">point out</a>, “In America they [the rich] don’t generally stay rich for long. A few years ago the Department of Treasury examined what happens to the wealth of families across several generations. Guess what: the poor got richer and the rich got poorer. The incomes of poor households rose 80 percent from 1987 to 1996 and then more than doubled from 1996 to 2005. The richer people were at the start of this period, the more income losses they suffered in subsequent years.”</p>
<p>The Treasury study indeed confirms this mobility, finding that between 1996 and 2005 over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005. Meanwhile, only 25% of the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996 were still that rich in 2005. This mobility has indeed stalled, but not for “several decades,” as Yellen claimed, and not because of the sinister machinations of the wealthy. Its cause rather is the sluggish economic growth after the recession ended 5 years ago, and the blame for that in large part falls on Obama and the Democrats’ regulatory overreach, trillion-dollar deficits, “you didn’t build that” anti-business rhetoric, and redistributionist economic policies. Get the feds out of the way of the economy so it can grow, and we will see income growth and mobility again.</p>
<p>The “income inequality” meme ignores other facts as well. It focuses only on “money income,” neglecting the value of government transfers like Medicaid, Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (formerly known as food stamps and welfare checks), emergency-room health care, Section 8 housing subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which boost the buying power of the statistical poor and lower middle class. For the middle class, “money income” ignores the value of employer-provided fringe benefits such as health care. As for the rich, “money income” ignores the highly progressive taxes they pay to fund those government programs. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/05/20-rising-inequality-1920s-measuring-income-burtless">writes</a>, “To disregard the impact of transfers and progressive taxation on the distribution of income and family well-being is to ignore America’s most expensive efforts to lessen the gap between the nation’s rich, middle class, and poor.”</p>
<p>Finally, consumption––how much people spend–– is more revealing than “money income” as a measurement of economic wellbeing. In fact, consumption rates of the lowest income quintile have increased over the years, reaching nearly twice of income in 2005. As a result, Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian <a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/mismeasure-inequality">write</a>, “A family claiming $22,300 in income in 2005 would have reported about $44,000 in expenditures in that year. As noted earlier, the gap between reported income and consumption is filled by various categories of government transfer payments (including Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, etc.), family savings, imputed income from owner-occupied housing, barter, support from family and friends, and income from the underground economy.” Indeed, if one takes into account consumption, the statistical <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty">poor enjoy living standards higher</a> than the average European. The obsession on “money income” ignores how well all Americans live.</p>
<p>Yellen’s second claim, that income inequality contradicts “values rooted in our nation’s history” like “equality of opportunity,” is equally muddled. If we look at the political order of the Constitution––our most important “national values”–– income inequality was taken for granted, a reflection of an unchanging and flawed human nature. In his famous comments on “factions” in <em>Federalist</em> 10, James Madison wrote, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. <em>The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.</em> <em>The protection of these faculties is the first object of government</em> [emphasis added]. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.” Hence “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.” Income inequality is a fact of life, not a failure of government or the economy.</p>
<p>Indeed, the clashing interests of those with property and those without, and the political discord they create, were continually on the minds of the delegates to the Constitutional convention. New Yorker Gouverneur Morris, arguing for an appointed rather than a popularly elected Senate, frankly said, “The Rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security against them is to form them into a separate interest. The two forces will then control each other . . . By thus combining and setting apart, the aristocratic interest, the popular interest will be combined against it. There will be a mutual check and mutual security.”</p>
<p>Thus the “mixed government” of the Constitution was designed <em>not</em> to eliminate property inequality, which is rooted in the differences of talent, hard work, virtue, and luck among people. Rather, it was created to prevent <em>any </em>faction, whether the rich or the poor, from taking control of the government in order to aggrandize its own power and serve its own interests at the expense of others’. Only that way can the freedom, property, and opportunity of all be kept safe.</p>
<p>Our “national values,” then, are for equality of opportunity, not equality of result. Yellen pays lip service to the former, yet that sentiment contradicts the whole complaint about income inequality, which is about result, not opportunity. Like most progressives, Yellen is really concerned with equality of result, something the Founders abhorred, for a tyrannical government always promises the masses equality of result, in the form of a redistribution of property, in order to secure the support of the people for centralizing and increasing government power and limiting personal freedom. But equality of result, as the sorry and bloody history of communism shows, is contrary to the reality of human nature and the unequal distribution of talent and character. As Plato wrote, it is “numerical” equality rather than “proportionate equality,” which takes into account the differences of character and virtue that exist among people, and “assigns in proportion what is fitting to each. Indeed, it is precisely this which constitutes for us political justice.”</p>
<p>America’s “national values” have traditionally included equality of opportunity, not equality of result. People should be free to rise to whatever levels their differing talents and virtues can take them. Differences of wealth over time and over large populations reflect those differences more than any unjust manipulation of the economy by the rich. Moreover, in a dynamic, free-market economy, the success of the well off improves the well being of the rest, whether by creating jobs or paying the trillions of dollars in taxes that fund the redistributive programs that have allowed millions of American to enjoy a material existence only dreamed of by most of the human race.</p>
<p>We still have equality of opportunity, whether measured by the millions of ordinary people who create and run businesses big and small, or the 11 million illegal aliens who didn’t risk their lives coming to America because it lacks economic opportunity. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve has no business indulging a progressive canard that exploits envy and resentment for electoral gain.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: The Republic of Bill</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-the-republic-of-bill/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-the-republic-of-bill</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-the-republic-of-bill/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 01 Sep 2014 04:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Whittle]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239940</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ll.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239941" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ll-450x242.jpg" alt="ll" width="296" height="159" /></a>We all know what the Weenie Dictatorship looks like. But what if a Conservatarian could design his own, small-government society? What would it look like, and how would it work? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Republic of Bill Whittle. See the video and transcript below:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/trNtNbmnGUo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT:</strong></p>
<blockquote><p>THE REPUBLIC OF BILL</p>
<p>Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>Certainly it’s not going to come as breaking news to anyone that there’s a lot of political discord and division in America today. Conservatives and Progressives are so far apart, and simply talk past each other so much, that’s it’s like we’re living in different countries.</p>
<p>And you know what? We’re supposed to be living in different countries. Before the unconstitutional, rampant centralization of Federal power over our lives, we were – and were supposed to be – separate countries, each with is own unique culture and preferences and cuisine and language and all the rest.</p>
<p>We know what the progressive, gun-controlled, safety-helmeted, calorie-restricted, carbon-neutral, politically correct Weenie Dictatorship looks like – they are trying to foist it on us every day. But if you could take a little chunk of America – say, five million steely-eyed missile men and another five million sleek and capable naughty librarians – and make your own little state with your own internal rules… what would it look like?  Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Republic of Bill.</p>
<p>Politically, the fundamental structure of the Republic of Bill looks pretty familiar. It’s the US Constitution, verbatim. There are a couple of minor changes: a line item veto is one. Another is the 28th Amendment, which reads “No one elected to public office shall, once their term expires, be eligible to hold that same office.”</p>
<p>That’s right, you savages out there beyond our borders: there are no incumbents in the Republic of Bill. No campaign distractions, no lobbyist leverage, no vote buying, no nothing. We have this radical idea that we can find 535 new people, every two years, out of a population of ten million. There’s no one in the Congress of the Republic of Bill who was elected before the invention of electricity.</p>
<p>Citizens are encouraged to be heavily armed here in the Republic of Bill. That’s why our crime rate is so low. The general attitude here can best be summed up as “if that guy didn’t want to get shot then maybe he shouldn’t have come through my bedroom window.” We don’t tolerate crime here. That said, common sense is King herein the Republic of Bill: if some guy fires a shotgun through the door at a Jehovah’s Witness who came knocking, that guy is going to jail for murder. You’d think it might be hard to tell the difference between that and a home invasion. It’s actually very easy.</p>
<p>You can marry a person of the same sex in the Republic of Bill. You can marry your office chair if you’d like; we really don’t care. Some people say this de-sanctifies marriage; we think sanctity is internal and can’t be imposed by force of government. That said, there are some things you can’t do in the Republic of Bill and one of them is impose your will on others. If a church opposes gay marriage that’s their business; in the Republic of Bill you can’t make them do it and you certainly can’t make them accept it.</p>
<p>In a similar vein, we believe very strongly in private property in the Republic of Bill. That means if you own a restaurant and you want to hire only six foot tall albinos, that’s literally your business. It also means if you don’t want to serve peg-legged Arabs, or Lesbians, or conservatives, or gays or just me – that’s also your business. What we find, though, is that bigots are dirtbags. No one forces them to close their businesses. Most people just don’t give them their business, and they end up having close on their own. Works out really well, actually. Of course, that’s for private property only. Public services are utterly colorblind and racism of any kind is simply not tolerated.</p>
<p>Our economy is humming in the Republic of Bill. We have a few reasonable regulations for safety – and that’s about it. And we have a LOT of energy in the Republic of Bill: Oil, natural gas, and just boatloads of clean, safe, powerful thorium reactors. We’re thinking about air conditioning the entire outdoors.</p>
<p>Education and health care are very, very affordable in the Republic of Bill, and there’s a simple reason for that. It’s because we treat education and health care as commodities – because that’s what they are. Our schools compete for your children, and that means they are incentivized to have high test scores and low tuitions. And a two cent aspirin in the Republic of Bill costs two cents. Not twenty dollars. That’s because people pay cash for the small items, and doctors and hospitals show their actual rates and their customer ratings. They buy stop loss insurance for the big ticket items.</p>
<p>How can people afford to buy their own health care and education in the Republic of Bill? Well, they can shop around and get the best value with all the extra money they have, because income taxes in the Republic of Bill are 10%. You do your taxes in three minutes: Ten percent, and everyone pays. We don’t keep taxing to pay for the government; we get as much government as 10% buys.</p>
<p>Now, of course, if you want to pay for Public Radio, the Republic of Bill Endowment for the Arts, the Republic of Bill Superconducting Supercollider, a government-run retirement plan – any of that – you certainly can. You get a pull-down menu when you do your taxes online and you can earmark whatever additional funds you want to pay, and that’s where that money goes. But the ten percent buys what the government is supposed to do: defend the republic and build some roads. You want a bigger government than that? Knock yourself out.</p>
<p>As it turns out, about half of the 10 million residents of the Republic of Bill want a space program, and so they pay ten dollars a month extra in taxes: that’s six hundred million dollars a year. Combined with five million people in neighboring Burtrutanistan – you can see the leaders of the two countries here resplendent in our National uniforms – thats 1.2 billion dollars a year. With a space program run by engineers and test pilots, rather than politicians and bureaucrats, ten dollar bolts cost ten dollars and not 500 dollars. We expect to have a permanent presence on the moon in six years.</p>
<p>Well, we hope you enjoyed your brief tour of the Republic of Bill. You’re welcome to stay; we love hard-working people. The registration forms for legal immigration are on the counter; they’re printed in English because that’s the official language of the Republic of Bill. We’re happy to help translate into Spanish… or French, Mandarin, Russian, Korean or anything else. But we do business in English.</p>
<p>The rules are simple. Don’t be a jerk, and Mind your own business. It’s printed right there on the money, along with a cutout of a profile – not of me or any other politician. That profile could be anybody. That’s the profile of the common person. That’s your profile.</p>
<p>Welcome home.</p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Moral Psychosis of Demonstrating in Support of Hamas</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/richard-l-cravatts/the-moral-psychosis-of-demonstrating-in-support-of-hamas/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-moral-psychosis-of-demonstrating-in-support-of-hamas</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 04:47:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[apologists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=237769</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inside the sordid world of a genocidal thugocracy's apologists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pro.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237855" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/pro-450x299.jpg" alt="pro" width="280" height="186" /></a>As an example of what the insightful commentator Melanie Phillips referred to as a “dialogue of the demented” in her book, <em>The World Turned Upside Down</em>, since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge some three weeks ago, the streets of American and European cities have been crammed with activists intent on expressing their collective indignation for Israel’s perceived crime of defending its citizens from slaughter from the genocidal thugocracy of Hamas.</p>
<p>Rowdy and sometimes violent demonstrations have taken place in Berlin, Paris, Toronto, London, and Madrid, where blatantly anti-Semitic chants of “Death to Jews!,” “Hitler was right!,” “Gaza is the real Holocaust,” “end Israeli apartheid,” and “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!” could be heard, with similar events taking place in such U.S. cities as Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle.</p>
<p>Joined with Muslim supporters of those wishing to destroy Israel and murder Jews were the usual suspects of peace activists, Israel-haters, social justice advocates, and labor unionists who decried Israel’s “genocide” against Gaza as well as the militarism, oppression, imperialism, and brutality imbued in Zionism itself. These radical, Israel-loathing groups include, among others, the corrosive, ubiquitous ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), Code Pink, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Students for Justice in Palestine.</p>
<p>What was particularly revealing, and chilling, about the hate-filled rallies was the virulence of the chants and messages on the placards, much of it seeming to suggest that more sinister hatreds and feelings—over and above concern for the current military operations—were simmering slightly below the surface. Several of the morally self-righteous protestors, for instance, shrieked out, to the accompaniment of drumbeats, “Long live Intifada,” a grotesque and murderous reference to the Second Intifada, during which Arab terrorists murdered some 1000 Israelis and wounded more than 14,000 others.</p>
<p>That pro-Palestinian student activists, those who purport to be motivated by a desire to bring “justice” to the Middle East, could publicly call for the renewed slaughter of Jews in the name of Palestinian self-determination demonstrates quite clearly how ideologically debased the human rights movement has become. Activists on and off U.S. campuses, who never have to face a physical threat more serious than getting jostled while waiting in line for a latte at Starbucks, are quick to denounce Israel’s very real existential threats and the necessity of the Jewish state to take counter measures to thwart terrorism. And quick to label the killing of Hamas terrorists by the IDF as “genocide,” these well-meaning but morally-blind individuals see no contradiction in their calls for the renewed murder of Jews for their own sanctimonious cause.</p>
<p>Other protestors were less overt in their angry chants, carrying signs and shouting out the oft-heard slogan, “Free, Free Palestine,” or, as they eventually screamed out, “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.” That phrase suggests the same situation that a rekindled Intifada would help bring about, namely that if the fictive nation of “Palestine” is “liberated,” is free, there will, of course, be no Israel between the Jordan River and Mediterranean—and no Jews.</p>
<p>Another deadly chorus emanated from protestors during the rally: “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” That is an oft-repeated, but disingenuous and false notion that stateless terrorists have some recognized human right to murder civilians whose government has purportedly occupied their territory. That is clearly not any longer the case in Gaza, where every Jew was removed in 2005 and where there is a blockade in effect to prevent the influx of weapons, but clearly no occupation or, as commonly referred to, a “siege.” It may be comforting for Israel’s ideological foes to rationalize the murder of Jews by claiming some international right to do it with impunity and a sense of righteousness. Unfortunately, however, as legal experts have inconveniently pointed out, the rally participants and their terror-appeasing apologists elsewhere are completely wrong about the legitimacy of murder as part of “resistance” to an occupying force. Article IV of the Third Geneva Convention, the statute which defines combatants and legitimate targets in warfare, is very specific about who may kill and who may be killed, and it does not allow for the murder of either Israeli civilians—or soldiers—by Palestinian suicide bombers who wear no identifying military uniforms and do not follow the accepted rules of wars.</p>
<p>So when pro-Palestinian activists and critics of Israel repeat the claim that Palestinians somehow have an internationally-recognized legal “right” to resist occupation through violent means, they are both legitimizing that terror and helping to insure that its lethal use by Israel’s enemies will continue unabated. Those who lend their moral support to terrorism, and who continually see the existence of “grievance-based violence” as a justifiable tool of the oppressed, have helped introduce a sick moral relativism into discussions about radical Islam and Palestinianism, not to mention Israel’s right to protect its citizens from being slaughtered. And the notion that Israel cannot, or should not, retaliate against these rocket attacks until a sufficient number of Israelis has been murdered is equally grotesque.</p>
<p>The fact that so many demonstrators feel comfortable with openly supporting a terrorist group with the single purpose of murdering Jews, that they publicly proclaim that “We are all Hamas now,” indicates quite dramatically how prevalent, and acceptable, genocidal Jew-hatred has become, both in the streets and on campuses in America and Europe. This is clearly not, as it is regularly asserted, merely “criticism” of the Israeli government’s policies; this is what many define as a new permutation of anti-Semitism—an irrational, seething animus against the Jew of nations, Israel.</p>
<p>These fatuous, morally self-righteous activists, many of whom are from the hard Left or the pro-Islamic Right, are, without any expertise in military affairs, eager to advise Israeli officials on the rules of war and denounce the lack of “proportionality” in Israel’s attempts to defend its population from jihadist murderers. And so eager are they to publicly assert their righteousness as defenders of the Palestinian cause, they embrace and “eroticize” terroristic violence and willingly align themselves with Israel’s deadly foes who seek its annihilation, catering, as essayist David Solway lyrically put it, “to the ammoniac hatred of the current brood of crypto-antisemites posing as anti-Zionists.”</p>
<p>In fact, the continual pattern of violence in the Arab world against Israel agitates liberals greatly, and makes them condemn Israel, not its foes, for having inspired Arab rage, with the assumption that only peoples with justifiable grievances are moved to violent ends to solve their woes.</p>
<p>This explains why the Left has regularly glossed over terroristic behavior on the part of Islamists—Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, or others—and has romanticized this violence as “resistance.” This rationalization, that violence is an acceptable, if not expected, component of seeking social justice—that is, that the inherent “violence” of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors—is exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that in this age has proven to be an intractable part of the so-called War on Terror.</p>
<p>Abetted by the Arab world, which has also perennially defined Israelis as European interlopers with no legitimate connection to the Levant, Israel-haters are now willing to sacrifice the very survival of the Jewish state because they feel that false charge of racism and apartheid against Israel is more incompatible with their fervent belief in a perfectible world than the rejectionist and genocidal efforts of the Arab world which, in fact have necessitated Israeli security measures—the separation wall, indeed, the occupation itself—all of which, ironically, are pointed to as indications of exactly how racist Israel’s behavior actually is against the Palestinians.</p>
