They say, "go woke, go broke".&nbsp;


	But Woke, in a bit of irony, <a href="https://deadline.com/2022/06/woke-canceled-hulu-after-two-seasons-1235051543/">got canceled</a>. The Hulu TV show that is.

<blockquote>
	
		Woke, the live action-animated comedy inspired by the life of award-winning artist&nbsp;Keith Knight, has been canceled by&nbsp;Hulu&nbsp;after two seasons.
</blockquote>


	Woke was, well, <a href="https://www.distractify.com/p/is-woke-hulu-based-on-a-true-story">woke</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		In the Hulu series&nbsp;Woke,&nbsp;Keef Knight&nbsp;is a black cartoonist who loves attending comic cons and tries his best to return lost wallets. But his world is turned upside down after he has a traumatic encounter with police, who pin him to the ground after they wrongly assume he's a mugger on the loose.

	
		The police eventually let Keef go but they don't apologize for their mistake.
</blockquote>


	Now, following up on the police, Disney (Hulu) canceled him. That follows up on Netflix jettisoning some of its more woke products. Both Netflix and Disney+ have been running into some financial issues with their streaming budgets. And woke virtue signaling may be starting to become too expensive to afford.

'Woke' Gets Cancelled. Literally.

They say, "go woke, go broke".&nbsp;


	But Woke, in a bit of irony, got canceled. The Hulu TV show that is.


	
		Woke, the live action-animated comedy

'Woke' Gets Cancelled. Literally.

California used to attract tourists eager to walk the streets of San Francisco and visit California landmarks and theme parks without stepping in human waste, getting mugged, or caught in the middle of a riot.


	Since that's no longer a great option, California's useless overlords is investing in abortion tourism.

<blockquote>
	
		Governor Gavin Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) today issued the following statement after reaching an agreement on the framework for the 2022-23 state budget:

	
		"And in the wake of Friday’s stunning Supreme Court decision, the state is reaffirming its commitment to defending reproductive rights, providing more than $200 million in additional funding for reproductive health care services. The state will also be investing in key programs that help California families, from funding for homeownership programs and billions of dollars in additional ongoing funding for education, to universal preschool, children’s mental health, and free school meals."
</blockquote>


	And if we can't help California's children, we'll kill them instead.


	California's population has dropped for two straight years. The last thing it needs is less people. But it's not as if the Dobbs decision is going to have any impact on the prevalence of Planned Parenthood facilities in the state. So this is more likely a desperate bid for abortion tourism.


	With the fall of Roe v. Wade, states are gearing up to become the 'Nevada' of abortion tourism. And California has a hell of a pitch. Come for Disneyland and Legoland and stay to kill your future children. Remember whatever happens in California stays in a secret government database.

California to Spend $200 Million to Help Fund Abortion Tourism

California used to attract tourists eager to walk the streets of San Francisco and visit California landmarks and theme parks without stepping in human waste,

California to Spend $200 Million to Help Fund Abortion Tourism

Inflation? What inflation. We've got all the cash we can print. And more. Now let's print some and<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3537495-biden-commits-200-billion-to-global-infrastructure-plan-meant-to-counter-china/"> give it away</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		President&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;on Sunday relaunched a global infrastructure initiative meant to counter China’s growing influence, saying the U.S. would commit $200 billion to the effort in public and private financing to boost projects in developing and middle-income countries. &nbsp;

	
		Describing the globe as at an inflection point, Biden said the initiative by the Group of Seven (G-7) nations would help set the world on a strong path for the future by investing in sustainable projects that are “grounded in our shared values.”&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Sustainable means worthless green energy garbage that puts money in the hands of politically connected investors.

<blockquote>
	
		In addition to U.S. commitments, Biden said the G-7 countries collectively would aim to mobilize $600 billion for the partnership by 2027. The $200 billion in funding the U.S. is committing over the next five years is a combination of federal financing, grants and private sector investment, according to a White House fact sheet distributed ahead of Biden’s remarks.&nbsp;The plan, called the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, is a rebranding of the “Build Back Better World” initiative that Biden unveiled at last year’s G-7 summit.
</blockquote>


	Because nothing was learned from the miserable failure of Build Back America.


	I'm all for countering China, but how about we do that by doing what the PRC did, build up our own manufacturing so it's globally competitive and take control of our economy, instead of dispensing more foreign aid so a handful of companies get some sort of favorable treatment in the Third World.

<blockquote>
	
		“I want to be clear: This isn’t aid or charity. It’s an investment that will deliver returns for everyone, including the American people and the people of all our nations," Biden said.
</blockquote>


	As usual, "let me by clear" means, "I'm going to lie to you now. The truth is the opposite of what I'm saying.


	Meanwhile, Americans can't afford to buy food and inflation is getting worse by the day.

Biden Announces $200B Plan to Aid Poorer Countries Because America is Made Out of Money

Inflation? What inflation. We've got all the cash we can print. And more. Now let's print some and give it away.


	
		President&nbsp;Biden&nbsp;on Sunday

Biden Announces $200B Plan to Aid Poorer Countries Because America is Made Out of Money

The Abortion Insurrection Leads to Violence From Arizona to Portland

After the Capitol Riot and the abuse of the term "insurrection", conservatives have retaliated by mockingly using the term "insurrection" for everything

The Abortion Insurrection Leads to Violence From Arizona to Portland

Islamic terrorism isn't going away any time soon, but it tends to be more pervasive in Europe.


	And this shooting <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61933817">will obviously</a><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/europe/norway-oslo-gay-bar-shooting-intl-hnk/index.html"> bring back</a> memories of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando by an Islamic terrorist.

<blockquote>
	
		Two people died and 21 were wounded early on Saturday in what police called an "act of Islamist terrorism".