<p>In fact, observed Harvard’s Ruth Wisse, the more hostile the Arab foes of Israel became, the more difficult it has become for liberals to absolve Israel for creating the very violent urges that emerged to eliminate it. “By blaming Israel for Arab complaints,” she wrote, “liberals anticipate a reasonable, pacific solution to the conflict . . . The democratic Jewish state is subject to ‘rational’ persuasion; not so the Arabs. The more determinedly, and by Western standards, irrationally, Arab governments and their agents pursue their anti-Israel campaign . . . the more desperately the liberal imagination tries to blame the Jews for incurring Arab displeasure.”</p>
<p>The language of multiculturalism that animates the hate-Israel crowd is sprinkled with the code words of oppression, and radicals in newly-identified victim groups frequently see themselves as deserving of protection and special political, racial, and cultural recognition. Thus, the decades-old emphasis on enshrining multiculturalism has meant that activists have been seeped in an ideology which refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults. For the multiculturalist left, the moral strengths of the two parties are equivalent, even though the jihadist foes of Israel, for example, have waged an unending struggle with the stated aim of obliterating the Jewish state through the murder of Jews.</p>
<p>There is no other explanation for why educated, well-intentioned and humane individuals, experiencing paroxysms of moral self-righteousness in which they are compelled to speak out for the perennial victim, can loudly and publicly advocate for the murder of Jews—who already have created and live in a viable sovereign state—on behalf a group of genocidal enemies of Israel whose tragic condition may well be their own doing, and, at any rate, is the not the sole fault of Israel’s. That these activists are willing, and ready, to sacrifice the Jewish state, and Jewish lives, in the name of social justice and a specious campaign of self-determination by Palestinian Arabs, shows how morally corrupt and deadly the conversation about human rights has become.</p>
<p>And its lethal nature and intent should frighten us all.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Who Are Our Adversaries?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/who-are-our-adversaries/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=who-are-our-adversaries</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/who-are-our-adversaries/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2014 04:55:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224049</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining an unusual enterprise.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-224051" alt="bb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb1.jpg" width="188" height="269" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/">NRO Online</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>[To order <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 &#8212; The Progressives</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/volume-ii/">click here</a>. </strong></p>
<p><strong>We encourage our readers to visit our new website &#8211;  <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com</a> – which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]</strong></p>
<p>I have just published the second in a projected ten-volume series of my collected writings called <i><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1594036942">The Black Book of the American Left</a></i>. The title pays homage to <i><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0674076087">The Black Book of Communism</a></i>, a celebrated European text documenting the crimes of the 20th century’s most notorious progressive experiment. While the original <i>Black Book</i> was a one-volume affair, the literary project I have undertaken is so large as to make it unique in today’s publishing world. Outside the category of literary fiction, so far as I can tell there are no ten-volume series by living authors.</p>
<p>So what prompted me to undertake so unwieldy an enterprise, which involves editing a million and a half words and arranging them into themed volumes? The seemingly obvious answer &#8212; one my adversaries will certainly seize on &#8212; is writer’s vanity. Who would not want to see his words in print and between hard covers? The more the better. But if you take a moment to think about it, this is not an unambiguous advantage and therefore does not provide so obvious an answer.</p>
<p>Over the course of a lengthy career I have written roughly 20 full-length books, six or seven of which I consider my best work and the writing I would like others to know me by. But already the 20 volumes threaten to bury some of the better writing I have done and create problems for readers who are seeking to acquaint themselves with my ideas. Where to begin? What to leave out? And given that this is the case, why add ten more volumes, containing a million and a half words, and risk having potential readers throw up their hands and say, “This is too much for me to sort out.” So the question better asked is this: What would <i>The Black Book of the American Left</i> contain that would significantly add to the work I had already done? What would prompt others to read it, and justify the two years of labor that went into the making of it?</p>
<p>The answer is in the nature of its contents and &#8212; equally important &#8212; in concerns I have had about the way conservatives have understood the phenomenon it describes. Five years into the Obama administration, most conservatives have little idea of the depth of its malignancy, or the fact that it is the product of decades of development that has transformed the Democratic party and created, as is rapidly becoming apparent, not only America’s nightmare but the world’s as well.</p>
<p>A good place to begin this explanation is by reporting that some readers have remarked critically on the fact that the articles in these volumes, which span some 30 years, have already appeared in print and can be located by a diligent web search. Why then bother arranging them in a new subject order and collecting them in themed volumes with titles like <i>My Life &amp; Times</i>, <i>Progressives</i>,<i> The Great Betrayal</i> (Iraq), <i>Culture Wars</i>,<i> Progressive Racism</i>, and <i>The Left in the Universities</i>?</p>
<p>The answer is that these are not articles written on random subjects that happened to catch my fancy. Nor were they written as intellectual exercises that set out to explore various aspects of current issues. They are dispatches from a war zone, written to identify the nature, agendas, and long-term goals of a political movement of historic proportions that is also global in scope. Written in the heat of battle, they are here arranged in chronological order as the events took place, in order to provide a running account of the war itself.</p>
<p>The nature of these conflicts as part of an ongoing war was, in my view, scarcely recognized by conservatives at the time, and has still not fully sunk in. Conservatives have rarely approached the individual conflicts with the seriousness they deserve, describing their adversaries as “liberals” &#8212; as if they subscribed to the principles of Lockean individualism, tolerance, and political compromise. Only with the advent of the Obama administration have some conservatives begun to connect the dots of origins and outcomes and to grasp the real nature of the national transformation that their adversaries intend.</p>
<p>It is for this conservative audience &#8212; a constituency on whom the American future depends &#8212; that I undertook to put together <i>The Black Book of the American Left</i>. It is first of all a narrative map of the battles fought over the last 40 years and &#8212; it must be said – lost, almost every one. <i>The</i> <i>Black Book</i> contains a record as complete as any likely to be written of the struggle to resist a Communist-inspired Left that was not defeated in the Cold War but took advantage of the Soviet defeat to enter the American mainstream and conquer it, until today its members occupy the White House.</p>
<p>It is an often overlooked but immensely significant fact that during the Cold War the vast majority of American progressives supported the Communist enemy, working as apologists, appeasers, and enablers for a global movement openly dedicated to the destruction of their country. At the time, the progressive movement was much smaller than it is now and was opposed by mainstream Democrats whom progressives referred to derisively as “Cold War Liberals.” In 1968, progressive activists staged a riot at the Democratic Party convention. The riot was overtly designed to destroy the electoral chances of Hubert Humphrey, regarded as the Cold War Liberal in Chief because of his support for the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>The Progressive Party, was formed in 1948 to challenge the cold war liberalism of Harry Truman and was in fact controlled by the Communist Party. The so-called New Left that emerged in the Sixties did not represent a clean break with communism and was not, in fact, a “new” left but a continuation of the old. It developed a modernized, deceptive political rhetoric &#8212; calling itself “populist” and even “liberal” &#8212; but it was mobilized behind the same malicious anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, and anti-American agendas as the Communist movement from which it sprang.</p>
<p>After the convention riot of 1968, this neo-Communist Left marched off the streets and into the Democratic party, and over the next decades took commanding positions in the party’s congressional apparatus, and eventually its national leadership. As it acquired power, it gradually shifted its self- identification from “liberal” to the bolder “progressive,” a designation shared by most leaders of the Democratic Party today. The betrayal of the Vietnamese by the “Watergate” Democrats, the appeasement of Latin American Communists (now firmly entrenched throughout the hemisphere and allied with our enemy Iran), the betrayal of the Iraqis and the sabotage of the war on terror, the traducing of the civil-rights movement and its transformation into a mob led by the racial extortionists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (the latter now the president’s chief adviser on race), the subversion of the modern research university and the conversion of its liberal-arts divisions into doctrinal institutes for training American youth in the radical party line known as political correctness, the rise of a campus fascism aligned with Islamic Jew haters and genocidal terrorists, the political undermining of the public-health system during the AIDS epidemic which led to half a million avoidable deaths &#8212; all these were crucial battles lost during the 40 years that preceded the White House reign of Barack Obama. All are documented in the pages of these volumes in week-by-week accounts of the arguments and conflicts that accompanied them.</p>
<p>The narrative of these developments is the substance of <i>The</i> <i>Black Book of the American Left</i>. Its fruit is an understanding that the movement now in motion to dismantle the American system, and bring this country to its knees, is no overnight phenomenon and is not the result of misguided idealisms or misunderstandings that can be easily repaired. The adversary cannot be dissuaded, because what drives him is a religious mission on which his identity and quest for a meaningful life depend. He can be stopped only by a political counterforce that is determined and organized, and &#8212; most importantly &#8212; that understands the gravity of the threat it faces.</p>
<p>How far are conservatives from understanding the gravity of the situation they are in? This question was brought home to me the other day as I watched Senator Tom Coburn, easily one of the most decent men in Washington, being interrogated by an unusually frustrated Brian Lamb about his friendship with Barack Obama. That Senator Coburn, a staunch conservative, would relate to the president on a personal level despite their political differences did not bother me. What bothered me was how profoundly the senator misread Obama, how he failed to understand the malice behind either his mendacity or his systematic efforts to dismantle America’s constitutional system and disarm us before our enemies. “He has good intentions,” Coburn assured the exasperated Lamb.</p>
<p>In this exchange, Senator Coburn was the picture of American innocence, unable to connect the contempt Obama has shown for the American people and their civil order with his readiness to betray America’s troops in the field and its interests abroad, with his embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood and appeasement of Iranian Hitlerites, with his supine posture toward Russian aggression in the heart of Europe. Conservatives’ conflict with Obama is not about different understandings of the facts among colleagues guided by good intentions.</p>
<p>I wanted to ask Coburn whether he thinks the sadistic murderer Fidel Castro, who has turned his nation into an island prison, is also possessed of good intentions and human graces. The director Steven Spielberg, himself a good man, called the eight hours he spent with Castro “the greatest day of my life.” Does this flapdoodle have any real-world significance when it comes to dealing with the radical Left? Unless they are Islamic fanatics, the zealots of the Left do not usually come at you as fire-breathing demons. They come to help. Do you think for a moment that Castro could carry on those nine-hour speeches about Cuba’s glorious socialist achievements if he did not at least half-believe his own fantasies? Obama and Castro are socialist missionaries. For that very reason, the evil they do far exceeds anything achievable by tinhorn tyrants. They are advocates of a cause that turns a blind eye toward the millions of corpses and the wrecked continents of the recent past while attacking the democratic foundations of what remains of a free-market, free-world community of nations, beginning with Israel and the United States. That is their evil and their crime: their will to do it all over again, as if the human calamities they inspired never took place.</p>
<p><i>The</i> <i>Black Book of the American Left</i> is a look into the psyche of these missionaries through the battles they have waged over the last 40 years &#8212; battles that have brought them into the command structures of the American leviathan. It provides a picture of how they think and it analyzes the why; it draws aside the veil of “good intentions” to reveal the malice underneath. That is its utility, and the main reason I am putting these volumes together. But it would not be candid of me if I did not mention another. By way of explication, I will quote from the general introduction to the work:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is almost a certainty that no other “book” will be written like this one, since it can only have been the work of someone born into the Left and condemned Ahab-like to pursue it in an attempt to comprehend it. Yet it is not simply a project of monomania, as my adversaries will suggest, but of discovery &#8212; an attempt not only to understand a movement but to explore its roots in individual lives, including my own. While I hope this book may be useful to those fighting to defend individual freedom and free markets, I do not deceive myself into believing that I have finally set the harpoon into the leviathan, a feat that is ultimately not possible. Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith, which meets the same eternal human needs as traditional faiths, and for that reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a Gnosticism that can only be held at bay but never finally beaten back to earth.</p></blockquote>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b></p>
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		<title>On Horowitz&#8217;s New Book: Progressives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-hollander/on-horowitzs-new-book-progressives/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=on-horowitzs-new-book-progressives</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-hollander/on-horowitzs-new-book-progressives/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Apr 2014 04:52:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Hollander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paul Hollander]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Black Book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[vol. 2]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220862</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With a commentary by the author.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220869" alt="bb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bb1.jpg" width="152" height="218" /></a><strong>[To order <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 &#8212; The Progressives</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/volume-ii/">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>We encourage our readers to visit our new website, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com, </a>which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]</strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;" align="center">I.</p>
<p>David Horowitz is one of the rare human beings, and handful of former Sixties radicals, who made an unequivocal break with his longstanding political beliefs and commitments. Unlike many former radicals who renounced <i>some</i> of the questionable means used in the pursuit of their political agenda but refused to distance themselves from the purported ideals, Horowitz rejected the ideals as well. In the meantime, most of the former Sixties radicals, or even some Sixties moderates, have continued to cling nostalgically to what they consider to be admirable goals embedded in their youthful idealism and legitimated by the irresistible appeal of good intentions.</p>
<p>Horowitz can claim further distinction on account of being an exceptionally knowledgeable guide to all varieties of the American left and his understanding of these movements and the mentalities of their adherents. It helps that he has been familiar with many individuals representing or associated with the same movements. Also unusual, even among the fully disillusioned, that ever since his break with his political past, Horowitz has devoted his life to renouncing and combating his former political illusions, commitments and affiliations. In doing so he was willing to risk the over-politicization of his own life, and the weakening of the boundaries between the personal and the political realm. He has also made it easier for his many critics to claim that his crusading spirit bears some resemblance to those of his former comrades and adversaries.</p>
<p>For reasons not obvious, more of the former supporters of the Soviet Union (of <i>The God That Failed</i> variety) and of Western communist movements of the past were willing and able to reexamine and publicly discard their previous convictions and illusions than those of the Sixties generation. The latter, while distancing themselves from the Soviet model, idealized Third World communist systems such as those of China, Cuba and North Vietnam. I am not sure why that has been the case but I surmise that since the Sixties radicals had more widespread and enduring subcultural or group support (especially on the campuses) than their predecessors of the 1930s, they had a lesser need to reexamine and reevaluate their beliefs. It is always easier to persist in convictions, even in wrongheaded ones, if they are widely shared. Moreover, the agenda of the Sixties radicals was broader, encompassing not only sympathy for the idealized and misperceived communist systems noted above, but also popular domestic causes such as the anti-Vietnam war protest, civil rights and women’s liberation. The presence of this large, supportive, quasi-communal subculture made it easier to squelch the impulse to engage in political soul-searching or “second thoughts.” As Horowitz puts it,</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he secret of the left’s longevity, its ability to withstand the discrediting of its idea, to ignore the millions of its victims, and thus to renew itself in the next generation&#8230;is the creation of a culture&#8230;and of a living community that perpetuates its myths&#8230;In 2003, the Rosenberg grandchildren can take pride in their heritage a being the heirs of Communists and spies, and receive encouragement and praise from &#8220;an international community of support.” [267-268]</p></blockquote>
<p>The Sixties radicals also differed from their political predecessors by entertaining a deeper and durable romantic rejection of modernity, and not only of capitalism, as well as a distinctive anti-Americanism. Horowitz writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>A crucial aspect of the worldview of American radicals is not only the monstrous nature of America’s essence but the belief in American omnipotence&#8230; Radicals never see America as reacting to a threat that cannot be ignored, or to a set of circumstances whose outcome it cannot determine. [81]</p></blockquote>
<p>These radicals have also shared a conception of the United States similar to that held by some 19<sup>th</sup> century Russian philosophers, as well as Soviet ideologues and their present-day descendants, namely that “The West is &#8230;rotten to the core and weak yet so powerful that it can be blamed for everything that goes wrong.” <sup><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=220862&amp;action=edit#_ftn1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Horowitz was capable of distancing himself from the sustaining embrace of discredited beliefs provided by the surviving subcultures of the Sixties and he paid (I presume) both an emotional and more tangible price for doing so. Many of his former radical colleagues have never forgiven his rejection of their animating beliefs and source of identity. His unembarrassed renunciation of sacrosanct political beliefs &#8212; at once liberating and wrenching &#8212; has also reduced, or more likely eliminated, many employment opportunities especially in the academic world. At last, it is always difficult, under any circumstances, to fundamentally alter or discard strongly held beliefs and causes which made one’s life meaningful and used to be a major source of one’s sense of identity.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">II.</p>
<p>This collection of previously published writings has several clearly articulated themes and propositions which lend coherence (and sometimes repetitiousness) to the volume. Among them is the basic and important point that the radical left has been motivated and sustained by secular-religious beliefs and this accounts for its persistence in the face of disconfirming realities, foremost the collapse of “actually existing” communist (i.e. state socialist) systems. Horowitz writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he community of the left is a community of meaning, and is bound by ties that are fundamentally religious. For the non-religious, politics is the art of managing the possible. For the left, it is the path to social and personal redemption&#8230;For the left, politics is ultimately not about practical options on which reasonable people may reasonably differ. It is about moral choices that define us as human. It is about taking sides in a war that will decide the future of mankind&#8230; [159]</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz correctly observes that,</p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Our century was a stage for the destructive drama of a secular religious faith called socialism, inspired by dreams of a social redemption that would be achieved by human agency, through the force of politics and the state. [189]</span></p></blockquote>
<p>The secular religious attitudes of the left (and I mean radical left, not “left” in general &#8212; a distinction Horowitz does not always make) and future orientation go together and further help to explain the handling of the frequent conflict between ends and means. Horowitz writes:</p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The belief in a perfect future inevitably inspires a passionate and otherwise inexplicable hatred towards the imperfect present&#8230; [3] In this surreal vision, once the chains of oppression had been removed&#8230;the natural goodness of &#8220;the people&#8221; would assert itself and the traditional dilemmas of power would no longer obtain. [17]</span></p></blockquote>
<p>Eric Hobsbawm, the widely revered historian, exemplified these attitudes with startling clarity as he refused to reject the Soviet system even after he acknowledged its moral, political and economic failures. As Horowitz explains:</p>
<blockquote><p>[H]is belief in an alternate world to replace the one into which he was born is not connected to any reality. It is an acknowledgment &#8211; albeit unintended &#8211; of the religious nature of radical belief. [32]</p></blockquote>
<p>Hobsbawm’s case is all the more noteworthy since unlike many other leftist sympathizers with the Soviet system he was well aware of its resounding failure to realize its founding ideals. He nonetheless admitted that in spite of all he knew, “‘To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.’” [31] George Lukacs, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, provides a similar example of a distinguished intellectual, thoroughly familiar with the failures and moral atrocities of the Soviet system, who nonetheless harbored a lifelong bond of affection for it that he was unable to sever.</p>
<p>Horowitz further illustrates the central place of secular religious beliefs in the sense of the identity of these true believers by quoting a revealing passage from the “political autobiography” of the radical feminist Gerda Lerner, who used to be a “card carrying” communist and subsequently prominent New Leftist. She wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>“‘Like all true believers, I believed as I did because I needed to believe: in a utopian vision of the future, in the possibility of human perfectibility&#8230;And I still need that belief, even if the particular vision I had embraced turned to ashes.’” [37]</p></blockquote>
<p>Another major theme of these writings is the continuity between the Old and the New Left, and their defining beliefs. Horowitz argues that “by the end of the decade [of the sixties] the ‘new’ left had become indistinguishable from the old&#8230;” [41] This is an overstatement. Doubtless, both movements shared an unqualified rejection of their own society and detestation of capitalism, as well as sympathy for any state or movement that denounced or challenged their society and capitalism. However, there have also been notable and significant differences.</p>
<p>For one thing, the New Left lost interest in the Soviet system and was (mildly) critical of it. It embraced a romantic rejection of modernity (not just capitalism) and a contradictory mix of a self-indulgent individualism and &#8212; what it considered &#8212; nurturing collectivism. Unlike the beliefs and institutional arrangements favored by the Old Left, there was no trace of puritanism in the New. The radical left of the Sixties shared with Georges Bataile, the French philosopher, a “longing for community and his glorification of transgression &#8211; acts of excess that would disrupt the status quo.” <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=220862&amp;action=edit#_ftn2"><sup>2</sup></a> Nor was the New Left organizationally linked to any existing communist state or organization, unlike its predecessor that was tied to the Communist Party of the U.S. and its front organizations.</p>
<p>Horowitz also makes the point that the terms “left” and “liberal” have become indistinguishable as the New Left came to usurp the liberal designation wishing to discard the “left” appellation that the failed communist systems brought into disrepute. The problem with this argument is that the left is not monolithic (as Horowitz well knows) and there has always been a moderate, anti-communist left, including social-democrats, that can justifiably claim the liberal mantle and not only as a public relations camouflage. Reading these essays I often felt that whenever critical reference was made to the left it was the radical left Horowitz had in mind.</p>
<p>These observations connect with another major proposition of the volume, namely, that mainstream, liberal American culture has absorbed and accommodated numerous left-wing positions and attitudes which can be traced to the protest movements and spirit of the Sixties. This is an important assertion and the circumstances referred to are familiar to all those who taught at a college or university since the late 1960s or early 1970s. It has indeed been the case that</p>
<blockquote><p>entire fields &#8211; &#8220;Whiteness Studies,&#8221; &#8220;Cultural Studies,&#8221; &#8220;Women’s Studies,&#8221; &#8220;African-American Studies,&#8221; &#8220;American Studies,&#8221; and &#8220;Peace Studies,&#8221;&#8230; are now principally devoted to this radical assault on American culture and society&#8230; [72]</p></blockquote>
<p>Numerous further manifestations of these trends are available and noted by the author. The academic celebrity status of Angela Davis is one of them. As few will recall she was the vice-presidential candidate of the American Communist Party in 1980 and 1984, received the Lenin Prize in 1979 and visited the Soviet Union under Brezhnev in the same year where she received a hero’s welcome. None of this cast a shadow on her celebration at Dartmouth College (among other places). [97-103] Even more astounding that, as Horowitz recalls, Tom Hayden, the leading Sixties radical and sometime advocate of guerilla warfare in the United States, was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Carter. [114, 5]</p>
<p>There is also the case of the late Herbert Aptheker, a major figure and “theoretician” of the American Communist Party showered with honors and appointments on numerous colleges campuses including the law school of the University of California and Columbia University. Howard Zinn’s vitriolic debunking history of the United States sold over a million hardback copies and has been the major text in countless colleges and high schools. [23] Noam Chomsky’s immense popularity on the campuses (at home as well as abroad) is another case in point. He is also said to be “one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities.” [57]</p>
<p>It is indisputable that, as Horowitz writes, “for 40 years Noam Chomsky has turned out book after book, pamphlet after pamphlet, and speech after speech with one message&#8230;alone: America is the Great Satan, the fount of evil in this world.” [223-224] At the same time it is hard to determine whether or not Chomsky has actually radicalized his audiences, or his popularity reflects an already existing predisposition and receptivity to his messages. It should also be noted that he has been subjected to criticism by some moderate leftists and liberals as well.</p>
<p>The popularity of Oliver Stone’s movies, abounding in absurd conspiratorial scenarios and ascribing a wide variety of evil to the United States are also among the symptoms of malaise enumerated by Horowitz. Not surprisingly, his latest movie called “My Friend Hugo” glorifies the late Chavez of Venezuela.</p>
<p>Another important proposition put forward in his book is that the left, or rather, the radical left, learned little from the collapse of Soviet communism and from the huge amounts of information about the suffering the pursuit of its policies led to. Such information had been available well before its demise, as were similar accumulations of evidence testifying to the profound moral and institutional defects of other communist systems. Horowitz writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>[T]he collapse of the Communist states and the bankruptcy of their Marxist economies ought to have thrown the left into a profound crisis of faith. It should have caused radicals to rethink their Marxist critique of democratic capitalism and the ideas about the revolutionary future&#8230;It should have caused them to re-evaluate &#8230;their support for regimes that had murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions of more. But such reassessments did not take place. [27]</p></blockquote>
<p>I made a similar point in some of my writings, but on further reflection I came to the conclusion that both Horowitz and myself somewhat overstated the case. The left, or elements of it (for example, people like Christopher Hitchens or Julius Lester, the former black radical, among others) did learn <i>something</i>. It has been that it was a serious error to pin their hopes for a better world and improved human beings on the fraudulent claims of repressive and regimented states such as the former Soviet Union or communist China and on their ideological pieties. But even if elements of the left developed such reservations about the former communist systems they have remained reluctant to modify their views of the United States, capitalism, and many Western cultural values and traditions. That is to say, their adversarial disposition has been preserved largely intact. Barbara Ehrenreich justifies this attitude &#8212; popular on the radical left &#8212; as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>“‘As a responsible radical, I believe our first responsibility is toward evil close to home, and stopping that. In any event, I’m more worried in the long run about the belligerence of George Bush than of Saddam Hussein.’” [110-111]</p></blockquote>
<p>The same underlying disposition also found expression in the recent support for political systems such as Venezuela under Chavez, the implacable hostility towards Israel, and more generally, in giving the benefit of the doubt to any social-political movement that has recycled some Marxist ideals and rejects capitalism, and its alleged bulwark, the United States, holding it responsible for every global economic, social or political problem.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most important, that many radical leftists continue to harbor the hope that there are political-institutional remedies and solutions for personal problems, that the discontents of modernity and the contradictory desires of human beings may one day be taken care of by political movements and systems which profess good intentions.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">III.</p>
<p>I have some minor quibbles and disagreements to register. Mark Kramer is not one of the authors of the <i>Black Books of Communism, </i>as stated in a footnote on page 25. He was its translator. It is arguable that the Soviet Union was “<i>the</i> most oppressive and repulsive empire in human history.” [30] (My emphasis.) Was it worse than Mao’s China or Nazi Germany? “One of the most&#8230;” would have been a safer assertion.</p>
<p>The suggestion that “our most privileged and educated youth&#8230; [had] come to despise their own nation&#8230;.with a ferocious passion&#8230;” [223] also calls for qualification. A “large or substantial portion” thereof would have been less debatable. In a seemingly similar frame of mind Horowitz quotes with apparent approval the assertion of Martin Amis that “the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere&#8230; colluded in the enslavement, death and&#8230;misery of hundreds of millions of socialist citizens.” [249] There is no evidence to support such a sweeping assertion and no reliable way to generalize about the attitudes and the alleged “collusion” of the “overwhelming majority of intellectuals.”</p>
<p>I would also hesitate to call socialism “a theory of economic theft,” or make other generalizations about it since there are considerable differences between the state socialism of the Soviet kind and the social democratic socialism that used to prevail in Scandinavian countries.</p>
<p>I am dubious about the proposition that “leftwing intellectuals like Hitchens and Berman&#8230;still nourish an enthusiasm for the utopian chimera.” [255] In the first place I am not sure about the unqualified, present-tense attribution of “leftwing” to them (even as it applies to Hitchens before his death). I doubt even more strongly that of late (if ever) they harbored utopian and revolutionary longings. True enough, Hitchens, even after the shift in his political worldview, had a soft spot for Trotsky but otherwise made a decisive and public break with his own leftism. More generally I am inclined to disagree with the suggestion that Hitchens “never did leave the left” [153] or that he “retain[ed] his progressive bona fides.” [6] He was actually denounced and vilified by many of his erstwhile comrades-in-arms, as Horowitz notes elsewhere in the same volume. I knew Hitchens (though not well) and spoke to him several times about his political attitudes and evolution and wrote about him.<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=220862&amp;action=edit#_ftn3"><sup>3</sup></a> That does not mean that I applaud all his political judgments and ideas (including his vehement and intolerant attacks on religion); nor do I consider myself an authority on his political convictions and transformations.</p>
<p>I would also be reluctant to lump together, as Horowitz does, Hobsbawm, Chomsky, and Todd Gitlin as “Stalinist intellectuals” even if they shared (different degrees of) a revulsion of America. The three of them are different not only in their political outlook and rhetoric but professional accomplishments as well. Hobsbawm’s was a competent historian notwithstanding his deluded affection for the Soviet Union and his long membership in the British Communist Party. As far as I know his rhetoric never came close to the vilifications and demagoguery of Chomsky who abandoned his work as a linguist decades ago to specialize in the obsessive demonization of the United States and Israel. In turn, Gitlin considerably modified his devotion to Sixties radicalism and rejected a good deal of it. Calling all of them “Stalinist” unhappily reminds me of the misuse of “fascist” similarly used to definitively discredit.</p>
<p>Another far-fetched assertion I came upon is that “deep in their hearts the radicals regarded the triumphs of the civil-rights movement as worrisome subversions of their real agendas” [91] which were “revolutionary.” [92] I don’t think that all, or most radicals necessarily subordinated the goals of the civil rights movement to their more far reaching “revolutionary” agendas.</p>
<p>Although I criticized Horowitz for insufficiently distinguishing among different kinds of leftists and at times blurring the line between different types of socialism it needs to be pointed out that this volume also includes a critique of Anne Coulter advising conservatives not to follow her “path.” Horowitz writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is important for conservatives to make distinctions between those on the left who were (and are) traitors or self-conceived enemies of the United States, those who were (and are) the fellow travelers of enemies of the United States, and those who are neither traitors, nor enemies, nor friends and protectors of the enemies, but are American patriots who disagree with conservatives over policy issues. [275]</p></blockquote>
<p>Notwithstanding the reservations expressed above this collection is an informative and authentic guide to the American radical left and some of its animating beliefs by an author who used to be a very vocal part of it.</p>
<p><b>Notes:</b></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> David Brooks: “Putin Can’t Stop,” <i>New York Times</i>, March 4, 2014.<br />
<sup>2</sup> Richard Wolin: <i>The Seduction of Unreason,</i> Princeton NJ, 2004, p. 163.<br />
<sup>3</sup> See Paul Hollander: <i>The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries,  and Political Morality</i>, Chicago 2006.  The same book also examined the political transformation  of David Horowitz.</p>
<p>***************</p>
<p><b><i>David Horowitz replies:</i></b></p>
<p>I want to thank Paul Hollander for a thoughtful review of Volume II of <i>The Black Book of the American Left</i>: <i>Progressives. </i>Because it appears in a magazine I publish I am taking the liberty of responding to some of his critical points, mainly because if I do not they may be seized upon by my detractors on the left as observations I do not challenge. Let me say at the outset that many of the points which Hollander calls quibbles are differences of opinion about which the reader can easily form an opinion, and are not substantive in a way that concerns me.</p>
<p>The first and most important of the claims that do concern me is Hollander&#8217;s suggestion that I lump together as &#8220;Stalinist intellectuals&#8221; Hobsbawm, Chomsky and Gitlin. In fact I do not. In the essay titled &#8220;The Mind of the Left,&#8221; which provides extended profiles of these three figures, I go out of my way to say that Gitlin is a sharp critic of Chomsky, while the section on Chomsky is headlined &#8220;The Nihilist Left,&#8221; of which Chomsky is the exemplar. Hollander&#8217;s mistake comes from an error that appears late in the text &#8212; several hundred pages after the aforementioned profiles &#8212; in a sentence referring to &#8220;The Mind of the Left,&#8221; which says that in it I &#8220;traced the continuities in radical thought from the generation of Stalinist intellectuals like Eric Hobsawm [to New Left intellectuals like] Noam Chomsky and Todd Gitlin.&#8221; The words in brackets were dropped from the published text but anyone reading &#8220;The Mind of the Left&#8221; would (or should) know exactly what I meant.</p>
<p>Hollander says that he would hesitate to call socialism &#8220;a theory of economic theft&#8221; as I do. Why? What is economic redistribution but the taking of the earned fruits of one segment of the population and giving it to those who haven&#8217;t earned it? I wrote this as a riposte to the socialist claim that &#8220;property is theft.&#8221; Obviously property is the legal protection of individual freedom and the rights of the individual to the fruits of his labor. Which is why an economic theory to abolish property is a theory of economic theft.</p>
<p>Hollander calls &#8220;far-fetched&#8221; my assertion that “deep in their hearts the radicals regarded the triumphs of the civil-rights movement as worrisome subversions of their real agendas.” As one of those radicals at the time, I know what I am talking about. The left turned its back on King after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts. Not a single New Left leader joined King&#8217;s last campaigns including the one in which he was killed. That is because the left did not want blacks to be integrated into the American system as King advocated. Instead the left supported racists (euphemistically referred to as &#8220;separatists&#8221;) like Stokeley Carmichael specifically for this reason. Far from my assertion being &#8220;far-fetched,&#8221; it is Hollander&#8217;s supposition that the left had good intentions that requires explanation. The whole post-King history of the civil rights movement which quickly degenerated into a racial assault on American values and in particular on the racial neutrality that was the core of King&#8217;s program is unintelligible if the left did not regard King&#8217;s message as troubling and seek to subvert it.</p>
<p>On the matter of Hitchens, Hollander is entitled to his opinion that Christopher left the left but a simple survey of the crowd at his memorial and the speakers at the international tribute to him in a specially televised event from London would say otherwise. I knew Christopher a lot better than Hollander and I have written a long appreciation of him which set out to define his complex political persona in an essay not in this volume. It is called &#8220;<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/david-horowitz/the-two-christophers/">The Two Christophers: Or the Importance of Second Thoughts</a>.&#8221; Readers can find it in my archive on this website or in my book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radicals-Portraits-Destructive-David-Horowitz/dp/1596988126"><i>Radicals: A Destructive Passion</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p>In closing I want to thank Paul Hollander for stimulating these thoughts and for providing an insightful review of my book.</p>
<p><b><i>Paul Hollander responds:</i></b></p>
<p>My comment on &#8220;lumping together&#8221; Chomsky, Gitlin and Hobsbawm was based on a sentence on page 312 of this book. I understand now that in an earlier essay David Horowitz made clear the differences among these three authors but the volume I reviewed did not include that essay.</p>
<p>I certainly don’t believe that &#8220;property is theft,&#8221; nor do I believe that progressive income taxes are theft. Likewise I don’t believe &#8212; and I wonder if Horowitz does &#8212; that the right to the &#8220;earned fruits&#8221; of one’s labor is, or ought to be, unconditional. If so, no taxes could ever be collected. The difficult question is how far the state should, or could go to in its attempts to equalize opportunities, and reduce inequalities by the use of the revenues it collects (and redistributes) and by other means. I don’t believe that equality of condition can ever be accomplished and I<i> </i>am also well aware that zealous attempts to do so can have a wide range of undesirable side effects and unintended consequences (including the growth of coercive bureaucracies). But I also believe that extreme inequalities are morally and socially problematic and undesirable. It is not easy to reconcile these two positions.</p>
<p>Socialist systems of the moderate, or social-democratic kind had no intention to &#8220;abolish property.&#8221;</p>
<p>I am sure that David Horowitz correctly argues that elements of the radical left preferred the Black Panthers, Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael to Martin Luther King and other moderate civil rights leaders. I took issue with what struck me as an over-generalization about the radical left’s &#8220;real agenda&#8221; that entailed a cynical devaluation of civil rights compelled by its far reaching revolutionary aspirations including separatism. Separatism, unwelcome as it is, does not necessarily conflict with the pursuit of civil rights.</p>
<p>It is very likely that David Horowitz knew Hitchens far better than I and read some of his writings I did not, and therefore is in a better position to assess the extent and depth of his political transformations and the remaining bonds with his youthful commitments and allegiances. For example I don’t know (and would like to know) how Hitchens’ view of Israel evolved following, and associated with, his break with Edward Said.</p>
<p>&#8220;A simple survey of the crowds&#8221; who attended Hitchens’ memorial service and the speeches made on the occasion are not necessarily reliable indicators of the nature, or durability of the political beliefs of Hitchens; their presence does not prove that their convictions and those of Hitchens late in his life converged. On the other hand, the volume, intensity and virulence of his denunciation by erstwhile comrades-in-arms (some of whom might have attended the same funeral) suggest that his &#8220;heretical&#8221; political positions and transformation were genuine and far-reaching.</p>
<p>How much of his earlier political beliefs and attitudes Hitchens might have retained in ripe middle age is a matter that leaves room for speculation, disagreement and varied interpretations.</p>
<p><b><i>David Horowitz replies:</i></b></p>
<p>Not to carry on this dialogue ad infinitum I will just address Paul&#8217;s objection to my statement that &#8220;socialism is theft.&#8221; Taxation to support community goods is not socialism in my book. Socialism is taxation designed to redistribute income, that is to take earned income from one element of the population and give it to another deemed deserving by whoever controls the state. And that is theft.</p>
<div style="text-align: left;" align="center">
<p>*<br />
<em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The Progressives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/barbara-kay/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/barbara-kay/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:45:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black Book]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What is the nature of progressives and why are conservatives so surprised by how radical, un-American and bigoted they are? Horowitz's second volume provides the answers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> <a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-223469" alt="bb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb.jpg" width="188" height="269" /></a>[To order <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 &#8212; The Progressives</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/volume-ii/">click here</a>. </strong></p>