	
		The shootings were in and near the London Pub, a popular LGBTQ+ venue, the Herr Nilsen jazz club and another pub.

	
		Norway's prime minister told the BBC the suspect was questioned in May, but was not deemed a threat at the time.
</blockquote>


	So business as usual.

<blockquote>
	
		The suspect, charged with terrorism, is a Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, and was “known to the police,” but has only received “minor convictions” up until now, prosecutor Christian Hatlo told reporters in Oslo Saturday.
</blockquote>


	"Iran" as an origin point sticks out. Shiite terrorism is usually organized under Iran's umbrella and does not involve lone wolf attackers. The country has a Sunni population.&nbsp;


	ISIS has also dissuaded its supporters from hitting gay bars after&nbsp;the Pulse massacre which was misunderstood as an anti-gay attack. ISIS wants the motives to be clear. And the Pulse massacre keeps being misrepresented as an anti-gay attack. That hasn't stopped one or two terror plots from targeting gay targets.


	Alternatively, like the Pulse massacre, it might all just be an unintentional coincidence.

Islamic Terror Attack Hits Norwegian Gay Bar

Islamic terrorism isn't going away any time soon, but it tends to be more pervasive in Europe.


	And this shooting will obviously bring back memories of

Islamic Terror Attack Hits Norwegian Gay Bar

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	At a quarter after one o’clock on the night before Oslo’s pride parade is scheduled to take place, a 42-year-old Iranian-born man shouts “Allahu akbar!” and starts shooting wildly and randomly at people in and around London Pub, the city’s largest gay bar. In all, he kills two people and wounds twenty-one. And within a few hours the police have a theory as to why he committed these latest barbaric acts: he has psychiatric problems.


	Yes, “psychiatric problems” - the euphemism of choice for Islamic terrorism. They tried to get away with this in the case of another soldier of Allah who attacked a gay club - namely, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando just over six years ago. By contrast, when the truly insane Anders Behring Breivik (just read his “manifesto”) killed 77 people in and near Oslo in 2011, authorities did everything they could to have him ruled sane - so that they’d be able to pin his actions on critics of Islam who’d never come close to calling for violence.


	The police who float the theory about “psychiatric problems” are the same police, note well, who’ve chosen to pretend that the major terror threat to Norway is posed by “right-wing extremists.” As recently as June 16, Norway’s Police Security Service (PST) <a href="https://www.pst.no/alle-artikler/pressemeldinger/oppdatering-av-terrortrusselen-i-norge/">stated</a> in a press release that the likelihood that Norway would experience a terrorist act by “right-wing extremists” (which here, as in the U.S., is chiefly a left-wing establishment phantasm) during the next 18 months was 40-60%, while the likelihood of such an action by “extreme Islamists” (as opposed, presumably, to “moderate Islamists”) was under 40%.&nbsp;


	On Saturday, the day after the atrocities, I watch the coverage on Norwegian television for several hours without hearing the word “Islam” or “Muslim” a single time. Bits of information drip out. The murderer’s name: Zaniar Matapour. He came to Norway as a refugee at age twelve. He’s a småbarsfar, which means he has one or more young children. He’s been living off of the social-welfare system for years. He has a previous conviction for a violent knife assault, served a prison sentence in 2016 for a drug offense, and was arrested in 2019 for attempted murder and gross illegal possession of a firearm - only to see the case (and a prosecutors’ appeal) dismissed. And yes, as it turns out, he’s been treated for psychiatric problems - but (to raise a question explored definitively in Jamie Glazov’s 2018 book Jihadist Psychopath) what exactly does it mean, in a Western society, to speak of the mental fitness of a Muslim who, like so many other adherents of Islam, is devout to the point of being willing to commit mass slaughter of infidels?


	Oh, and he holds Norwegian citizenship. Did he acquire it, I wonder, before compiling his rap sheet, or afterward? What exactly does a violence-prone immigrant have to do to be deported? These are questions that the mainstream Norwegian media used to permit itself to ask now and then, but not so much nowadays.


	Finally, at a 2 p.m. press conference, PST head Roger Berg declares the atrocity an act of “extreme Islamist terrorism.” Matapour, he explains, belongs to a network of radical would-be terrorists. He’s been on PST’s radar since at least 2015. In fact they had a sit-down with him last month, because he’d “shown interest” in statements that he’d regarded as “offenses against Islam,” but had decided he wasn’t a threat. “We can’t monitor everybody,” Berg explains.


	This is the same PST that called me in several years ago, and wasted over an hour grilling me because they thought I, a writer about Islam, represented some kind of danger.


	Even after the PST links the savage shootings directly to Islam, none of the gay people interviewed on the streets of Oslo about it make any reference to the Religion of Peace. And when the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, goes on TV at about 3 p.m. he only mentions Islam by way of expressing concern for Norwegian Muslims, who, he says, must be “scared and despairing” in the wake of Matapour’s misdeeds, and who deserve our acknowledgment that no one other than the perpetrator himself is responsible for them. Later in the day, Masud Gharahkhani, a 39-year-old Iranian who came to Norway as a refugee and who last November was named president of Parliament - a largely ceremonial position that makes him, technically, the highest ranking individual in the country after the king himself - <a href="https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/jaGadn/gharahkhani-etter-angrepet-i-oslo-har-ikke-noe-med-religion-aa-gjoere">states</a> that the atrocity had “nothing to do with religion.” And in a Sunday morning TV interview, parliament member Abid Q. Raja, who before entering politics was the spokesman for a mosque, tries to play down Islamic hatred for gays by saying that Norwegian Christians have their prejudices, too.


	I also read reports connecting Matapour to Arfan Bhatti, a leader of the Norway-based Profetens Ummah movement who has recruited on behalf of ISIS and who, on July 14, posted on Facebook a picture of a burning rainbow flag along with a hadith - i.e., a saying of Muhammed - calling for the murder of homosexuals. (In the course of all this reading, incidentally, I discover that Karianne Solbrække, who since 2016 has been news editor of Norway’s leading privately owned television channel, TV2, was once Bhatti’s mistress.)


	A personal note. London Pub used to be my regular watering hole. It’s a rambling, slightly musty, basement-level space with a dark, cozy feel and large framed pictures on the wall of Oscar Wilde, Dirk Bogarde, Ian McKellen, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and other famous gays. It was there that I met, over twenty years ago, most of the people who would become my best friends in Oslo. It was the place where, on 9/11, my fellow patrons queued up to give me, the American expatriate, hugs of condolence and solidarity. And it’s still the place that I drop into whenever I’m in Oslo. It’s no longer, for me, a place where everybody knows my name, to quote the theme song from Cheers, but it’s still a place where there’s almost always a familiar face.


	It’s also a place that’s been an oasis of friendly faces in a city that, for gay people, has become increasingly unfriendly. I’ve written previously about the several occasions on which my partner and I were attacked on the streets of Oslo by Muslims who appeared to have gone berserk at the mere sight of a gay person. I’ve also written about Stein Sjaastad, the genial London Pub regular who was several of my friends’ GP, and who in 2006 was stabbed to death at his office - stabbed 19 times in total - by a Muslim patient. Both of the men Matapour killed on Friday night, Kaare Hasvik and Jon Erik Isachsen, were old friends of old friends of mine. Isachsen, by the way, was one of Norway’s thousand or so Jews - a coup for a jihadist, I suppose.


	It was partly because of the worsening Muslim crime situation in Oslo that I moved out of the city eleven years ago. As I <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/islamization-oslo-15686.html">discussed</a> at length in City Journal in 2018, the Muslim population of Oslo has grown rapidly over the past generation (Muslims now make up over ten percent of the city’s population) and the resulting increase in Muslim violence has made the streets far less safe. It’s also made me more vigilant every time I’ve ventured into London Pub, because when residents of Oslo think of gay people they think of London Pub, and many Muslims - raised on a book that calls for the murder of homosexuals - don’t have very warm and fuzzy thoughts about gay people.


	The events of Friday night led several commentators to reflect on this fact. On Saturday morning, Hans Rustad, editor of the alternative news website document.no, <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/06/25/for-stort-til-a-kunne-vaskes-vekk/">wondered</a> whether Norwegian politicians and journalists had ever considered that, “for followers of a religion that views homosexuality as a crime,” the ubiquitous, over-the-top, month-long celebration of gay pride “is a constant provocation?” On Facebook, writer Nina Hjerpset-Østlie <a href="https://www.facebook.com/nhjerpset/posts/pfbid0kJumonqdGQKzpm8QvfwJrJJQTZUWkRz92gikPScmktRkDC9t9icmTKwpqMRw6Cg8l">raised</a> the same question: “have authorities thought that there can be some cultural frictions” when “a large and growing religious group…has extremely intolerant attitudes toward gay people”? If so, she asked, what do those authorities plan to do about it?


	What indeed? Of course this is one of many questions that politicians across the Western world should have contemplated seriously a long time ago. So far they’ve preferred to ignore it. There’s no reason to expect them to change now. It’s probably too late, anyway.


	Also on Saturday morning, writer Christian Skaug <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/06/25/homofile-har-vaert-redde-i-oslo-sentrum-i-mange-ar/">recalled</a> a telling incident from several years ago: several gay organizations in Oslo requested that the taxi stand outside London Pub be moved to another location, because Muslim cabbies - as in other Western cities - were suspected of spying on gays from Muslim families.


	All of which is by way of saying that this monstrous attack shouldn’t have shocked anyone. If it did come as a shock, it’s because the media, government, and police have conspired for years to whitewash the reality of Islamic gay-hatred. And too many gay people, I’m sorry to say, have been complicit in this activity, either staying silent on the subject or parroting the absurd line that gays and Muslims are oppressed minorities and hence allies. (Sadly, many of the friends I made at London Pub are now ex-friends because my views on Islam grated against their politically correct sensibilities. I wonder if the Koran-inspired carnage at our old haunt has changed any of their minds.)


	After the Friday night shootings, PST suggested that Saturday’s pride parade be canceled. It was. Was this a good idea? Some of us have been arguing for years that these parades, which began as civil-rights marches, no longer have a serious purpose in societies with same-sex marriage, and have, in fact, been taken over largely by silly narcissists and vulgar exhibitionists who, to most gay people, are nothing but an embarrassment. Yet in the face of a provocation like Matapour’s, it would, I think, have made sense to hold the march - and to reroute it through the heart of Muslim Oslo.


	Admirably, in spite of the parade cancelation, and in a display of real pride (as opposed to today’s cheap, ersatz, hypersexualized, corporate-sponsored kind), thousands of gays chose to turn out in downtown Oslo on Saturday afternoon to march in angry defiance of the antigay hatred - the Islam-inspired antigay hatred - that motivated Matapour. If anything good comes of this butcher’s evil bloodbath, perhaps it will spell an end, in Norway at least, to the absurd charade of gay and Muslim concord.

Terror in Oslo

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	At a quarter after one o’clock on the night before Oslo’s pride parade is

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It was six years ago today that the people of Britain surprised the world by voting to leave the European Union. One of the major reasons why they supported Brexit was a widespread desire to take back control of Britain’s borders from the EU and subject the mass immigration into the country to responsible controls.