<p><strong>We encourage our readers to visit our new website &#8211;  <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com</a> – which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]</strong></p>
<p><i>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times</i> dwelt heavily on author David Horowitz’s personal journey from the hard left as a “red diaper” child of Communists to leadership in the New Left movement. We followed the anguished transitional trajectory that began with Horowitz’s reflections on the New Left’s role in America’s Vietnam defeat, and his visceral recoil from the criminal excesses of the Black Panther Party. These attacks on his settled convictions provoked profound self-interrogation, leading to an intellectual pivot away from the theories, antipathies and loyalties that had for so long defined his identity.</p>
<p>Volume II surveys the wreckage blotting the landscape of “progressivism,” a barrier island to Communism’s landmass. Here we find the unbroken bridge linking Communism to the received wisdom of the vast majority of academics in the West, who download them into vulnerable students en masse. The Marxist vision that sustained Stalin’s supporters in the 1940s and 1950s is alive and well in the post-colonialist and identity obsessions of postmodern theorists. Utopians then, utopians still, Horowitz finds their vision of social justice is still attended by the same suppression of “incorrect” thought and speech, the same self-righteousness, the same illiberalism in dealing with critics and apostates that were – are &#8211; the hallmarks of Communism.</p>
<p>Progressives may refer to themselves as “liberals,” but that is a misnomer Horowitz strenuously proscribes. Classical liberalism in our culture was largely vanquished in the counter-cultural revolution, though the odd grey-haired academic adherent pops into view now and then, seeming baffled by what has become of the noble assumptions of his youth.  Referring to leftists as liberals launders their intellectual and political lineage. Real liberals – especially liberal scholars &#8211; don’t excommunicate their peers for deviating from the party line. Communists did; New Leftists did (as Horowitz learned first hand when he left the movement and his entire circle of “friends” renounced him); and progressives still do.</p>
<p>Take the case of feminist scholar Aileen Kraditor, Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. Aileen who? Precisely Horowitz’s point.  Even though much of my journalistic effort is spent in exposing the misandry and other cultural crimes springing directly from feminist theories, I had never heard of Aileen Kraditor prior to seeing her name in Volume I of <em>The Black Book</em> (she is mentioned again in Volume II).</p>
<p>According to Horowitz, Kraditor, a feminist historian in good – even iconic – standing during the years she was a card-carrying Communist,  was virtually &#8220;disappeared&#8221; from the feminist movement when she renounced Communism. Horowitz provided a mere thumbnail sketch, praising her work, and explaining why this once-admired scholar of the suffragette movement now languishes in near-obscurity, but it was enough to pique my curiosity.</p>
<p>I ordered Kraditor’s fascinating 1988 book,  <i>“Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958, </i>paying a hefty price for one of what seems to be a dwindling pile of remainders, but it was worth it. In the book’s foreword, Kraditor notes how difficult it was to get it published at all, acknowledging Horowitz as one of a handful of people who helped her bring the book to the world’s attention. (Interestingly, <i>Jimmy Higgins</i> is not cited amongst her writing achievements on her <a href="http://www.bu.edu/history/people/emeritus-faculty/aileen-kraditor/" target="_blank">Boston U blurb</a>.)</p>
<p>That’s the effect Horowitz’s writing has on me – to long to know more, that is &#8211; and I am sure I speak for many others of his readers. Horowitz knows the Left from the inside out. He recalls people and incidents everyone else has forgotten and recalls their words and deeds whole. Every essay is an intellectual assessment, but always contains a story, a plot, a human drama illuminating the eternal conflict between ideology and the individual conscience.</p>
<p>One of Horowitz’s special skills is to offers links, not only of beliefs handed down from previous incarnations of Marxist ideology, but precise little details that nail the object of his scorn to the wall, like the fact, adduced in the essay “The Peace Movement” in Volume II, that the fringe Workers World Party, the animating force behind the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East’s 1990 march on Washington, was the same party that in the 1960s was “the only Trotskyite splinter to endorse the Soviet invasion of Hungary.” A palpable hit, one of hundreds.</p>
<p>The reprinted articles and speeches covering the 1990s and early 2000s in Volume II of <i>The Black Book</i> are broken down into four parts. In Part 1, introduced by an eponymous essay, “The Mind of the Left,” Horowitz elaborates on a theme he has raised many times: the Left’s belief in a perfect future necessarily results in hatred of the imperfect present. He joins post-9/11 apologism for terror to the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Left’s antecedents. Post 9/11 progressives seeking “root causes” for our enemies’ hatred in American sins were following the same nihilist and utopian agendas as their political forebears.</p>
<p>Here Horowitz makes the pithy observation that old-style traitors like Benedict Arnold considered themselves true American patriots, acting in the interest of preserving and strengthening American honor, while modern traitors believe the higher form of patriotism is to shame and subvert America, an existential difference.</p>
<p>Modern traitors inculpate themselves. Speaking for his ideological peers, former president of SDS Todd Gitlin said: “The most painfully public emotion in our lives was <i>rejecting</i> patriotism.” Unregenerate Communist Eric Hobsbaum &#8211; he died in 2012 &#8211; admitted: “To this day I notice myself treating the memory and traditions of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.” He was a frequent guest on the campus circuit. Anarchist guru Noam Chomsky, a hero to countless leftists, cheerfully identifies America as “the greatest terrorist state.” Horowitz’s portrait of Howard Zinn, a Stalinist in youth, whose recent death has not halted the indoctrination of millions of young Americans into national shame through his wildly popular <i>A People’s History of the United States</i>, reveals Zinn as an unscrupulous ideologue, unabashedly open about his intention to expose American history as a litany of evils by white euro-centrists visited on “the people”: Indians, blacks, women and workers.</p>
<p>Horowitz concludes of the modern traitors: “In sum, America can do no right; even the right America does is wrong; and the wrongs are monstrous. This syllogism captures the entire logic of the anti-American mind.”</p>
<p>In Part II, “After the Sixties,” Horowitz takes on the 1970s radicals’ “long march through the institutions.” Particularly noteworthy is the entry, “Angela Davis at Dartmouth,” a 1988 speech Horowitz gave at Dartmouth College, both for the lurid story of Davis’ adventures with little-remembered multiple-murderer lover George Jackson (she was indicted as an accomplice to murder, but never convicted) and for the liveliness of the writing. (Horowitz’s writing is never less than elegant, but his spoken-word pieces bring him into unusually intimate connection with the reader.)</p>
<p>For Elaine Brown a day without the possibility of somebody being punished was a day without sunshine (even if it was herself: “by her own account, [Brown] was bull-whipped for missing an editorial deadline”). She too became a regular on the blame-America campus circuit – not in spite of her anti-Americanism and engagement with revolutionary criminals, but because of them.</p>
<p>Progressives have done their best to cast negative memories of the Black Panthers into the historical oubliette, and have largely succeeded; but Horowitz is their nemesis on the subject. He circles back to the Panthers constantly in his writings, unearthing all the forgotten names, all the forgotten sins.</p>
<p>His essay, “Progressive Education, Panther Style (1997)” rebukes the media for their political amnesia, recounting as evidence the story of Geronimo Pratt, a cold-blooded killer who was viewed by the left as an “American Nelson Mandela.” When Pratt was released from prison on a technicality, not a single reporter checked the court records proving beyond any doubt that Pratt had murdered an elementary-school teacher on a tennis court three decades previously (that factoid – “on a tennis court” is typical Horowitz, the little narrative detail that humanizes), or interviewed the prosecutor. Instead they hung on and publicized the words of defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran who babbled police conspiracy theories. This essay sets <i>that</i> record straight.</p>
<p>In spite of his loathing of the Panthers, Horowitz is not implacable where redemption is sought. He shows his softer side in acknowledging the humanity of Panthers criminal Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver, Horowitz writes in the essay, “Eldridge Cleaver’s Last Gift (1998),” “won my respect” when, in 1997, during a “60 Minutes” interview, he quietly condemned his past deeds, conceding that he had not appreciated in youth that America had been remarkably good to its minorities. He added, “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.” The interviewer didn’t respond to this remark, but Horowitz did: “In a world where it is so difficult to get a purchase on the truth, we can be thankful to [Cleaver] for providing us with one.”</p>
<p>Being thankful even to people we consider our ideological enemies when they step away from their errors is a human trait. And reacting more in sorrow than anger toward our ideological friends when we consider their speech or actions wrong is also a human trait (see Horowitz’s graciously firm criticism of Ann Coulter in his essay, “The Trouble with Treason”). But ideologues on the left are by definition incapable of common humanity when party lines are crossed.</p>
<p>In “The Secret Power of the Leftist Faith,” Horowitz explores the ruthless shunning – and worse – of “apostates” who deviate from the party line, a strategy that “keeps the faithful in line.” The most famous victim of progressive wrath was alpha pundit Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ crimes were his castigation of Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of “distract[ing] attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake [Monica Lewinsky]” and his exposure of Sidney Blumenthal as the willing agent of a corrupt regime, both captured in his 1999 book, <i>No One Left to Lie To</i>.</p>
<p>Blowback against this erstwhile icon of the Left was swift and harsh. One senses in it the kind of gut revulsion from the “unclean” we see in fundamentalist religions. Comrade after comrade blasted him in print. Longtime colleague at <i>The Nation</i> Alexander Cockburn denounced him as a “Judas.” He also accused him of being a closet gay and a sexual pervert. Todd Gitlin called Hitchens a “poison” who was no longer welcome to cross Gitlin’s threshold. Nobody stepped up to defend him. Horowitz concludes, “In blurting out the truth, Christopher has slammed the left up against its hypocrisies and threatened to unmask its sanctimonious pretensions.”</p>
<p>Hitchens resurfaces in a Part Three (“Loyalties”) essay, “The Destructive Romance of the Intellectuals,” in which Horowitz reviews novelist Martin Amis’ book about Soviet Communism, <i>Koba the Dread</i>. Hitchens was Amis’ best friend, yet Amis had the courage to challenge his friend’s tolerance and even support for ideas that produced such havoc on a grand scale. Addressing him directly – “Comrade Hitchens!” – Amis asks why, knowing what he knows, Hitchens doesn’t disavow his youthful regard for Trotsky and Lenin, as “These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use.”</p>
<p>There are some wonderful essays in this book that resist summary because it is the cumulative effect of the narratives in which the richness lies. I recommend “Three political Romances,” which unpacks “the Stalin school of falsification,” according to which historical data may be tortured in the interests of a more important historical “truth.” In this essay Horowitz strips the mendacious veneers from the self-serving personal myths propagated by “Guatemalan terrorist” Roberta Menchú (who won a Nobel prize for her lies); Stalinist propagandist and feminist doyenne Betty Friedan; and PLO apologist and bio-fictionalist Edward Said.</p>
<p>I also recommend a short essay, “A Question for the Millennium,” in which the still-functioning leftist magazine <i>The Nation</i> is reduced to moral rubble through a litany of the causes it has editorially supported: Stalinist collectivization, the purge-trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Pol Pot’s genocidal Cambodian campaign – and those causes it opposed: the formation of NATO, the security policies of Truman, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. As late as 2000, <i>The Nation</i> was still defending the innocence of Alger Hiss! With such a history, any self-respecting magazine would have thrown in the towel long ago. But to leftists the past is always “in another country”; and besides, its bloody wenches are always dead.</p>
<p>Far-left Journalist Robert Scheer is taken to the woodshed for a well-deserved drubbing in “Scheer lunacy at the Los Angeles Times (2001)”; the same for Noam Chomsky in “Guru of the Anti-American Left (2001)” (who else but Chomsky could write a history of World War II “without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers so much as influenced its events[?]”) Ditto Tom Hayden and the SDS (“Even in 1962, [the late Irving] Howe understood that Hayden and his comrades were totalitarians in the making”).</p>
<p>In “The Left on Trial,” Horowitz eviscerates the disgusting leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who defended Omar Abdul Rahman (the “Blind Sheik” convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trace Center bombing and plotting to kill 100,000 people in New York tunnels), and was herself convicted of aiding Rahman in furthering his terrorist agenda. Horowitz rightly sees her apologism for terror as emblematic of the Left’s mindset. Stewart assessed the 9/11 jihadists as “basically forces of national liberation.” In 2004, at a National Lawyers Guild annual convention, she attacked America as having “a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe,” raising a glass to her heroes “Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel&#8230;.” With the ashes of 3000 World Trade Center American victims barely cool, such are the people the National Lawyers Guild chooses to honor.</p>
<p>I was raised in the same era as Horowitz, but in a typically bourgeois Jewish home awash in Jewish values, but without ideology. So I really have no idea of what it is like to be indoctrinated with ideology every waking moment of one’s youth. I have always admired Horowitz for the intellectual independence that fueled his break with the Left, but didn’t appreciate how extraordinary his action was until I read his account of Robert Meeropol in “Guilt of the Son (2003),” which for memorability, psychological impact and illumination of the left’s imperviousness to moral clarity I think I must rate my favorite of this collection.</p>
<p>Meeropol was the younger of two sons orphaned by the execution of their infamous parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for treason (the boys kept the name of their adoptive parents, also diehard Stalinists). Robert and his brother Michael bore the unenviable burden of their Communist parents’ crimes of passing state secrets to the Soviets.  For many years the sons denied their parents’ guilt, but newly-opened Soviet archives in the 1990s left no further room for doubt of it.</p>
<p>Horowitz describes meeting Robert Meeropol decades ago when he himself was having his famous “second thoughts” about the Left. He asked Robert with some trepidation if he could imagine that his parents were actually guilty, and Robert said that he could, an admission that touched Horowitz’s heart. Yet in 2003 Robert published a memoir, <i>An Execution in the Family</i>, in which the Rosenbergs are presented as heroes of an American “resistance,” and courageously loyal to a higher principle than a mere state. The memoir is, in Horowitz’s judgment “the story of a man whose adult life began as an effort to rehabilitate his parents for a crime he believed they did not commit, and ended as a crusade to justify the crimes they did commit.”</p>
<p>In Horowitz’s summary of Robert’s book, Meeropol comes off as a fragile and confused man, unable to find a comfortable career niche that would accommodate his leftist views. He is worthy of some sympathy, and yet both he and his more hardened brother consciously decided to make the crusade to clear their parents’ names their life’s work, in 1974 publishing the book <i>We are Your Sons</i>, and assuming the role of chief spokesmen and fundraisers in the Rosenbergs’ defence.</p>
<p>Not defense of their literal innocence, but defense of their Communist cause. It didn’t matter to them that the Rosenbergs stole the plans for American jet fighters or the trigger of the atomic bomb: What mattered was that they were demonstrating “resistance to the dominant forces of our society.” In other words, neither their parents’ crimes nor the Soviets’ crimes nor the fact that their parents put love of an ideology ahead of their love for their children have shaken their loyalty to the belief system that formed them.</p>
<p>Robert Meeropol found true happiness when he created the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a support group for the children of “political prisoners.” The fund’s first beneficiaries were the children of the “Ohio Seven,” a group of revolutionaries who robbed banks and carried out bombings against multinational corporations investing in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and ‘80s. Another group of beneficiaries were the children of the Stalinist Communist Workers’ Party, whose leaders fomented suicidal incitement against the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, and were subsequently killed by them, becoming martyrs to the Left, remaining arrogant fools to the rest of us.</p>
<p>In 1997, a documentary filmmaker interviewed Robert’s children. They too are leftists who take pride in their heritage. Horowitz writes: “This is the secret of the left’s longevity, its ability to withstand the discrediting of its idea, to ignore the millions of its victims and thus to renew itself in the next generation. It is the creation of a culture, a historical narrative, and of a living community that perpetuates its myths, and sustains its progressive faith.”</p>
<p>In <i>Jimmy Higgins</i>, Aileen Kraditor tells us that</p>
<blockquote><p>The process of ideological self-delusion takes place below the level of consciousness where &#8220;free and deliberate choice&#8221; occurs…Those who have never been ideologically self-brainwashed will never comprehend the nature of ideology until they understand how millions of intelligent and generally decent people – including themselves – can fall prey to it…In people possessed by an ideology, the need for what the ideology offers is so strong that it determines what they accept as evidence. Facts and logic can never make them change their fundamental worldview so long as the need for it remains as the organizing principle of their personalities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Reading <i>Jimmy Higgins</i>, I see what it was that evoked Horowitz’s empathy for Kraitor. Not only does she nail the quintessential mindset of the ordinary Communist loyalist, arriving at the same conclusions as Horowitz, but one sees in her lavishly-detailed rendition of the fictional composite Jimmy Higgins an ideological portrait of Horowitz’s parents as he described them in his 1996 memoir, <i>Radical Son</i>.</p>
<p>It saddens me that Kraditor’s scholarly and profoundly insightful book, clearly a labor driven by the kind of prophetic zeal only former victims can really understand, has been lost to the mists of time. It is a comfort to know, however, that her name and mission live on in David Horowitz’s <em>The</em> <i>Black Book of the Left</i> series. There should be an honorific form of the normally pejorative “fellow travelers” to describe those who escaped from the ideological gulag. We may never really understand what it is like to live there, or what it takes to make the break away from its confines, but harkening attentively to those who’ve known slavery and freedom both is our duty, and in the case of David Horowitz’s <i>The Black of the Left </i>series, a richly rewarding pleasure, enhanced by the knowledge that there are many more volumes in the series to come.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></strong></p>
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		<title>Fat Cats and Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/fat-cats-and-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fat-cats-and-democrats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/fat-cats-and-democrats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Feb 2014 05:56:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219454</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The eerie conflict between progressives’ ideals and their lives. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/moore.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-219535" alt="moore" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/moore-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>The progressive mind functions by means of mythic narratives that have tenuous connections to reality. Cops shoot a black man, and Eugene Robinson of <i>The Washington Post</i> begs “please don’t shoot me,” indulging the myth of a lethal American racism endangering black people’s lives, even though black offenders kill 90% of black murder victims, and 85% of interracial crime is perpetuated by blacks against whites. Criticize Sandra Fluke for demanding that a Catholic university’s health care plan subsidize her birth control, and you’re waging a sexist “war on women” for making them pay a whole $30 for their monthly pills. Another particularly persistent and long-lived political folk tale is that conservatives and Republicans are the party of robber barons who use their exorbitant wealth to undermine democracy for their own nefarious ends.</p>
<p>Just recently this hoary myth was used to explain why Volkswagen autoworkers in Tennessee voted against joining the United Automobile Workers Union. According to MSNBC, the union lost because Grover Norquist’s “nonprofit Americans For Tax Reform . . . turned out to be funding a union-busting arm called the Center for Worker Freedom that waged a public campaign against the UAW in Chattanooga.” This is a variation on the same liberal caterwauling over the malign influence of money on politics allegedly enabled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that held restrictions on political speech by corporations, associations, and unions to be in violation of the First Amendment. In October last year, Obama blamed Citizen United for empowering rich conservative extremists like the Koch brothers: “You have some ideological extremists who have a big bankroll, and they can entirely skew our politics.” Look at the facts, however, and it is the progressives and Democrat elites who are using their fat bankrolls to make the political system serve their ideological and material interests.</p>