	This desire to control immigration could be described as having a single cause - namely, public alarm over the ongoing Islamization of Britain - or as having a number of intimately related causes: the increasing segregation of Muslims into sharia enclaves, as painstakingly outlined in Ed Husain’s 2021 book Among the Mosques; the high rates of Muslim crime and welfare dependency; the housing crisis, which is only exacerbated by the influx of new immigrants; the so-called “grooming gangs” - that is, Muslim rape gangs - that, beginning in 2012, were revealed in the media to have targeted thousands of underage victims in cities across England over a period of decades; and, not least, the acts of jihadist terrorism that took 52 lives in London on July 7, 2005, five lives outside the Palace of Westminster on March 22, 2017, 22 lives at the Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017, and so on.


	As recently as last October, all of Britain was shocked when an ISIS-inspired son of Somali immigrants walked into a Methodist church in Essex and assassinated a Member of Parliament named David Amess, who was meeting there with constituents. And just four months ago, Tommy Robinson released an explosive <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/rape-britain-bruce-bawer/">documentary</a>, The Rape of Britain, that detailed the reprehensible activities of a Muslim rape gang in Telford. It was an indictment not only of the coldblooded perpetrators but also of the Telford police, who, as I wrote at the time, came off looking “every bit as morally reprehensible as the pimps and rapists themselves” - for like police, politicians, social workers, and other public servants across England, they’d pusillanimously turned a blind eye to the brutal and systematic exploitation of working-class girls.


	The ultimate point of Tommy Robinson’s documentary, of course, was that Telford isn’t a one-off. The grooming gangs are a national crisis - a national scandal and disgrace - and that disgrace has everything to do with the fact that a very high percentage of the men and women charged with enforcing the law and defending the weak in Britain are simply too scared of the Muslim “community” to perform their duties responsibly. As the number of Muslims in Britain continues to grow, and with it their ability to wreak havoc in response to any perceived offense, this official cowardice can only intensify. When the British Muslim population finally reaches the tipping point, Muslims won’t have to lift a finger to take power; they’ll already have it.


	Now, you’d think that these facts would be obvious to most Brits by this point, and that public pressure to reduce Muslim immigration would be on the rise. Polls taken in 2017-18 <a href="https://www.globalvillagespace.com/why-is-muslim-immigration-such-a-huge-issue-in-uk/">showed</a> that 47% of Brits wanted an end to Muslim immigration and that 55% see Islam as incompatible with British values. Yet most Brits have continued to vote for major-party political hacks who have no intention of doing anything about the issue. Tommy Robinson’s 2019 run for the European Parliament failed disastrously. So have the candidacies of other impressive critics of Muslim immigration. Why? And on May 12 of this year, the Financial Times <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f2d72f42-af5f-4922-8fcb-f50a32f37afc">reported</a> that, according to a recent survey, most Brits are now “fine with” the fact that “Britain is now a high-immigration country.”


	Again: why? Could it be because there haven’t been any major terrorist actions in the last few months, aside from the murder of David Amess? Or because it’s been a while since the last time the newspapers pulled back the curtain on yet another new grooming gang that’s destroyed the lives of hundreds of young girls? Is it so easy for Brits who’ve seen all the evidence that their country is hurtling toward disaster to loosen up about it simply because things have been relatively quiet of late? Is the need to push away the facts and believe that everything’s going to be okay just that powerful? Have other matters - COVID, Megxit, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee - distracted Brits from the Muslim mess? Has a paralysis, an indifference, a lack of a fundamental sense of responsibility to future generations, become endemic in the UK, afflicting not only public servants but millions of other subjects? How can it be that the daily drip-drip-drip of horrifying news stories about the Muslim minority isn’t enough to raise hackles - and keep them raised?


	I’m referring to stories like the ones told in a just-released <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10934985/Rochdale-grooming-gang-boss-worked-welfare-officer-Oldham-Council.html">report</a> on the failures of Greater Manchester Police and other officials in their confrontation with grooming gangs. One of the report’s revelations concerns Shabir “Daddy” Ahmed, the longtime head of the grooming gang in Rochdale, which is part of Greater Manchester. As it turns out, Ahmed worked for eighteen years as a “welfare officer” in Oldham, which is also a part of Greater Manchester. The police knew as early as 2005 that this welfare officer was also running a rape gang, but they didn’t share the information with Ahmed’s employers on the Oldham Council until 2012, when the Rochdale rape gang - and the failure of authorities to do anything about it - became national news. Even then, however, the Oldham Council took no action on Ahmed.


	On GB News on Tuesday morning, Martin Daubney of the Reclaim Party <a href="https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1539131794854928385">described</a> the Oldham revelations as an example of how Britain’s working classes have been failed by progressive officials who are scared of being called racists. His emphasis on the rapists’ Pakistani identity, however, was glibly dismissed as “a complete distraction” by left-wing activist Amy Cameron, who insisted that the grooming gangs demonstrate nothing more or less than the fact that, quite simply, “whenever you have people in positions of power they’re often able to exploit the vulnerable.” In short, the grooming gang members' Pakistani identity - to say nothing of their shared religion - is of no significance whatsoever. It’s a transparent lie, needless to say, but it’s a lie by which Britain’s progressive establishment - as well as a good chunk of the rest of the kingdom’s population - has apparently decided that it wishes to live. And, in time, die.&nbsp;&nbsp;

What’s Wrong With the Brits?

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It was six years ago today that the people of Britain surprised the world by

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Here’s a brief history of New York City during the last half century. Under a series of incompetent and ideology-driven mayors, it turned from a glittering jewel into a cesspool of crime, corruption, poverty, narcotics, prostitution, and homelessness. Heroically, Rudy Giuliani restored it to glory. And Bill de Blasio, mayor from 2014 to 2021, turned it back into a hovel. Last November, voters had a chance to reverse their city’s alarmingly fast decline. A scandal-ridden machine Democrat, Eric Adams, who was chummy with Louis Farrakhan and who, when speaking in public, sounded like an imbecile, was running against a local hero: Curtis Sliwa, who, as founder of the non-profit Guardian Angels, a highly regarded anti-crime group consisting mostly of black and Hispanic men, began patrolling the city’s unsafe subways in the 1970s. In short, Sliwa, now a 68-year-old radio talk-show host, has spent his entire adult life exhibiting an unselfish dedication to the people of New York. So naturally New Yorkers elected Adams in a 67% to 28% landslide. And in the months since his inauguration, while the city has experienced record-breaking levels of violence, Adams could be seen partying it up with celebrities at the Met Gala, flying to Los Angeles to attend a lavish, star-studded dinner, and turning to hapless Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, of all people, for advice on fighting crime.


	If I’m ruminating all these months later on the election of this buffoon as mayor of New York, it’s because the voters of California have now served up a similar heartbreak. The Golden State, of course, is in very much the same boat as New York: the parks and streets of its once storied cities are full of tents, human feces, used condoms and syringes; as the state fills up with illegal aliens, the middle class flees to Texas and elsewhere. Yet last September, Governor Gavin Newsom, the empty suit who’s responsible for this nightmare, and who became world-famous for violating his own stringent lockdown rules by attending a party at the French Laundry in the Napa Valley ($350 a head for dinner), fought back a recall effort with 62% of the vote. The man who wanted to replace him, the brilliant and deeply principled Larry Elder, later wrote a <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/california-gov-newsoms-firewall-republican-hating-larry-elder/">piece</a> for FrontPage about an encounter at a West L.A. restaurant with two women who’d pulled the lever for Newsom. He asked them about their views on crime, homelessness, schools, etc. On every issue, they turned out to be on the same page as Elder. But they’d voted for Newsom. Why? He told them why: they simply couldn’t bring themselves to vote Republican. They admitted he was right. .


	In the primary elections on June 7, Californians had another chance to ditch Newsom. This time around, in a system whereby the top two vote-getters in the primary face off in the general, he was up against an obscure Republican and a high-profile independent, Michael Shellenberger. A long-term Democrat, Shellenberg has the kind of credentials that coastal Californians love: after spending a high-school year in Nicaragua in solidarity with the Sandinistas, he studied Peace and Global Studies in college, became a radical left-wing activist, and was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time Magazine. Recently, however, he’s made enemies on the left by criticizing sustainable development and “environmental alarmism.” And in San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, which I <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/real-fix-homelessness-bruce-bawer/">reviewed</a> in November, he takes aim at the left’s “pity narrative” on homelessness and its favorite approach to the problem, a policy called Housing First, whereby cities hand out free apartments on the assumption that the root cause of homelessness is financial difficulty. In fact, as Shellenberger discovered, homelessness is almost always caused by a combination of medical ailments, psychiatric disorders, and (above all) substance abuse - a trifecta of problems that can’t be solved by giving out apartments. What to do, then? After studying approaches around the world, Shellenberger recommends housing homeless people in temporary shelters on the condition that they submit to the treatments they need. As he shows, it works in the über-liberal city of Amsterdam, which you’d think would make Californians eager to give Shellenberger a try.


	Nope. In the gubernatorial primary, with 49% of the ballots counted, Newsom won 56.3%of the vote, GOP nominee Brian Dahle, a farmer and state senator, received 16.8%, and Shellenberger got a measly 3.7%. What happened? The same thing that happened in the New York mayoral race. To explain it, it’s useful to glance at a May 15 op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle by Zachary Siegel, identified as “a freelance journalist who covers public health and drug policy.” Writing with the objective of warning voters against Shellenberger, Siegel <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Michael-Shellenberger-s-narrative-of-California-17172493.php">provided</a> a perfect account of just how a typical progressive mind responds to someone like Shellenberger. To wit: Shellenberger was a “zealot” who lacked “awful human emotions like empathy and compassion” and whose “facile” and “glib” analysis of homelessness led to “cruel and harsh solutions” that blamed people’s difficulties on “bad life choices” and sought to cure them with “a hefty spoonful of tough love, tough policing and personal responsibility,” thereby appealing to “reactionary anger among an aggrieved electorate.” For a self-respecting California progressive, of course, it’s sheer barbarism to blame problems like homelessness even partly on individuals rather than on society - let alone to expect those individuals to take on a degree of responsibility for improving their own situation. As far as Siegel was concerned, Shellenberger’s plan for shelters and treatment - which, again, is based on the successful approach taken by Amsterdam - amounted to “a bizarre Big Brother-style structure of mass institutionalization” whereby the state would “round up the unhoused and coerce them into a system of shelters and ‘treatment.’”


	Bottom line: if you were even considering casting your vote for Shellenberger, then you, like him, were lacking in “empathy and compassion.” In at least some parts of California, that’s what Election Day is all about. Yes, the rest of the year, you can gripe as much as you like about the state’s continued failure to solve its ever-growing crime and education and addiction and homelessness problems, about how your taxes are skyrocketing while your standard of living is taking a dive, and about the way in which the barbarians keep pouring in even as civilization collapses all around you. But on Election Day, in spite of all this, and in spite of the specifics of policy analysis and the statistics that indicate which approaches work and which don’t, you head for your polling place - on the way stepping carefully, of course, around the people sleeping on the sidewalk and over the mounds of human excrement and used needles and assorted garbage - and pull the lever for the Democrat, thereby demonstrating that, in spite of every temptation to cross over to the dark side, you’re still on the side of good. Because, remember: it’s not about actually fixing problems. It’s about proving, in the midst of the maelstrom, that you still care.