<p>Consider the Center for Responsive Politics’ recently released <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php">list</a> of “Heavy Hitters,” the biggest donors among political organizations from 1989 to 2014. Number 1 is ActBlue, “the online clearinghouse for Democratic action,” as it styles itself, that bundles individual contributions for distribution to Democratic candidates. ActBlue has already raised $12 million for the 2014 election cycle. In 2012 it tallied $33 million. All but 4 of the top 16 “heavy hitters” give the overwhelming majority of their funds to the Democrats. Only 2 of the top 20 give to Republicans. As FrontPage’s Arnold Ahlert <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-left-wing-money-machine-and-the-irss-vendetta-against-conservatives/">points out</a>, the progressives’ favorite big-money bogeymen, the Koch brothers, didn’t even make the top 50. These data are consistent with the research of David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin in their <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Leviathan-Left-Wing-Money-Machine-ebook/dp/B006OHIXK2?tag=vglnk-c277-20">book</a> <i>The New Leviathan</i>, which counts 122 left-wing foundations worth $104 billion, compared to 86 conservative ones worth around $10 billion.</p>
<p>This blatant hypocrisy and disregard for fact, of course, is nothing new, and reflects a long history of wealthy elites promoting progressive causes and policies from their privileged enclaves. In 2005 Hoover fellow Peter Schweitzer <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Do-As-Say-Not-Hypocrisy/dp/0767919025">profiled</a> some of these Potemkin populists whose lives have nothing to do with their principles, and who never have to live with the consequences of their policies. MIT professor Noam Chomsky, for example, one of the most prominent left-wing critics of America, has called capitalism a “grotesque catastrophe,” one “crafted to induce hopelessness, resignation, and despair.” Yet Chomsky, Schweitzer writes, is “himself a shrewd capitalist, worth millions, with money in the dreaded and evil stock market, and at least one tax haven to cut down on those pesky inheritance taxes that he says are so important.” Chomsky has set up an irrevocable trust to shelter his money, with his tax attorney and his daughter as trustees. Fans of redistributing wealth via the income tax like Chomsky are careful to make sure that somebody else pays for their political idealism.</p>
<p>Or take progressive filmmaker Michael Moore, who boasted about not owning stock but then set up a private foundation that in 2005 owned nearly $400,000 in corporate stocks and bonds, including pharmaceutical and medical companies like Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly, the targets of his documentary <i>Sicko</i>, which attacked the American health-care system. Moore’s foundation, however, doesn’t lavish funds on activist causes: “For a man who by 2002 had a net worth in eight figures,” Schweitzer writes, “he gave away a modest $36,000 through the foundation, much of it to his friends in the film business or tony cultural organizations that later provided him with venues to promote his books and films.” John Kerry, George Soros, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Ralph Nader––as Schweitzer documents, all these scolds of capitalist greed and champions of the oppressed have done very well manipulating the system to increase their own power and privilege, and ensuring that their money doesn’t end up in the government’s hands to finance the social justice policies they loudly champion.</p>
<p>Examples of this conflict between progressives’ ideals and their lives are as common as flies. People with King-Kong-sized carbon footprints left by private jet travel and 30,000-square-foot homes decry climate change and propose policies that will raise fuel and electricity prices for the masses. Champions of public schools and the policies that enable their failure put their own kids into exclusive private schools even as they attack charter schools that benefit minorities. Congressmen like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who cast themselves as the defenders of the little guy against rapacious and heartless corporations, endorse environmental policies that dump precious water into the Pacific in order to protect baitfish, throwing out of work Mexican farmworkers. Preachers of multicultural diversity and the boons of integration live in gated enclaves and high-end zip codes far from the dark “other.” Gun-control fanatics eager to gut the Second Amendment protect themselves with armed private security. And the scolds of bigotry and racism routinely indulge the most vicious slander and calumny against conservatives, Christians, pro-life women, and anybody else who doesn’t agree with their doctrines.</p>
<p>The demonization of wealth spent on conservative political causes, even as many more millions are spent on progressive ones, is just another example of liberalism’s moral incoherence. It reflects as well a two-bit postmodern carelessness about the distinction between words and deeds. For the affluent progressive, chanting the right mantras about fairness, equality, and justice creates a reality that masks how their beliefs and policies create unfairness, inequality, and injustice, and obscures how far their lives are from the clients they patronize and exploit politically. But as Eric Hoffer said, “Facts are counterrevolutionary.” The costs of the Democrats’ attempts to realize Obama’s pledge to “fundamentally transform America” are creating a mountain of unpleasant facts that just might awaken enough voters to the hypocritical and duplicitous myths that comprise progressive politics.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>How the American Left Lost Its Nerve</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-judge/how-the-american-left-lost-its-nerve/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-american-left-lost-its-nerve</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:54:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Judge]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new book unveils the true sinister motives of the American Left. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="BlogContent">
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/tbb1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-217082" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/tbb1.jpg" width="231" height="350" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8220;<em>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,&#8221; </em><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://dailycaller.com">TheDailyCaller.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>They were Communists. Not liberals or progressives. They wanted the Russians to win the Cold War, and the Vietcong to defeat America in Vietnam. They didn’t even like liberals. The radicals of the 1960s were Communists. And today they continue to lie about it.</p>
<p>That’s the major takeaway from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Book-American-Left/dp/1594036942/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1383737997&amp;sr=8-11&amp;keywords=david+horowitz" target="_blank"><em>The Black Book of the American Left</em></a>, a new book by David Horowitz. Horowitz, the son of two American Communists — with a capital C, meaning party members — was a radical student leader and the editor of <em>Ramparts</em> magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. He began to turn politically in 1974, when he sent his friend Betty Van Patter to help the Black Panther Party only to have her turn up murdered soon after. For Horowitz it’s caused a crisis, then a conversion to conservatism.</p>
<p>Horowitz has been a well-known conservative activist for decades, but it’s quite bracing to have a lot of his internet writings compiled into one hardback volume.</p>
<p>And again and again in <em>The Black Book of the American Left,</em> he hits his main point: the “activists” of the 1960s, like the “progressives” of earlier eras, were Communists. They wanted to topple the government of the United States. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground were not interested in mainstream Democrats like Hubert Humphrey or any liberal solution to any of America’s problems. They wanted to blow things, and people, up. They wanted a revolution.</p>
<p>I would argue that there is an important difference between the radicals of the early 20th century and those of the 1960s and today, and that Horowitz doesn’t capture this, but I’ll get to that shortly. For now it’s worthwhile just to sit back and listen while Horowitz, a compelling writer and honorable man, remind us that the people he rioted with in the 1960s were, yes, Communists.</p>
<p>Tom Hayden. Angela Davis. Bill Ayers. Noam Chomsky. Todd Gitlin. The Black Panthers. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. The Weathermen. Reds, all. Some more violent than others, but all of them called for a revolution.</p>
<p>A few years ago Horowitz was on a panel at Georgetown University with Michael Kazin, who had been a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society, an influential leftist group in the 1960s. All the left wanted to do in the 1960s, Kazin said, “was give peace a chance.” Horowitz reminds readers that during the Vietnam era Kazin was a left-wing revolutionary who embraced the motto “bring the war home” — i.e., cause as much violence on American streets as possible. Kazin could care less about peace. At a 1969 rally he led the following cheer: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Gonna Win!” Give peace a chance? Kazin wanted nothing to do with it — or even with liberalism. Horowitz: “It had been liberalism that guided America to power in the postwar world. It was liberalism that had gotten America into Vietnam. Centrist liberalism was the balance wheel giving synchronicity to the entire political system. But now radicals assaulted the center; if it could not hold, America would fall.”</p>
<p>Ask yourself: why did left-wing demonstrators attack the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago? It wasn’t because they hated Republicans, although that was also true. They hated liberals because liberals at the time represented authority in America. Student radical Todd Gitlin, who now, like so many of his left-wing friends, is a professor, didn’t vote in 1964, even though Barry Goldwater was against the war in Vietnam, which was supposedly Gitlin’s top issue. So why didn’t Gitlin vote for Goldwater? In later years Gitlin would give a weak excuse, but the answer is obvious: he was a left-wing revolutionary who wanted to collapse the American system of government. These people were in no way, as Horowitz puts it, “mooning for Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” as they would later claim. They wanted to bring the war home, and topple the United States.</p>
<p>Horowitz connects the left of the 1930s and 1960s with the left of today. This is accurate as far as a lot of academics go, but I think that is different than the modern left in the media and popular culture. As historians such as Christopher Lasch and James Hitchcock have observed, there has been not just a political but psychological transformation in the United States over the last 40 or 50 years. Once communist radicals like Whittaker Chambers and the editors of <em>The Nation</em> believed in communism as a kind of mathematical religion; there were going to occur certain things as history marched towards its resolution, and the role of the revolutionary was to aid in that process. But this meant that when that system broke down, there was the chance that reason could  break through the cracks. Horowitz’s own Communist parents saw their worldview collapse in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev made a speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin and the “cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin. Whittaker Chambers, as he chillingly put it, “heard the screams” and saw the lie that was communism.</p>
<p>Today it’s different. Most leftists that are seen on TV, online and in the entertainment industry don’t have any coherent plan or overarching cosmic concept about dialectical materialism and the gears of history. They’re just psychologically damaged and resentful losers. Rachel Maddow is not Todd Gitlin. Michael Moore is a lefty, but his entire shtick is based on jokes and self-loathing. Dan Savage hates conservatives not because of anything Lenin or Marx wrote, but because deep down he dislikes himself — his obsession with sex, shared by most of his lefty friends, reveals someone with deep personal issues. Jonathan Capeheart, the pathetic Obama toady, doesn’t want the proletariat to rise — he wants the world to be forced to embrace his gayness. These people aren’t the vanguard of a revolution; they just need counseling.</p>
<p>Of course, that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. In fact that probably makes them more dangerous than traditional Reds. With evidence communism can be revealed as a sham. But if someone has an Oedipal issue and is raging against their father, or is a sexual deviant out to bring others down to his level, or just has general free-floating anger about some childhood issue, there’s no real resolution. It just festers. In <em>The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich</em>, William Shirer noted that the early Nazi were not anything fearsome. They were just a small group of deadbeats, misfits, sexual deviants and bullies. The thing that tied them together was resentment. This picture is more more accurate when looking at today’s leftists. When the revolution does come, it won’t be about a worker’s paradise. It will be about shaming, silencing, and ultimately killing anyone who hurt your feelings.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/theodore-dalrymple/the-black-book-of-the-american-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:55:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Theodore Dalrymple]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213422</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's new collection unveils the heart of progressive darkness. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-213426" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb.jpg" width="300" height="454" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8220;<em>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,&#8221; </em><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Ever since Stéphane Courtois published his <em>The Black Book of Communism</em>, there has been a deluge of black books, particularly in France, where the latest is that of Vichy. David Horowitz’s <em>Black Book</em> is that of the American left, which he charges – with a great deal of cumulative evidence – of equivocation towards, support for and outright complicity with the Soviet Union. Ignorance of the horrors of Soviet rule was not an excuse, because the horrors were known and documented from the very first, and for decades the left preferred to ignore the facts than abandon its fantasies. And although the American left was not responsible for much violence in America itself, there was hardly any revolutionary violence that to which it did not provide aid and comfort, repeating its original <em>sin ad nuaseam</em>. In the process it rewrote its own history as assiduously and dishonestly as Stalin wrote his.</p>
<p>It is against the attempt by intellectuals to disconnect the ideas that their words express and the deeds that those ideas have inspired, condoned or encouraged, that David Horowitz has written for a quarter of a century. He has focused his powerful guns on the American left for two reasons, the first personal and the second sociological, though in fact in his case the two reasons are inextricably linked. First he himself was a member of the left for much of his youth and early adulthood, and second leftist ideas of various stripes were and remain predominant in academia and among the intelligentsia.</p>
<p>He was a red diaper baby, that is to say the child of ‘orthodox’ communist parents, but by the time he came to young adulthood the Soviet Union was no longer plausibly the hope of the world. However, Horowitz did not at that stage want to throw the baby out with the diapers, and therefore helped to found the New Left. Unfortunately, the internal logic of its socialist beliefs led it to support or make excuses for totalitarian regimes such as Castro’s, just as the previous generation of orthodox communists had done. It also indulged in what would have been comic operetta revolutionism had it not been for the extreme criminal nastiness of the acts which it excused, condoned, concealed or perpetrated.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.</p>
<p>There is inevitably some repetition in collection. There are also things with which one might disagree: it is far too categorical, for example, to state that up to 100,000,000 people have died of malaria as a result of the ban on the use of DDT. I think the author greatly underestimates the strength of possible conservative objection, both on grounds of moral justification and practical effects, to the second Gulf War (though he admits that not all those who objected to it were motivated by American self-hating animus). He does not identify the real source of dangerous Islamism in most of the west, namely Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which play double games if ever such double games were played, and which are not mentioned by him.</p>
<p>He is very good on the guerrilla movements in Latin America, which far from being the spontaneous and justified expression of a downtrodden peasantry, as was the received wisdom among western intellectuals at the time of those movements’ apogee, were the products of rapidly expanding numbers of university students led by leftist intellectuals. The Guatemalan guerrilla group, ORPA, for example, was led by the son of the then sole Guatemalan Nobel Prize Winner, the novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias. The worst of them all, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, was led by a university professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzmán, who very nearly became Peru’s Pol Pot. Just as American leftist intellectuals ceased to be interested in Indochina the moment American troops left, so the fate of Central America ceased to interest them once there was no possibility that utopian leftist regimes would be established in them. Their interest in far-flung places was only as a screen upon which they could project their own psychodrama.</p>
<p>It is on the psychological reasons for eschatological leftism that Horowitz is best. Eschatological leftists, rather than genuine liberals, or for that matter eschatological nationalists or religious fanatics, are not interested in righting this or that individual wrong, reforming this or that defective institution; they aim at resetting the terms and limits of human existence itself. They are like doctors who, instead of wanting to cure illness, want to abolish death. They dream of an existence in which there are no frustrations, no contradictory desires, no conflicting interests. For them anything less than root and branch change is but a sticking plaster over a gaping wound, and anyone who enjoys the present moment is deficient in compassion for those who are not in a position to do so. The only permissible enjoyment is in fighting the good fight.</p>
<p>Why? What is the gaping wound that they want to heal? It is the transitoriness of human life to which, in the absence of religious belief, they cannot reconcile themselves, the life that Macbeth says is full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. They seek in political action that transcendence that would assure them that their lives in fact have significance; and since the problem is a metaphysical one that will never be solved, victory over eschatological political belief, of whatsoever kind, is never final or even very lasting. Indeed, as things get materially better chiliasm grows stronger, for people have greater leisure to dwell upon their dissatisfactions.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s reflections on this problem, both obvious and revelatory, are for me the best thing in these volumes, and express very succinctly why conservatism, at least of the kind that I favour, is an attitude to life rather than a doctrine:</p>
<blockquote><p>It became clear to me that the world was not going to be changed into anything very different… from what it had been. On this earth there would be no kingdom of freedom where swords would be turned into plowshares and lions would lie down with lambs. It should have been obvious when I began. Many things change but people do not. Otherwise how could Shakespeare, or writers more ancient, capture in their creations a reality that we recognize, and that still moves us today?</p></blockquote>
<p>He continues:</p>
<blockquote><p>These revelations had a humbling effect. They took my attention away from noble fantasies that had enveloped me and forced me to focus on my ordinary existence; to see how common it was; how un-heroic, ordinary and unredeemed. The revelations that shattered my faith allowed me, for the first time, to look at my mortality… I was going to die like everyone else, and be forgotten.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz then realized that his political fantasies were a way of ‘averting [my] eyes from this ordinary fact.’ And ‘who would want to hear the voice of a future that was only calling them to oblivion?’</p>
<p>The leftism that Horowitz wants to combat, then, is religious, but without a god and without beauty. His short essay, A Political Romance, reminds me of the words of Joseph Conrad:</p>
<blockquote><p>I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common, short and empty; that it is in ‘seeking’ the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!</p></blockquote>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Progressive Reality Is Here</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-reality-is-here/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-progressive-reality-is-here</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:51:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[limited government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scandals]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213415</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How many Americans are ready to accept the sacrifices we have to make to right our fiscal ship? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/well.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213420" alt="well" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/well-450x266.jpg" width="315" height="186" /></a>The Republicans are feeling confident these days. The slow-motion debacle of Obamacare promises to keep that albatross around the necks of the Democrats at least through next year’s midterm elections. The IRS, NSA, and Benghazi scandals are still simmering, and any day new information may emerge that puts them back on the front page. Obama’s disapproval rating is at 53.4%, according to the <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" target="_blank">RealClearPolitics</a> average of 11 polls. The Republican Party’s approval numbers are still lower than Democrats’, but they are trending up while the Dems are moving down.</p>
<p>The recent budget deal passed in the House supposedly augurs well for the Republicans as well. Many see the bipartisan agreement to fund government spending for two years as a tactical victory that takes the bad public relations of a government shutdown off the table, thus keeping the focus on the Obamacare disaster. Growing more confident, the “establishment” Republicans are marginalizing the Tea-Party “extremists” who generate so much bad press for the GOP. Or as the Huffington Post gloated, House Speaker John Boehner “was at least declaring war on the well-funded agitators” who “jumped the shark” by opposing the deal.</p>
<p>The Republicans may have achieved a tactical victory, but only time will tell if it translates into taking back the Senate and the presidency. But even if they do, it is still unlikely that they will achieve any meaningful reforms that can reign in the federal leviathan, seriously reduce metastasizing debt and deficits, or fix the looming disaster of unfunded entitlement liabilities. For the fact is, the Progressive vision now a century old has won the political debate over the power and goals of the federal government.</p>