Voting for the Status Quo in California

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Here’s a brief history of New York City during the last half century. Under a

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Having consumed an extraordinary amount of information (and misinformation) about transgenderism - whether through terrific books like Helen Joyce’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trans-When-Ideology-Meets-Reality/dp/0861540492/">Trans</a> and Abigail Shrier’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/1684510317/">Irreversible Damage</a> or YouTube videos by transgender “influencers” like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/NoahFinnce">Noah Finnce</a> or canny critics of transgender ideology like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/mennofest">Mr. Menno</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/arielle">Arielle Scarcella</a>, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/KellieJayKeen">Kellie-Jay Keen</a> - I worried that the just-released Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/videos/what-is-a-woman-official-trailer">documentary</a> on the topic, What Is a Woman?, produced and directed by Justin Folk and starring Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, wouldn’t offer anything new.


	In a sense I was right. My mind wasn’t changed. I went in knowing that transgenderism is deranged and dangerous, and the film confirmed my point of view. But what confirmation! Folk, Walsh, and company have put together a serious and definitive piece of work - at once a comprehensive survey, a chilling indictment, and, strange though it may sound, an often laugh-out-loud piece of entertainment.


	Structurally, What Is a Woman? borrows from, of all things, Michael Moore’s debut documentary, Roger &amp; Me (1989), about the effect of GM factory closings on the increasingly bleak economy of his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Moore structured his film around the conceit that he was on a quest to track down, and confront, GM chairman and CEO Roger Smith, the tongue-in-cheek premise being that, if informed about the town’s suffering, Smith would certainly take remedial action. The conceit propelling Folk’s documentary is that Walsh, the 35-year-old father of two boys and two girls, is hopelessly confused by the new concepts of sex and gender, which posit that a man can become a woman and vice-versa, and is traveling around the U.S. to learn from experts on the subject - and to pose one question in particular: What is a woman?


	To be sure, his first interviewee, “gender-affirming therapist” Gert Comfrey, is right there in his own hometown of Nashville. How, Walsh asks, do we know that this whole gender thing is true? “I learned it,” replies Comfrey, “by listening to transgender people.” “What,” Walsh then asks, “is a woman?” Comfrey’s reply: “Great question! I’m not a woman so I can’t really answer.” In fact, Comfrey is very obviously a biological female. A perfect start for a journey on which almost nothing is what it seems.&nbsp;


	In San Francisco, Walsh talks to Marci L. Bowers, “the nation’s pre-eminent sex-change surgeon.” Bowers, very obviously a biological male, presents as a woman - although when asked to confirm that he’s a trans woman offers an odd reply: “I have a transgender history.” (No, buddy, you have a transgender present.) Asked whether some people who undergo “sex-change” surgery ever regret doing so, Bowers replies, dishonestly, that such occurrences are “really, really uncommon”; asked about the similarity between transgenderism and body dysmorphia (whose sufferers want to cut off an arm or leg), Bowers says that the latter “doesn’t have anything to do with gender identity…..That’s someone who has a…psychiatric condition….Pardon my non-medical language: kooky.”


	But of course nobody finds transgender ideology kooky. Asked about its critics, Bowers says that “there aren’t many” and that those who do exist are “dinosaurs” - killjoys in an “exciting” new era of maximum gender fluidity. “You know who gets it right?” Bowers enthuses. “This next generation!”


	Brown University pediatrician Michelle Forcier, who helps plop children onto the trans assembly line, also finds the whole thing exciting. She tells Walsh that when first meeting her very young patients, she asks them: “Where have you been in terms of your gender and your gender identity? Where are you right now and, more excitingly, where would you like to be in the future?” When Walsh pushes back a bit, asking her if she’s ever met a four-year-old who believes in Santa Claus - and, when she answers in the affirmative, asking whether this indicates that such a child “maybe has a tenuous grasp on reality” - Forcier replies that “they have an appropriate four-year-old handle on reality” and that the child’s belief in Santa Claus shows just “how wonderful that four-year-old and their imagination is!” Like Bowers, she obviously feels that - along with her pre-teen patients, whom she praises for recognizing that “our antiquated ways just don’t apply to them” and for “rejecting a lot of our social mores” - she’s on the cutting edge of a super-duper social revolution.


	Cheery stuff. But things turn dark when Walsh asks Forcier about her prescription to children of the drug Lupron, which is also used to chemically castrate sex offenders. “You know what?” she says, her tone suddenly chilly. “I’m not sure we should continue with this interview.” Why not? Because by using the word drugs and the term sex offenders, “you’re being malignant and harmful.”


	Walsh also gets blowback from Patrick Grzanka, director of the program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Tennessee. At first he’s quite the smug, voluble chap, banging on eagerly about how gender “infuses itself into all aspects of social life” and how gender and sex, although “different constructs,” are “deeply intertwined with each other.” But when Walsh asks if a “trans woman” can fairly be categorized as a male, Grzanka is uneasy. “Why are you asking the question? I want to understand why that’s so important.” When Walsh says he’s out “to understand reality,” Grzanka, echoing Comfrey, replies that you should simply trust what trans people tell you. And when Walsh explains that he’s “just trying to start by getting to the truth,” Grzanka declares angrily that he’s “really uncomfortable with that language”: to speak about “getting to the truth,” he complains, sounds “deeply transphobic.” Like Forcier, he threatens to stop the interview. Then, asked to define woman, he calls it “a curious question” before sitting there ruminatively, apparently stunned into silence by the query.&nbsp;


	This isn’t the last time in the film that an interviewee freaks out over a simple question. Later on, a gay guy on a San Francisco street tells Walsh that only a woman knows what a woman is. In response, Walsh asks: “Do you know what a cat is?” At once flustered and outraged, the guy stalks off. Then there’s Congressman Mark Takano (D-CA), a pro-trans Harvard grad who’s proud of being the “first openly gay person of color elected to Congress.” When confronted with the fact that letting “trans women” use public women’s bathrooms makes biological females uncomfortable, he hems and haws inanely for what seems like a full minute before finally declaring: “You know what? I think this interview is over.”&nbsp;


	Fortunately, the documentary also provides voices of sanity. Miriam Grossman, an adolescent and adult psychiatrist, notes that since gender dysphoria only afflicts “between one in 30,000 and one in 110,000” people, almost all of the young people who now claim to be trans aren’t really trans at all. About the likes of Forcier, Comfrey, and Bowers, Grossman declares: “It’s unspeakable what these people have done to our children.” And she sums up the baleful influence on current thinking of Alfred Kinsey (whose belief “that children are sexual from birth” led him to perform repulsive “sexual experiments on children”) and psychologist John Money (whose quack notions about the fluidity of gender were utterly - and tragically - disproved by his most notorious experiment but nonetheless shape today’s gender ideology).&nbsp;


	Walsh talks to many others whose lives have been touched by transgenderism. Selina Soule, a track-and-field athlete, explains that after biological boys started competing as girls, she went from a winner to a loser. Jordan Peterson, who shot to fame by opposing a Canadian law compelling the use of trans pronouns, vents his fury: “There’s no such thing as a gender-affirming therapist. It’s a contradiction in terms….You don’t get a pat on the back from a therapist for your pre-existing axiomatic conclusions. That’s not therapy. That’s a rubber stamp.”


	In the one part of the film that I’d have left out, Walsh travels all the way to Kenya to ask Masai tribesmen about sex roles and tell them about transgenderism. The results are predictable: of course they laugh at the idea of a woman trapped in a man’s body. Funny stuff, I guess. But does Walsh really want to imply that the West should turn to African tribes for wisdom about anything? Surely this sequence is all too easy for the pro-trans crowd to dismiss: well, they can say, we’re more scientifically advanced than they are. (Then again, who on the left would dare to suggest that Masai tribesmen are primitive?)


	Walsh’s most moving interviewee is Scott (Kellie) Newgent, a pretty woman who went through several operations before she ended up looking like a dumpy guy, and who, regretting all of it, now devotes her life to trying to talk young people out of “sex-change” surgery. “The truth,” she tells Walsh, ”is that medical transition is experimental,” with side effects that aren’t yet fully understood. She notes that there’s a 70% complication rate in female-to-male surgery, and displays for the camera the horrifying rectangular patch on her lower arm from which skin was stripped to create a fake phallus.&nbsp;


	No, I didn’t need to see this film to know what I think about transgenderism. But it did bring some key points into greater focus. First, like the promoters of abortion, who’d rather speak about “choice” than discuss in detail the procedures by means of which a baby is forcibly removed from a uterus, the pro-trans community rely heavily on euphemism. Don’t call drugs drugs; don’t say mastectomy, say top surgery; don’t say castration, say bottom surgery. (These people mangle language as eagerly as they mangle healthy sexual organs.)


	Another thing: folks like Comfrey and Forcier and Bowers hold important-sounding positions and are supposed to be respected, distinguished experts. But they’re freaks. Comfrey’s a wild-eyed wacko. Forcier has a crazy smile. Bowers (to borrow Truman Capote’s description of Jacqueline Susann) looks like a truck driver in drag. The more they talk - barely able to conceal their glee at the thought of butchering children’s genitalia - the more you realize you’re in the presence of a very special kind of evil and a very special kind of madness. In a sane society, these creatures would be recognized as outcasts, reprobates, degenerates, creeps. That’s what they are: creeps. It’s striking that when Grossman, the sensible psychiatrist, first appears onscreen, you know immediately - even before she’s opened her mouth - that she’s not one of them.


	And yet what comes through so clearly in this documentary is that, for the time being anyway, these people have won - and they’ve won without a fight. Their ideas - if you can call them that - have swept society, shaping new laws and policies and school curricula before the sane majority has had a chance to notice and to say: “Wait just one second.” These creeps may blithely pretend, as Bowers does, that nobody dissents from trans ideology except for a few “dinosaurs,” but they know very well that that’s not true - in fact, despite all their boosterism, they have to be aware, with their predilection for circular logic and their allergy to honest inquiry, that they’re selling a lie (hence Grzanka’s astonishing reaction to the word truth) and that there’s a sleeping giant out there waiting to call them on it. Which is why, the moment they realize that Walsh isn’t there to promote their ideology but to compel them to defend it, they’re prepared to call the interview to a halt.

What Is a Woman?

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Having consumed an extraordinary amount of information (and misinformation) about

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If you happened to take a look at the New York Times website a few days ago - specifically, on June 2 - you’d have found the usual daily mix of predictable left-wing claptrap. One article <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/us/miami-republicans-proud-boys.html">smeared</a> the Proud Boys as a “violent” gang of “far-right nationalist[s]”; another <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/01/opinion/depp-heard-won-lost-verdict.html">lamented</a> the verdict in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial because it afforded the unacceptable spectacle of “a woman brought low,” while yet another asserted that Depp won “[b]ecause he’s a man.” Meanwhile the travel section <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/travel/things-to-do-paris.html">pretended</a> that Paris (a “City of Light” nowadays only when Muslim gangs are setting cars and churches ablaze) is still the romantic locale of Gigi and Funny Face, and the op-ed page offered an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/opinion/inflation-vegetarian-vegan.html">essay</a> headlined “Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians” and an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/opinion/biden-the-blob-china-us.html">argument</a> that the main problem with the “capable, decent men and women” who make up the Biden administration is that they’re insufficiently eager to make nice with China.