<p>The Progressive agenda starting with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt is now political reality. The Constitutional idea of a limited federal government checked and balanced by Congress and the sovereign state governments––the obstacles to Progressive ambitions to guide the evolution of the nation toward greater “social justice” and fiscal equality––is now a distant memory. Most people assume that the job of the fed is to “solve problems” through a vast bureaucracy of technocrats. The notion that state and local governments, or the institutions of civil society perhaps should have the responsibility to “solve problems,” gains little traction among the mass of citizens, especially when it comes to mitigating the slings and arrows of human existence.</p>
<p>As a result of this assumption, the size and coercive concentrated powers of the federal government at the expense of state governments and individuals alike have grown to an extent that would have shocked the Founders. As of January 2012, the federal government employed 2.3 million workers, excluding military personnel, at a cost of $200 billion a year. Total federal spending in 2013 was $3.5 trillion, a 40 percent increase over the last decade. Equally significant is the intrusive, coercive regulatory apparatus that has followed this expansion of the federal government. In 2012, the Federal Register, which publishes proposed new rules andfinal changes to existing rules, comprised 78,961 pages. The Code of Federal Regulations, which publishes general and permanent rules and regulations, totaled 174,545, with over one million individual regulatory restrictions. Just the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2010 is up to nearly 14,000 pages of rules––and is only 39 percent complete. The <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#143023156b511253_http://cei.org/studies/ten-thousand-commandments-2013">Competitive Enterprise Institute</a> puts the total cost of complying with all these rules and regulations written by anonymous, unaccountable federal bureaucrats at $1.8 trillion. As Robert Nisbet writes in his invaluable <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Present-Age-Progress-Anarchy/dp/0865974098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387241092&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+present+age+nisbet" target="_blank">book</a> <i>The Present Age</i>, “There isn’t an aspect of individual life, from birth to death, that doesn’t come under some kind of federal scrutiny.”</p>
<p>This expansion, moreover, has come under Republican administrations as well as Democratic ones. The Environmental Protection Agency’s some 7000 rules cost $353 billion a year. Just six proposed new rules could cost between $36 and $111 billion, according to the EPA’s own lowball estimate. The legislation establishing the EPA was signed by Richard Nixon. Or take Social Security Disability Insurance. The number of workers receiving disability insurance has increased from 2.9 million in 1980 to 8.8 million in 2012. In 2013 SSDI will cost around $150 billion, a trend that will leave the program insolvent in 2016. This increase is mostly the result of the loosening of medical eligibility requirements to include more subjective conditions such as mood disorders and musculoskeletal problems. This change was legislated under the Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984. That legislation was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. More recently, George W. Bush signed into law the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2006, which will cost $549 billion between 2006 and 2015.</p>
<p>The last three examples demonstrate that bigger government has been driven by a relentless expansion of entitlement spending both by increasing the number of recipients of existing programs, and by creating new ones. But as everyone knows, spending on entitlement programs is on a path to national bankruptcy due to 76 million Baby Boomers retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day. In 2012, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other health spending made up 45 percent of the $3.6 trillion budget, with another 19 percent going to federal employee retirement and benefits, veterans’ benefits, and anti-poverty programs such as food stamps and welfare. Add in the costs of servicing the $17 trillion in debt necessary for financing all this largesse, and by <a href="http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/entitlement-spending-double?nomobile" target="_blank">2050</a> just health care entitlements alone will consume every dollar of federal taxes.</p>
<p>Here too Republicans, when they haven’t been creating new programs, have at best attempted to cut back <i>increases</i> in spending, rather than holding spending flat or reforming programs to decrease spending. As for questioning the existence of such programs, that is the fast track to political suicide. Indeed, just recommending modest reforms will bring down on any politicians charges of heartless indifference to the old and poor. Just ask Paul Ryan, whose 2012 budget that called for entitlement reform earned him a starring role in an attack ad in which he pushed a granny in a wheelchair over a cliff.</p>
<p>Finally, all this largesse is funded by a federal income tax that is a mechanism for the redistribution of property that troubled critics of democracy from the ancient Greeks to the American Founders. The U.S. has one of, if not the most, progressive tax rates of the world’s 24 richest countries. This progressivity of U.S. income taxes results in a redistribution of wealth from higher income to lower income citizens, even taking into account payroll and state taxes. According to the <a href="http://taxfoundation.org/article/distribution-tax-and-spending-policies-united-states." target="_blank">Tax Foundation</a>, “The typical family in the lowest 20 percent in 2012 (with market incomes between $0 and $17,104) pays an average of $6,331 in total taxes and receives $33,402 in spending from all levels of government. Thus, the average amount of redistribution to a typical family in the bottom quintile is estimated to be $27,071. The vast majority of this net benefit, a total of $21,158, comes as a result of federal policies.” The top 20 percent, on the other hand, paid $87,076 more in taxes than it received in government spending, while the top one percent paid $867,473 in taxes and received $55,078 in spending. In 2012, about $2 trillion was distributed via entitlement programs and tax credits from the top 40 percent to the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers.</p>
<p>The truth is, we all have become a “nation of takers,” as Nicholas Eberstadt documents in his important <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Takers-Americas-Entitlement-Epidemic/dp/1599474352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387239901&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=a+nation+of+takers" target="_blank">book</a>. We all consider normal a gigantic federal government of bureaucrats and technocrats whose job is to redistribute property in order to finance a vast network of entitlement spending from which most of us benefit either directly or indirectly. Beneficiaries of these programs have powerful lobbies that monitor and punish any politician who dares challenge this status quo. Just consider how easy it has been to marginalize the Tea Party as racist extremists, the only political organization calling for the return to the limited government of the Constitution, the reigning in of unsustainable debt and deficits, and the reform of entitlement programs so that only the truly needy are served. The existence of a vast constituency for government handouts has enabled this demonization of the only people crying “Iceberg ahead!”</p>
<p>Other Republicans may believe that once they return Congress and the Presidency to the Republicans––something they say the polarizing Tea Partiers make difficult, if not impossible––then they will turn to addressing the coming debt-deficit-entitlement crisis. Perhaps they are right. I hope they are right. But history gives us little hope that they will achieve anything other than a slow-down of the disaster. Not because they are “establishment” insiders or liberal wolves in conservative sheep’s clothing, but because not enough American people are ready yet to face reality and accept the sacrifices we’re all going to have to make to right our fiscal ship. Until then, the Progressives will keep winning no matter which party is in power.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>How the Left Yearned for a White American Bomber &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/how-the-left-yearned-for-a-white-american-bomber-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-left-yearned-for-a-white-american-bomber-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bombers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Boston]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[chechen]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MSNBC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rachel Maddow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[terrorists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186386</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[See no Islam, Hear no Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Obama32.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187241" alt="Obama3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Obama32.jpg" width="252" height="378" /></a>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> had the honor of being joined by actor <strong>Basil Hoffman</strong>, (The Artist), actor <strong>Dwight Schultz</strong> (DwightSchultzFansite.nl) and<br />
<strong>Ann-Marie-Murrell</strong>, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.</p>
<p>The Gang members gathered to discuss<em>: How the Left Yearned for a White American Bomber. </em>The discussion occurred in <strong>Part I</strong> and centered on the Boston Massacre and David Sirota&#8217;s article in <em>Salon</em> which expressed his wish that the Boston Marathon bomber would be a white American terrorist. (See Daniel Greenfield&#8217;s analysis of it <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/praying-for-a-white-american-terrorist/">here</a>.)</p>
<p><strong>Part II</strong> focused on <em>Rachel Maddow’s Brain Numbing Attack on David Horowitz. </em>The Gang analyzed why MSNBC&#8217;s terminally sophomoric host scoffs at an author&#8217;s books without reading them. The dialogue shed light on how and why progressives oppress blacks and Hispanics while pretending to be their saviors. (See Frontpage&#8217;s article on it <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/rachel-maddows-brain-numbing-attack-on-david-horowitz/">here</a>). The segment also touched on: <em>Will Americans Soon Live Like Israelis? </em></p>
<p>See both parts of the two-part series below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/W2VkHcOZVaE" height="325" width="425" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/L5D4Vm8fdMQ" height="325" width="425" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>Rachel Maddow’s Brain Numbing Attack on David Horowitz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/rachel-maddows-brain-numbing-attack-on-david-horowitz/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rachel-maddows-brain-numbing-attack-on-david-horowitz</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Apr 2013 04:58:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attacks David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black skin privilege]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=185733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Read the books, Rachel, before you blow another gasket about them.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/rachel-maddows-brain-numbing-attack-on-david-horowitz/mad/" rel="attachment wp-att-185739"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-185739" title="mad" alt="" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/mad-450x235.jpg" width="315" height="165" /></a>Last Friday, the terminally sophomoric Rachel Maddow turned her adolescent sarcasm on the Republican National Committee for seeking advice from Dick Cheney, Hugh Hewitt and David Horowitz. How absurd it was she cackled. &#8220;I thought I was being punked.&#8221; In regard to Frontpage editor Horowitz, she was aroused by the fact that the RNC invited him to keynote their conference at the Reagan library (as it happens that very Friday) to advise them on how to persuade minorities that  their best interests were served by voting against Democrats, remarks, by the way, that got a standing ovation. (The attack on Horowitz begins at <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/#51524599">3:09 of the video</a>.)</p>
<p>Since Rachel Maddow is incapable of dealing in ideas or facts, she thought it was sufficient to read off the titles of three of what she called David&#8217;s &#8220;books,&#8221; including what she described as his &#8220;magnum opus&#8221; &#8212; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Race-Card-Resentment-Assault/dp/0761509429"><em>The Race Card</em></a>. <em>The Race Card</em> is actually not anything that anyone who read it could think of as a &#8220;magnum opus.&#8221; It is a book of essays written mostly by other people that Horowitz and Peter Collier edited fifteen years ago. The other titles Maddow chortled over were <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productattribute.html?productId=5087"><em>Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes</em></a> and &#8220;<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/black-skin-privilege-pamphlet/">Black Skin Privilege</a>&#8221; (not even a book by David but a 35-page pamphlet that he wrote with John Perazzo). Since Maddow can&#8217;t be bothered to read let alone think about the ideas of people who don&#8217;t share her blind prejudices, she remains blissfully ignorant that her own attitudes are racist, which happens to be what these texts are about.</p>
<p>It is inconceivable to people like Maddow, for example, that an incompetent, unaccomplished, left-wing ideologue like Barack Obama, whose closest friends and advisers were America-haters Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, would never have been elected president if he weren&#8217;t black &#8212; one of the points of &#8220;Black Skin Privilege.&#8221;</p>
<p>Of course there&#8217;s a method to the sarcasm and scorn that Maddow directed at David Horowitz. It is to avoid confrontation with the fact that the principal oppressor of blacks and Hispanics in American society are Democrats and progressives like her. We don&#8217;t have a transcript of Horowitz&#8217;s remarks to the RNC, but everything of substance that he did say is contained in the passage below from <em>Go For The Heart: How Republicans Can Win </em>(the full text is available at <a href="http://www.gofortheheart.org/">www.gofortheheart.org</a>).</p>
<p><strong>Go For The Heart: How Republicans Can Win<br />
By David Horowitz<br />
(Excerpt pp.30-35)</strong></p>
<p>The bottom line is this: If Republicans want to persuade minorities they care about them, they have to stand up for them; they have to defend them; and they have to show them that Democrats are playing them for suckers, exploiting them, oppressing them, and profiting from their suffering.</p>
<p>Large populations of the African American and Hispanic poor are concentrated in America’s inner cities – Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Harlem, South Central Los Angeles. In these inner cities the unemployment rates are off the charts, the school systems so corrupt and ineffective that half the children drop out before they graduate and half those who do are functionally illiterate. They will never get a decent job or a shot at the American dream.</p>
<p>In these inner cities every city council and every school board and every school district are 100% controlled by Democrats and have been for more than 70 years. Everything that is wrong with the inner cities and their schools that policy can affect, Democrats are responsible for. Democrats have their boot heels on the necks of millions of poor African American and Hispanic children and are crushing the life out of them every year. But Republicans are too polite to mention it.</p>
<p>In the middle of the 2012 campaign a teacher union strike shut down the schools in Chicago, Obama’s home town. The issue was not pay but the union’s refusal to allow teacher rewards to be connected to teacher performance. African American and Hispanic children were the true victims of the determination to protect bad teachers and not to reward good ones. Yet Republicans ignored the strike, and never put a face on its victims.</p>
<p>At the Republican convention one keynote speaker referred to the teacher unions and the issue of teacher rewards and union obstruction. This was Governor Chris Christie, probably the most aggressive and articulate Republican warrior. But here is how Christie framed the Democrat/union atrocity:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>We believe that the majority of teachers in America know our system must be reformed to put students first so that America can compete…. We [Republicans] believe that we should honor and reward the good ones while doing what&#8217;s best for our nation&#8217;s future — demanding accountability, higher standards and the best teacher in every classroom.</em></p>
<p><em>They believe the educational establishment will always put themselves ahead of children. That self-interest trumps common sense. They believe in pitting unions against teachers, educators against parents, and lobbyists against children. They believe in teacher&#8217;s unions.”</em></p></blockquote>
<p>And that’s all he said. The issues are there – accountability, standards and rewards for teacher performance. The policy is there. But the moral outrage is missing. The victims are missing and the culprits aren’t named. It’s not the “educational establishment” that’s ruining the lives and blocking the opportunities of African American and Hispanic children. It’s the Democrats – <em>they</em> are<em> </em>the educational establishment in every failing public school district. The Democrat teacher unions and the Democrat Party that supports them are destroying the lives of African American and Hispanic students whose parents are too poor to put them in private schools – the same private schools where Democrat legislators and union leaders send their own children.</p>
<p>Democrats will fight to the death to prevent poor parents from getting vouchers to provide their children with the same education that well-heeled Democratic legislators provide for theirs. This is a moral atrocity. This is an issue to get angry about and mobilize constituencies over. This is an issue that could drive a Gibraltar size wedge through the Democratic base. But Republicans are too polite to do that.</p>
<p>This is merely the most obvious atrocity that Democrats are committing against America’s impoverished minorities. Subverting family structures through a misconceived welfare system, encouraging food stamp dependency, providing incentives to bring into this world massive numbers of children who have no prospect of a decent life just to earn a welfare dollar. These are the corrupt fruits of Democratic welfare policies which are spiraling out of control. Republicans criticize these programs as “wasteful.” They need to start attacking them as destructive, as <em>attacks</em> on the human beings who are ensnared by them.</p>
<p>The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies, ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately. Government welfare is not just wasteful; it is destructive.  The public school system in America’s inner cities is not merely ineffective; it is racist and criminal.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Left’s Dance With Terror</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Mar 2013 04:35:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann-Marie Murrell]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why Sean Penn and Oliver Stone wept when Hugo Chavez died.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/annmarie/the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror/penn-chavez/" rel="attachment wp-att-180562"><img class=" wp-image-180562 alignleft" title="penn-chavez" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/penn-chavez-450x339.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="237" /></a><strong>To order Jamie Glazov&#8217;s <em>United in Hate</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Dr. Jamie Glazov’s brilliant book, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror</a>,” explains the bizarre love affair that the Left has had for every mass-murdering Communist, Dictator and/or Marxist throughout time.  It chronicles their dangerous obsession with evil from the likes of Stalin and Mao to their current tolerance for all-things-Islam, all the while shouting their anti-capitalistic mantra that “human blood purifies the earth”.</p>
<p>“To be materially comfortable meant to be empty and selfish,” writes Glazov.  “They consider free expression their inalienable right, but hated the society whose institutions gave it to them…”</p>
<p>An especially disturbing case-in-point is found in Chapter 7, “Flirting with Mao’s Executioners” when in 1972,  actress/believer Shirley MacLaine toured communist China. Charmed by the propaganda thrown her way by Mao and company, MacLaine viewed China as a leftist utopia instead of the oppressive, murderous country it really was.  Unfortunately, her belief that the Chinese had caused “the better side of human nature to dominate” involved ignoring the fact that over 70 million Chinese who had been exterminated by her beloved Mao.  As Glazov writes, “The Chinese children who had not died of starvation or been eaten by their starving parents greatly impressed MacLaine.”</p>
<p>Another interesting aspect covered in “United in Hate” is the fact that despite the Left’s “anything goes” mentality here in America, they adore oppression in other countries.  They cheer the unisex clothing of China and the burqas of the Middle East, hypocritically proud of women for covering up any type of sexuality as opposed to the “evil ways of the West”.  Of course what they forget to mention (or choose not to think about) is the fact that these women aren’t given a choice about what to wear and, in fact, are beaten mercilessly if they dare to show their faces in public.</p>
<p>According to Glazov, the self-loathing and guilt associated with living in the greatest country on earth is what drives people like Jane Fonda to climb on the enemy’s tank in Hanoi, or to make Steven Spielberg describe his meeting with Castro as “the most important eight hours of my life.”</p>
<p>(Apparently Spielberg forgot about the birth of his children…but I digress…)</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/annmarie/the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror/jf/" rel="attachment wp-att-180470"><img class="aligncenter  wp-image-180470" title="jf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/jf.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="259" /></a></p>
<p>In addition to recommending “United in Hate” to <a id="_GPLITA_0" title="Click to Continue &gt; by Text-Enhance" href="http://politichicks.tv/column/book-review-united-in-hate-the-lefts-romance-with-tyranny-and-terror/#">adults</a>, I also recommend you give a copy  to your teenaged children.  If you don’t think they’ll read the entire book, please encourage them to at least read Chapter 10, “To Hate a Woman”.  It is an excellent example of what “hatred” really is–and it has nothing to do with the alleged conservative-driven ‘War against Women’.</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: See Jamie Glazov discuss <em>United in Hate</em> with interviewer Josh Brewster in the two part series below:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SNJg6w6CB0o" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/6sBPH589Feo" frameborder="0" width="425" height="325"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>. </strong></p>
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		<title>9 Phony Martyrs of the Left</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2013 04:52:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Schweikart]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The progressive school of falsification.

]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/larry-schweikart/9-phony-martyrs-of-the-left/rose-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-178024"><img class="wp-image-178024 alignleft" title="rose" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/rose-384x350.jpg" alt="" width="307" height="280" /></a>Every religion has its martyrs, and so it is with the American Left. Myths have been built around myriad “wronged&#8221; radicals/communists and endless ink spilled about the injustice of their fate. Indeed, when I looked at more than 15 mainstream U.S. college history textbooks several years ago for my 48 Liberal Lies of American History, almost all of them flatly stated or strongly implied that Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss, among others, were prosecuted only for their ideology, not for their crimes. In fact, the leftist hall of shame is filled with culprits who were actually guilty. Below is a list of nine of the most infamous leftist criminals in modern American history and the facts surrounding their cases.</p>
<p><strong>1. The Rosenbergs.</strong></p>
<p>When even a communist dictator tells you that Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg were Soviet spies, you’d think the Left would have to believe him. Nikita Khrushchev, one-time premier of the USSR, said the Rosenbergs “provided very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb.”</p>
<p>Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg slipped atomic bomb secrets, including the famous schematic of the first bomb’s design, to other Soviet agents and by all accounts took five years off the Russians’  a-bomb project. Yet mainstream textbooks such as Marc C. Carnes and John A. Garraty’s American Destiny insist the Rosenbergs were “not major spies” and “the information they provided was not important.” However, Martin Sobell, a long-time friend of the Rosenbergs and co-defendant at their trial, finally admitted that both he and Julius were Soviet agents. One of the Rosenberg sons, Michael Meerpol, who had also maintained his parents’ innocence, simply stated, “I have no reason to doubt Marty.”</p>
<p><strong>2. The McNamara Brothers.</strong></p>
<p>No, this isn’t a movie about Irish thugs, but rather the true story of John (“J. J.”) and James (“J. B.”) McNamara, two union members who bombed the Los Angeles Times building in 1911, killing 21 innocent newspaper employees and injuring over 100 more. Both were found guilty, and James admitted setting the bomb, for which he got life in prison. His accomplice, John, served 15 years in prison and went back to being a union organizer. Some people never learn.</p>
<p>Of course the labor movement saw them as martyrs; a film “A Martyr to His Cause” was made of the bombing, and for a while Labor Day was renamed “McNamara Day.” Another accomplice, Ortie McManigal, the union leader directing the Iron Workers’ bombing campaign—yes, you heard right—ratted out the McNamaras and other union thugs. Clarence Darrow, brought in to defend the pair at the incredible price of $350,000 (nearly $8 million in 2012 bucks) soon had doubts about James’s testimony. Perhaps that was what led him to attempt to bribe a juror, for which the head of the defense team was arrested, even though Darrow was seen passing the bills.</p>
<p>Leftist activist Lincoln Steffens traveled to L.A. to interview the pair, but was convinced also that they were guilty. When Lincoln Steffens and Clarence Darrow conclude you are guilty, it’s a good bet you are.</p>
<p><strong>3. Alger Hiss.</strong></p>
<p>History books make poor Alger into a pathetic figure wrongly put in jail for a minor charge while his accuser, Whitaker Chambers, “wrote a bestseller.” Most textbooks still claim the trial was “controversial.” Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, period, and was only caught when his fellow agent, Whitaker Chambers, found a conscience and exposed him.</p>
<p>Hiss had worked at a variety of important State Department positions, and had helped draft the organization of the United Nations. Called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC) to answer Chambers’ charges, Hiss claimed he had not known Chambers. Had he stopped there, he would have gotten away scot-free. But he sued Chambers for defamation of character, and in a pair of trials beginning in 1949, new evidence was introduced that led to his conviction for perjury.</p>
<p>In high irony, Hiss’s “Woodstock” typewriter—brought in by the defense to prove his innocence—in fact was shown by tests to have been used to type the documents passed to the Russians. At that point, the defense tried to claim that the very documents in question were forgeries, after having laid the groundwork to prove the typewriter produced them. Later, the Venona documents, which were KGB files leaked to the West, mentioned an American spy named ALES, who was one of only four Americans at Yalta to return home via Moscow, and the only one fitting the ALES time-and-date requirements was Alger.</p>
<p>Just when everyone thought Alger was bottled up for good, a conference on the Cold War at New York University in 2007 saw a bait-and-switch attempted in which a Nation editor claimed to have evidence that ALES was Wilder Foote (one of the other men) . . . except Foote wasn’t even in Washington when the ALES spy activity was going on. Hiss’s itinerary fit ALES, Foote’s did not.</p>
<p><strong>4. Sacco and Vanzetti.</strong></p>
<p>Astoundingly, textbooks still claim that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, that “their trial was a travesty” as American Destiny says, and that “the state doctored evidence” (Making a Nation). The two anarchists, Niccolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with robbing a shoe factory paymaster and a security guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and killing the guard in the process. A Dedham jury needed only three hours to reach a guilty verdict, but according to the Left, they were guilty only of being anarchists. Except:</p>
<p>Nine eyewitnesses identified Sacco as having been at the scene and/or shooting the guard, and four others identified Vanzetti. Several different analyses of the pistol concluded the bullets came from Sacco’s gun. Vanzetti lied throughout the trial about his own pistol, ammunition and his whereabouts on the date in question. Alibi witnesses proved flimsy. Liberals then claimed that the evidence was manipulated by the state.</p>
<p>In 1983, a new book, Postmortem, claimed that the prosecutor tampered with the evidence, but James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science, discovered that the defense expert had switched the gun barrel, producing the entire controversy. New ballistics tests found that the two spent cartridges at the scene were made by the same machine as the live cartridges for the same gun Sacco had in his pocket when arrested. Experts also concluded that Sacco’s Colt fired the bullet that killed the guard. If that wasn’t enough, Carlo Tresca told writer Max Eastman that Sacco was guilty but not Vanzetti.</p>
<p>In 2005, a 1929 letter from socialist Upton Sinclair, who had defended the two, surfaced in which he had spoken with the two men’s attorney, Fred Moore, who said they were indeed guilty. Moreover, Moore provided details to Sinclair as to how he “framed a set of alibis” for them. All this was too late for former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who in 1977 claimed the two were innocent and said that “all disgrace should be removed from their names.”  Instead, it added disgrace to his.</p>
<p><strong>5. Victims of the Red Scare.</strong></p>
<p>Pick your martyr here: when Senator Joe McCarthy announced on February 9, 1950 that he had a “list of 205 [active members of the Communist party and members of a spy ring] that were made known to the Secretary of State,” it didn’t take long for this to be labeled the “Red Scare.” Just for context’s sake, let’s remember that a) there had already been dozens of Soviet spies exposed in the Roosevelt/Truman administration; b) the West had “lost” China to communism; c) the Soviets had aggressively taken half of Europe and occupied it; d) they had detonated an atomic bomb five years ahead of schedule; and e) they had infiltrated Hollywood. But this was all just “hysteria,” right? (Clue: “hysteria” is an ungrounded fear.)</p>
<p>McCarthy identified several individuals, including Solomon Adler, Frank Coe, Harold Glasser, Owen Lattimore and Annie Lee Moss. McCarthy was not only right that these individuals were Soviet operatives, many of whom played critical roles in denying gold to Chiang Kai-Shek in China, who was locked in a death struggle with communist Mao Tse Tung, but he was too late. By the time he identified most of them, they had done their damage and the administration had quietly removed them. Perhaps one of the most famous of the McCarthy martyrs was Annie Lee Moss. The Left claimed McCarthy had mistaken her for someone else. But M. Stanton Evans’ book, Blacklisted by History, reproduced actual FBI reports identifying Moss as a communist in absolutely unqualified terms. He provided reproductions of other FBI documents totally incriminating virtually all of McCarthy’s so-called victims.</p>
<p><strong>6. The Haymarket Affair.</strong></p>
<p>Long a staple of all left-wing labor history, the Haymarket “Massacre” occurred on May 4, 1886 when workers striking at Haymarket Square in Chicago supposedly gathered peaceably. (Just as an aside, how many peaceful strikers have you seen lately? Can you say SEIU?) Someone hurled a bomb at the police who themselves were standing—peacefully—watching. But after the bomb exploded, they opened fire on the crowd and killed four (seven police were killed and few deny that the crowd fired back at the police).</p>
<p>Rudolf Schnaubelt, the lead suspect, was arrested, but released, then when the police found evidence that showed his role to be more significant, he fled the country. Seven other suspects were indicted as accessories to murder. From the outset the police assumed that anarchists in the labor gathering had planned the event to incite violence. After engaging in a voir dire of almost one thousand potential jurors, the twelve selected confessed to being “prejudiced.” Historians James Henretta and David Brody (America: A Concise History) wrote that the defendants were “victims of one of the great miscarriages of American justice.”</p>
<p>There was one small problem with their “historical” analysis: they had relied on a defense-supplied transcript of the trial rather than the actual trial record itself. This was too much for even an honest liberal like Timothy Messer-Kruse, whose two books on Haymarket came from slogging through the actual trial transcript. He concluded that indeed Schnaubelt was the likely bomb thrower, that the crowd (based on forensic recreations he did) almost certainly fired at the police, and that the defendants received a fair trial by all standards of the day.</p>
<p>Sometimes the truth is so clear that even liberals must confront it—and to be sure, Messer-Kruse paid a price in character assassination by his liberal brethren before, finally, several center-left publications began to admit that his book was, as Choice said, “well-argued” and “careful.” Labor History named Messer-Kruse’s second book on the Haymarket “Massacre,” Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists, as its book of the year.</p>
<p><strong>7. Huey Newton.</strong></p>
<p>David Horowitz’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360919393&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=radical+son">Radical Son</a> has done a thorough job of exposing the co-founder of the Black Panthers in 1966. Newton, already with an assault with a deadly weapon conviction, was pulled over on October 28, 1967 by Oakland police officer John Frey, who quickly realized he had pulled over the Black Panther leader and called for help. A second policeman, Herbert Heanes, arrived. As the typical non-descript, take-no-offensive-to-the-left position Wikipedia says, “shots were fired.” Frey was shot at a range of less than a foot, four times. Newton was shot once in the abdomen. Newton was convicted of manslaughter, appealed, got two new trials that ended in mistrials, and the state gave up. Newton later told close friends that he had killed Frey, and Horowitz recalled that all the “Panther exiles” knew he had killed Frey. It is noteworthy that while Newton, Angela Davis, and others associated with the Panthers get their own Wikipedia entries, Officer Frey never did.</p>
<p><strong>8. Joe Hill.</strong></p>
<p>Anyone over the age of 40 probably has seen the famous “Woodstock” movie clip of Joan Baez singing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” Joe Hill, an immigrant who was born Joel Emmanuel Hagglund in Sweden, was typical of the European immigrants of the day who came to the U.S. in 1902 in that he had fully absorbed much of the European socialist dogma. He became a member of the International Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), but generally drifted until he arrived at Park City, Utah near Salt Lake City in 1914. There he killed John G. Morrison and his son during a grocery store robbery, before showing up at a local doctor’s residence with a bullet wound and brandishing a pistol. He claimed he had been shot in a dispute over an unnamed woman, and the doctor reported him. The intruders had worn red bandanas, and police discovered a red bandana in Hill’s room. A dozen witnesses said the killer looked like Hill. While a subsequent biography claims that Hill was “probably” innocent, no actual evidence clearing Hill has ever been produced, and at his trial he did not want to discuss his wound. But hey, at least he gave Joan Baez 15 minutes of fame.</p>
<p><strong>9. Che Guevara.</strong></p>
<p>No, Che isn’t an American, but can anyone think of a leftist martyr who is more honored? After all, even Joe Hill doesn’t have his face on t-shirts. Most of the other creeps listed here don’t have Che’s creds, either: a one-man “death panel,” Che reviewed the murder lists for Fidel Castro’s firing squads, wrote a manual on guerilla warfare, and then broadened his horizons to lead revolutions elsewhere. Bolivian forces killed him in 1967 (of course, “assisted” by the CIA, according to the Left) and that left only Time magazine in 1999 to name him one of the most influential people of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. The Time editors’ elevation of this murderous thug to such a level represents an egregious &#8212; and sadly predictable &#8212; ignorance of <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2054">historical facts</a>.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Sources: Most of the references are found in the end notes for my 48 Liberal Lies About American History, 2<sup>nd</sup> edition (New York: Sentinel, 2007). Also see Humberto Fontova, Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him (New York: Sentinel, 2008); David Horowitz, Radical Son (New York: Touchstone, 1997) and his Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion (Washington: Regnery, 2012), Timothy Messer-Kruse, The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (New York: Random House, 1997), Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File: Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Crown, 2007), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).</p>
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		<title>Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:24:15 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz talks about his new book with Patrick O’Heffernan]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/radicals-portraits-of-a-destructive-passion-2/rad-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-175019"><img class="size-full wp-image-175019 alignleft" title="rad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/rad.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="300" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz’s new book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/bookstore/">click here</a>.<br />
</strong></p>
<p><strong>Below is an edited transcript of David Horowitz’s appearance on <em>Fairness Radio with Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan</em> on BlogTalkRadio on January 24, 2013, Thursday, 11 AM:</strong></p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  I&#8217;m Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan, your host on <em>Fairness Radio with Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan</em>, and again, I want to welcome our radio listeners on 1490 WWPR in Tampa Bay and KSKQ-FM in Ashland, Oregon, and I want to remind everybody that they can be part of the program &#8212; 424-675-6806, or you can e-mail us at FairnessRadio@Gmail.com.</p>
<p>Well, we often have conservative thinkers and writers on this program, and sometimes I just sort of grit my teeth and bear the books in the conversations as respectfully as I can, and sometimes I actually agree with some of their points.  But I think often that my time could be spent better on issues that need attention.</p>
<p>However, I recently sat down with David Horowitz&#8217;s new book<em>, Radicals: Portraits of Destructive Passions</em>, and I was mesmerized.  This book chronicles the lives of a handful of people who founded the New Left, mostly in the San Francisco area.  David was one of those people.</p>
<p>As editor of <em>Ramparts</em> magazine, he was one of, if not the, most respected and influential thinker and writer on the New Left.  David is now one of the most respected and influential writers of the conservative movement, and the time it took me to read this book was not only well spent, but it was a delight, beautifully written stories of people and times of the New Left and some in the present.  I put this book down with a new understanding of why David Horowitz is called &#8220;the most brilliant political mind in America today and also a national treasure,&#8221; and he&#8217;s with us today.</p>
<p>David, welcome back to Fairness Radio.</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong> Thank you for that introduction.  I was thinking as you were giving it that if there were more progressives like you, my life would&#8217;ve been different.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  But maybe not better.  Who knows?</p>
<p>David, from its title, I expected kind of a harsh critique of some of the Left&#8217;s intellectual leaders, but instead, this is almost a memoir, a book filled with sadness and joy and even sometimes love as it critiques people and thinking.  Was your experience in writing this a memoir experience in any way?</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong> I&#8217;ve written several books like this.  One was my autobiography, <em>Radical Son</em>. There are some pages in that book which are somewhat polemical, but most of the book is an effort to understand the characters (including myself!). It is written from what I would call a novelist&#8217;s perspective.  A novelist has to have sympathy for his characters even when the characters are on the wrong side of whatever it is they are on the wrong side of.</p>
<p>I used this voice and perspective also in <em>The End of Time</em> and <em>A Point in Time</em>. I wish I had been able to do more of this and wasn&#8217;t as engaged as I have been in political fire fights. A lot of people on the left have a greatly distorted image of me from those engagements.  Political battles leave a lot of blood on the floor, and a lot of scar tissue behind.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  Well, from reading the book, I could see that there was, but you&#8217;ve done a masterful job.  And I know that not all of the people have faded from the political scene &#8212; Cornel West, for instance &#8212; but many have, and before we talk about the individuals you write about, do you think that the New Left has passed from the scene, that there&#8217;s a new generation of leaders now who have no connection to the &#8217;60s?</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  No, I actually don&#8217;t.  The left is a religious movement, seeking to change the world. Its mission is one of redemption, and its solaces are those of a church. Consequently, the Left is very conscious of its history and its traditions, and it really hasn&#8217;t turned its back on its past.  It hasn&#8217;t even turned its back on its Communist forebears.  Of course, it will condemn Stalin now and so forth, but even Khruschev did that. In Oliver Stone travesty on <em>Showtime</em>, there&#8217;s an attempt to resurrect Lenin as a put-upon and beleaguered progressive. There&#8217;s great continuity in the left. In fact, that&#8217;s one of the reasons that I left the left, because there was no willingness to break with a bad past.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  Interesting.  I guess we know different people. But I want to get back to the book.</p>
<p>The story of Susan Gordon Lydon is particularly poignant.  Now, you should know, I met Susan and Michael, but it was a surface meeting.  We spent an afternoon with a group of other people at my home in Marin.  Could you tell us about Susan and tell us, also, what the arc of her life symbolized to you and why you included it in this book?</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong> Susan was a very bright woman. She went to Vassar, and got involved in the drug culture. She was a writer who did music reviews, but she married Michael Lydon, and Michael just had a bigger reputation and she had he was writing for <em>Newsweek </em>and other major publications. They both wrote for <em>Ramparts</em>.  And Bob Scheer, who was the editor then, kind of pushed Susan into the background.  Anyway, she wrote an article which Peter Collier, who is now a conservative like me assigned to her and gave its title:  “The Female Orgasm.” And, of course, in the &#8217;60s context, “The Female Orgasm”<em> </em>became a political statement.  Such were the times.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  It still is (inaudible &#8211; multiple speakers).</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  It became a very famous article.  The chapter in my book starts off with the obituaries for Susan, who eventually died of the consequences of her drug abuse.  From the obituaries you might conclude she was world famous.  Even her fame was based on one small article, which wasn&#8217;t an original article, and was put in the back of the book by the <em>Ramparts</em> editors at the time. It was a testament to its political correctness and hyped up political significance, rather than anything of merit in the article itself.</p>
<p>Susan went through a horrible drug period.  She was a heroin addict with all the personal debasement and degradation that that entails. Then she managed to come out of it, and had a second career as a knitter.  She wrote philosophical and practical books on knitting with Buddhist overtones.  She was a follower of Oscar Ichazo, a famous guru of the time.</p>
<p>My view of her story is that she was derailed by the political – by “the personal is political” idea of the time, the notion that your personal life should be governed by political precepts. In accordance with those precepts she liberated herself from her marriage to Michael. I say it was political because she was a member of a feminist group in Berkeley, where all the women did this and ended up destroying their marriages. I&#8217;m not saying that feminism is the only cause of a broken marriage, but in this case, it was pertinent.</p>
<p>I saw her as a victim of the political universe she inhabited and her life as a struggle to recover who she was, her authentic self, as opposed to the one that conformed to the political correctness of the hour.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  Do you see the arc of her life as having any parallels in the arc of the New Left?</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  Well, I think there were a lot of people who suffered similar fates. The chapter in my book on Bettina Aptheker shows how extreme such an intermingling – destructive intermingling of the personal and political can be. This is a woman who has no solid knowledge of herself really but preens as a political guru and thinks that she has found the key that unifies the political and the personal.</p>
<p>She wrote a memoir which was the basis for my chapter. It is one of the contributions that feminism has made to leftist autobiography to actually put in the details of a human life. Usually, if you read Communist autobiographies or really any leftist autobiographies, they skip over the personal, and really never try to assess the relationship between the two realms in their lives. There is no introspection. Oddly, Christopher Hitchens, intelligent as he was, falls victim to this myopia.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  Yes, I was going to ask you to talk about that.</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  &#8212; Christopher managed to write a 400 page memoir without mentioning the mother of his first two children. His second wife, Carol, is never properly introduced and barely referenced. Christopher never looks inside himself.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  David, since you brought up Christopher, I was going to ask you about the Christopher Hitchens &#8212; the Christopher Hitchens chapter is one of the, I think, the softest chapters that you wrote, although it has deep critique in it.  Why did you start the book with Christopher Hitchens?</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  It&#8217;s called “The Two Christophers.” As everybody listening to this show would know Christopher had some second thoughts about his Leftism.  He was an articulate and courageous supporter of the war against Saddam Hussein and his monster regime, which made him quite a few enemies on the Left. But Christopher remained a leftist to the end.</p>
<p>In my autobiography, <em>Radical Son</em>, I set myself the task of answering the question how could someone like me, someone who had been as committed to the left as I had, become a conservative? And there was Christopher, who had made some changes, but not all. So for me, looking at his life was a way of examining the whole idea of second thoughts. It was a way of looking at what being a member of the leftist church do to you intellectually and politically. And I think in Christopher’s case it led to intellectual and moral incoherence.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  David, we have to take a quick break, and when we come back, I have sort of a basic philosophical question for you, but don&#8217;t go away.  Stayed tuned.  You&#8217;re listening to <em>Fairness Radio with Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan</em>, and we&#8217;ll be right back with more of David Horowitz.</p>
<p><strong>Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan:</strong>  And we&#8217;re back.  This is Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan on <em>Fairness Radio with Patrick O&#8217;Heffernan</em>.  We&#8217;re talking with David Horowitz.  We&#8217;re talking about his new book, wonderful new book, called <em>Radicals:  Portraits of a Destructive Passion</em>, and it&#8217;s available everywhere.  You can get it online and in bookstores.  Go to Amazon.com.  That&#8217;s called <em>Radicals:  Portraits of a Destructive Passion.  </em></p>
<p>David, we only have about four minutes left, and I wanted to ask you about a statement that&#8217;s in your chapter six on “A Radical Machiavelli”:</p>
<p>&#8220;Conservative outlooks spring from observations about the past, and as a rule, therefore, are pragmatic.  Whatever first principles comprise such beliefs, they are or should be propositions that encapsulate the lessons of experience.  By contrast, progressive views are built on expectations about the future.  Progressive principles are based on ideas about a world that does not exist.  For Progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences but a moral choice.&#8221;  And you&#8217;ve written elsewhere that Progressives are constantly trying to change or improve upon a world that doesn&#8217;t exist.</p>
<p>I think, in general, you&#8217;re right.  I agree with that, but I draw some different conclusions from it.  I&#8217;d point out that it&#8217;s absolutely true that progressives are constantly trying to change America.  We&#8217;re trying to make it better, but I think we&#8217;re following our Founding Fathers, who set up this enterprise to form a more perfect union, and I agree with you that there are first principles that do need to be determined but also that drawing your experience from the past can also mean that you embed past mistakes and that if you&#8217;re not progressive, you don&#8217;t try to change them.</p>
<p>And I think that America is successful because we blend Conservatives and first principles and the progressive movement to constantly improve and form a more perfect union.  We shouldn&#8217;t criticize either one; we should try to bring them together.</p>
<p><strong>David Horowitz:</strong>  Well, this is a conversation I sure wish I&#8217;d been able to have over the years.  It&#8217;s the right conversation, and it&#8217;s too bad we have like whatever it is, three minutes, to do it. I would disagree with you about the Founders. The Founders were very conservative, and that&#8217;s why they created a system of government to frustrate the desires of people to change everything in a big way and in a hurry.  That&#8217;s why we have a system of checks and balances.  That&#8217;s why senators once were appointed. To insulate them from the popular will. Everything that the left hates about the Constitution was designed specifically by the framers to keep the left in check.</p>
<p>In the opening of the book I observe that the utopian aspiration to change the world is the chief source of the misery that human beings inflict on each other.  Certainly in the last 100 years, the horrific movements, genocidal movements of Nazism and Communism, were spearheaded by political missionaries, socialists attempting to defy everything that we know about human nature to make a “better world.” That&#8217;s why they killed so many people – to remake the world as it should be, ignoring what it is.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Conservatives Need to Make the Case for Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/conservatives-need-to-make-the-case-for-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=conservatives-need-to-make-the-case-for-freedom</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/conservatives-need-to-make-the-case-for-freedom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:13:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left's agenda for the country fails not just on its merits but on its morals as well. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/USA_NYC_Statue-of-Liberty.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-120898" title="USA_NYC_Statue-of-Liberty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/USA_NYC_Statue-of-Liberty.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a></p>
<p>Since ancient Athens, politics in democracies has been brutal. That’s because the conflicts that a democracy empowers a great variety of ordinary people to debate are not about technical matters requiring specialized knowledge. Rather, they arise from questions about the fundamental principles, beliefs, and values that give people their identities and provide meaning for their lives. Such questions are not “scientific,” and the conflicts they raise will not be resolved by experts and technicians. And since these principles and beliefs are so fundamental to our self-identity and meaning, they raise intense passions, and so the public conversation about them is often emotional, at times even angry. Throw in personal ambition, the lust for power, and the vanity of politicians and office-seekers, and the fights can get bloody indeed. But that’s the price we pay for free political speech. As the Athenian playwright Sophocles once said, “Free men have free tongues.”</p>
<p>Consider the biggest domestic problem facing the nation: metastasizing debt that promises to explode because of exponentially increasing entitlement spending. If the problem were simply a technical one, accountants could solve it. Look at the <a href="http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/contents">math</a>: our debt has surpassed $15 trillion, over 100% of GDP, and absent entitlement reform will reach 344% of GDP by 2050. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare will devour 18% of GDP by 2050, consuming all federal tax revenues. Total federal spending is slated to consume one-half of GDP by 2056. These numbers point to a Greece-like collapse unless entitlement spending is reined in.</p>
<p>Likewise, simple math discredits the solution Obama presented in his State of the Union speech with generous helpings of class-warfare rhetoric. Obama wants to impose a 30% minimum tax on the “rich,” defined as those making over $1 million. The “rich,” however, simply do not have enough money to solve the ballooning debt and entitlement-spending problem––confiscating outright all the wealth of <em>Forbes</em> magazine’s richest 400 Americans would barely cover Obama’s 2011 deficit, let alone the cost of future entitlement spending. As for making the rich “pay their fair share,” reducing the deficit by raising taxes on the two top brackets would require preposterous tax rates of over 200% in 2050. Worse yet, raising the capital gains tax, which Obama’s minimum tax on millionaires perforce would do, constitutes what Larry Kudlow <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289546/obama-s-low-ball-vision-larry-kudlow">calls</a> a “tax on seed corn,” one that would reduce the amount of capital needed for investment and economic growth. Finally, the sorry record of tax increases disconnected from spending reductions should make us all chary of giving more money to a spendthrift federal government that has increased spending per capita 166% since 1965. Simple math points us to the only solution: cut entitlement spending and reduce deficits to more manageable levels.</p>
<p>But of course, the problem isn’t about math and how to balance the books. The conflict is one of differing visions of the federal government’s role in achieving certain contested ends. Obama claims a solution to our economic crisis demands that the rich pay their “fair share,” and we create an economy in which “everyone gets a fair shot.” But what is “fair”? The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development <a href="http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/27134.html">reports</a> that the U.S. already has the most progressive tax system among industrialized economies. The top 10% of taxpayers in America pay 45% of all income taxes (personal income taxes and payroll taxes) but earn 33% of market income. In socialist heartthrob Sweden, by contrast, the top 10% pay a percentage of taxes equal to their income, 26.6%. Paying a greater share of taxes than one’s share of income might strike some people as more than “fair,” as would the simple fact that nearly half of Americans pay no personal income tax, while the top 10% pays 70%. But Obama has a different set of values and a different vision of what ends the government should pursue.</p>
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		<title>The Muslims Next Door</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-muslims-next-door/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-muslims-next-door</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/the-muslims-next-door/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:12:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A community-wide reading program whitewashes Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/must1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-120622" title="must" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/must1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, <a href="http://www.siliconvalleyreads.org/2012-13/default.asp">Silicon Valley Reads</a> is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.</p>
<p>The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers <a href="http://www.siliconvalleyreads.org/2012-13/calendar.asp">several dozen free public events</a> at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,</p>
<blockquote><p>between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…</p></blockquote>
<p>And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:</p>
<blockquote><p>Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.</p></blockquote>
<p>The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.</p>
<p>One of the program’s two book selections is <em>The Muslim Next Door</em>, sporting the cutesy subtitle<em> The Qur&#8217;an, the Media, and That Veil Thing</em> and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,</p>
<blockquote><p>I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.</p></blockquote>
<p>In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.</p>
<p>The other book selection is <em>The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman&#8217;s Journey to Love and Islam </em>by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim convert who struggled to come to grips with “that veil thing” and ended by proclaiming that a woman in the Middle East “is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated.” The book comes with a front cover blurb by the rock star of academic apologists for Islamic supremacism, <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/11/the-incredible-reza-aslan-automated-insult-generator.html">Reza Aslan</a>. Ms. Wilson writes on the Silicon Valley Reads site that</p>
<blockquote><p>the topic of Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and only through open and honest communication can Muslims and non-Muslims come to a better understanding of one another.</p></blockquote>
<p>I couldn’t agree more. Indeed Islam <em>is</em> loaded with emotional and political baggage, and I hope that, in the spirit of that “open and honest communication,” she will openly and honestly acknowledge the reasons why.</p>
<p>The 2012 Silicon Valley Reads program also features a panel discussion called “Paranoid Politics – Islamophobia, McCarthyism and the Yellow Peril,” described thusly:</p>
<blockquote><p>Muslims are not the first group in America to be targeted by paranoid people who are afraid and looking for someone to blame. This will cover three periods in U.S. history when groups who are “different” – Muslims since 9/11, Jews during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, and Asians during World War II – were persecuted in politics and the media.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, American Muslims are <em>not</em> being targeted, and non-Muslims outraged about sharia and jihad are not “paranoid people looking for someone to blame.” Any reasonable person who follows the news is justifiably concerned about Islam not because Muslims are “different” but because Muslim fundamentalists have openly declared war on Western civilization and are waging global jihad, including on our own soil. Real-world Islamic terrorism and creeping sharia are the issues, not the phantom red herring “<a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=OGTAUUU8UWRC">Islamophobia</a>.”</p>
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		<title>United For Death</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/george-jochnowitz/united-for-death/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=united-for-death</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/george-jochnowitz/united-for-death/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:05:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[George Jochnowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[jamie glazov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left's terror ties]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The ties that bind leftism with Islamism. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fideloliver.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117719" title="fideloliver" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/fideloliver.jpg" alt="" width="410" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This review is reprinted from the Winter 2011 issue of <em><a href="http://www.midstreamthf.com/">Midstream</a>.</em></strong></p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror</a></strong>.  By Jamie Glazov.  Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009.  xxxii + 264 pp.</em></p>
<p>Jamie Glazov was born in the USSR in 1966. His parents were both dissidents, who felt they had to flee. They left the USSR in 1972 and settled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1975. Glazov grew up in a family that knew about the horrors of totalitarianism. He eventually earned a Ph.D. in history and is now the managing editor of <em>Frontpage Magazine</em>, an online political journal that fights totalitarian tendencies in leftist thinking. To a certain extent, Glazov is continuing a fight against totalitarianism and anti-Semitism that was begun by Hannah Arendt.</p>
<p>In 1951, Arendt wrote a book, <em>The Origins of Totalitarianism</em>, which has since become a classic, exploring the 20th-century phenomenon of totalitarianism. One-fourth of this work is devoted to the question of anti-Semitism.<sup>1</sup> Arendt wrote the book shortly after World War II, but her decision to link an ancient prejudice to a modern political ideology is as valid today as it was then. Glazov, in his book, provides us with a quotation to illustrate this connection. Ulrike Meinhof, one of the founders of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang, said, “Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed … for what they were: money Jews. … Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”<sup>2</sup> Meinhof was proud of her anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Meinhof, to be sure, was a terrorist. Unfortunately, many leftists who have never committed acts of violence take positions approaching hers. Noam Chomsky, for example, would never describe himself as an anti-Semite and became famous for his writings on linguistics before he had published anything about politics. Chomsky visited Hezbollah in 2006 despite the fact that its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, had said about Jews, “If they all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”<sup>4</sup> Chomsky showed by his visit that he had chosen not to understand that Nasrallah was calling for genocide.</p>
<p>Glazov feels that there are two basic reasons that the left has joined Muslim terrorists to oppose Jews and Israel. “First … leftism, like Islamism, detests modernity, individual freedom, and any value placed on <em>individual</em> human life. … In addition, Jews are seen as being synonymous with the oppressive structures of corporate capitalism and globalization.”<sup>5</sup> Oddly, nowhere in the book are Israel’s kibbutzim ever mentioned. Before Israel became an independent state, its cultivated land consisted of either kibbutzim (communal farms) or moshavim (cooperative farms). A kibbutz was unambiguously a socialist enterprise; a moshav was partly private and partly communal. Since farms take up much more space than cities and towns do, most of the land owned by Jews during the days of the British Mandate was either entirely or partially the property of socialist communities. Corporate capitalism indeed! Leftist opponents of Israel have chosen not to know this fact, and Glazov has not reminded them or us about this piece of history.</p>
<p>Glazov&#8217;s book is divided into four sections: (1) The Believer, (2) Romance with Tyranny, (3) The Death Cult Cousin: Islamism, and (4) Romance with Terror. The first part sets the tone for the whole book. Believers don&#8217;t question. They have faith. Marxism is not a religion, but it does demand belief—blind belief—in the doctrines it teaches. Leftists today may ignore Marx&#8217;s writings about economics, but they support and have always supported regimes that suppress free thought. As we saw above, Glazov says that rejecting modernity and individuality is what links leftism to Islamism.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/united.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-117721" title="united" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/united.jpg" alt="" width="245" height="361" /></a><strong>[To order <em>United in Hate</em>, <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">Click Here.</a></em></strong>]</p>
<p>Some readers may disagree with Glazov’s allegation that leftism detests modernity, individual freedom, and the value of individual human life. At this point, we should remember that a liberal is not a leftist  For example, Nadine Gordimer, responding to an interviewer who described her as a white liberal, said, “I happen to be white, but I&#8217;m not a liberal, my dear. I&#8217;m a leftist.”<sup>6</sup> Glazov writes of many leftists who certainly are not liberals but rather supporters of totalitarianism, the various systems of thought control that Arendt talked about in her 1951 book.</p>
<p>Hannah Arendt’s good friend, Mary McCarthy, praised North Vietnamese society because she felt it had controlled thought and recreated human nature. McCarthy wrote, “The phenomena of existential agony, of alienation, don’t appear among the Vietnamese—probably in part because they lack our kind of ‘ego,’ and our endowment of free-floating guilt.”<sup>7</sup> It is amazing that a novelist as informed and sensitive as McCarthy could actually believe that North Vietnam had ended ego and free-floating guilt; it is even more amazing that she could believe this was a good thing. McCarthy certainly was not alone. Shirley MacLaine, who visited China in 1972, wrote that she had never seen a quarrel in China and went on to say that “it slowly dawned on me that perhaps human beings could really be taught anything, that we were simply blank pages upon which our characters are written by parents, schools, churches, and the society itself.”<sup>8</sup> MacLaine is unambiguously cheering the idea of thought control and the desirability of erasing human differences. I should add a personal note here: I lived in China twice, during the spring semesters of 1984 and 1989, and I saw and heard lots of quarrels. MacLaine, of course, is echoing Marx and Engels, who said that after the final stage of communism was achieved, people would no longer have any disagreements and the state would wither away.</p>
<p>Glazov, as we saw above, said that the left had joined with Islamism to oppose Jews since Jews were linked to globalism and capitalism. But there is a more profound factor in the hostility that totalitarians feel toward Jews: Jews argue. They think dangerous thoughts. Marxist regimes reject thinkers and intellectuals. Chairman Mao exiled teachers and writers to the countryside to learn from the peasants. Pol Pot simply killed them. Mao and Pol Pot didn’t attack Jews because there weren’t any in China and Cambodia (the Jews of Kaifeng, China, had assimilated and become invisible long before Mao ruled the country). Hitler, to be sure, never explained why he had to kill people who were Jews or descended from Jews. Perhaps he felt that the genetic flaw he had to eradicate was the argument gene.</p>
<p>Since Jews argue, a variety of beliefs may be found among them. There have certainly been Jews who were Communists; there are even Jews today who are sympathetic to Islamism. All the same, it is logical that argument and free thought are a problem for totalitarians. Totalitarians hate Jews. Hitler’s decision to try to eradicate Jews from the world was nevertheless irrational. Germany was a country that always respected scholars and intellectuals, and Hitler did not eliminate scholars the way Mao and Pol Pot did. Jews were heavily represented among Germany’s academics and scientists. Hitler knew he needed scientists because he wanted Germany to be able to produce atomic weapons, but anti-Semitism took priority over this need. Einstein fled Germany; Edward Teller and Szilard fled Germany’s ally, Hungary. Enrico Fermi, who was not Jewish but was married to a Jew, fled Europe when Mussolini extended Hitler’s racial laws to Italy. Hitler, for reasons that will never be fully understood, felt that killing Jews was virtuous and that virtue took precedence over his country’s military needs.</p>
<p>Hitler was a music lover who admired the music of Anton Bruckner, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss. He almost certainly would have adored the music of Gustav Mahler, but anti-Semitism came first. Mahler had been born a Jew, and so his music was banned, as was the music of Mendelssohn, another composer of Jewish descent. Jewish musicians fled, if they were lucky and able to do so. Those who didn’t escape were murdered.</p>
<p>Today, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is echoing the irrationality that Hitler put into effect 70 years ago. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has led many nations to impose sanctions against it. Israel may decide that it has to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Ahmadinejad has no practical need for these weapons, which are threatening his country’s security rather than protecting it. But he is amassing atomic bombs as part of a policy announced by moderate President Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, who has in effect suggested that Iran should turn itself into a suicide bomb. In the annual Al-Quds (Jerusalem) sermon given on December 14, 2001, Rafsanjani said that if one day the world of Islam comes to possess nuclear weapons, Israel could be destroyed. He went on to say that the use of a nuclear bomb against Israel would leave nothing standing, but that retaliation, no matter how severe, would merely do damage to the world of Islam.<sup>9</sup></p>
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