	But the day’s most ludicrous piece of agitprop was an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/movies/liberal-hollywood-dog.html">essay</a> in which Times film critic A. O. Scott actually tried to make the case that Hollywood isn’t left-wing. Yes, he admitted, the film industry is “a hub of Democratic Party fund-raising and activism” - but, hey, there are also plenty of “suspected conservatives” in La La Land (he didn’t pause to ponder why they’re only “suspected”), and in any case, he suggested, it all evens out, because during the era of the “Red Scare” Hollywood conservatives subjected liberals to “blacklisting and betrayal.” Um, no. Here’s the real story: through much of the 1930s and 40s, the writing and acting branches in Hollywood were dominated by ruthless, card-carrying Stalinists like Dalton Trumbo, who sought to use their power to propagandize for Communism; it was they, not conservatives, who aimed to crush the liberals in their midst; and it was they, not liberals, who were later targeted by the HUAC hearings. “Betrayal”? It was these Stalinists, enemies of their country and tools of the Kremlin, who were the traitors.


	So much for Scott’s slick rewrite of history. Returning to the present, he scoffed at the idea that showbiz conservatives “face purging and intimidation in a town ruled by the tyranny of wokeness” and attributed this notion to the “sense of grievance and victimization” that, he assured readers, is widespread on today’s right. (Got that? It’s the right that specializes in “grievance and victimization.”) Scott eventually conceded, sort of, that the film industry “may skew progressive” - he was plainly referring, by the way, to the “above-the-line” creative types, not the crews, who are largely deplorables - but insisted nonetheless that, whatever their personal politics, the movies they make are essentially conservative.


	What, according to Scott, makes these movies conservative? Well, he argued, they tell stories “[a]bout the grit and glory of the American military; about the heroic, essential work of law enforcement; about the centrality of revenge to any serious conception of justice; about the superiority of common sense over credentialed expertise; about the lessons ordinary small-town folks can teach fancy city slickers; about individual striving as the answer to most social problems; about the need for heroes.”


	Huh? Let’s start with the contention that Hollywood celebrates the American military. In fact, its response to 9/11, the deadliest assault ever on American soil, was to churn out miles of slanderous celluloid - Redacted, Syriana, The Kingdom, Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Grace Is Gone, Stop-Loss, etc., etc. - depicting U.S. armed forces as monsters, rapists, morons, bigots. These films were, and deserved to be, flops. And Hollywood movies about the military continue to skew anti-American. If Top Gun: Maverick is a hit, it’s partly because it does celebrate America (as did the openly conservative Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper and 15:17 to Paris).


	Does Tinseltown celebrate law enforcement? On the contrary, it was quick, in movies like Black and Blue, Monsters and Men, Detroit, Blindspotting, The Hate U Give, and Queen &amp; Slim, to embrace the disgusting and dangerous lie that racist white cops are gunning down innocent blacks in droves. As for the encounter between “ordinary small-town folks” and “city slickers,” all I can think of in this line (aside from films in the tradition of Deliverance and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which urbanites who venture into the countryside risk rape or dismemberment) are those that follow the time-honored formula of Norma Rae, in which a noble union organizer from New York City helps a dimwitted North Carolina factory worker recognize the virtue of the closed shop.


	Scott claimed that Hollywood supplies “the need for heroes.” Yes indeedy. The 2020 Best Picture nominee The Trial of the Chicago 7 made heroes out of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and other Yippies (while demonizing the police); the hero of Judas and the Black Messiah, which also got a 2020 Best Picture nod, was a Black Panther named Fred Hampton; in One Night in Miami, nominated the same year for Best Adapted Screenplay, the hero is Malcolm X. Few Americans want to see pictures like these. But the studio execs are so fervent in their left-wing bias that they can’t stop making them.


	“Mainstream American movies,” Scott further maintained, are “conservative” in that they’re “in love with guns, suspicious of democracy, ambivalent about feminism, squeamish about divorce, allergic to abortion, all over the place on matters of sexuality and very nervous about anything to do with race.” Oh, really? Exactly which mainstream American movies in recent years have treated conservative attitudes toward feminism, divorce, or abortion with anything but contempt? As for guns, conservatives don’t love them - they love the Constitution, including the Second Amendment, which acknowledges their right to defend their liberty - with guns, if necessary - in the face of government tyranny. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Are conservatives “suspicious about democracy?” No, they’re suspicious, and rightly so, of the Democrat swamp that many leftists now equate with democracy. As for race, it was Barack Obama who, in a momentous act of mischief, returned that largely settled issue to the front burner; overwhelmingly, conservatives aren’t squeamish about race but are deeply uneasy about mendacious race hustles like the Times’s own 1619 Project, which malignantly identifies racism, not liberty, as America’s founding principle.&nbsp;


	In his concluding paragraphs, Scott sought to argue that Hollywood has always sought to be “fundamentally affirmative of the way things are,” to tell stories in which antagonists find “common ground,” and thereby to reinforce “an elaborate mythos” of America that is, essentially, conservative. Ha. Last year’s Academy Award for Best Picture went to Nomadland, <a href="https://www.thejc.com/culture/film/film-review-nomadland-1.516285">described</a> by one critic as a “gently meditative drama about the failure of the American dream.” The Hollywood Reporter <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/nebraska-cannes-review-550167/">called</a> Nebraska, nominated for Best Picture in 2014, a “wryly poignant and potent comic drama about the bereft state of things in America’s oft-vaunted heartland.” Then there are the Motion Picture Academy’s decidedly unconservative new diversity rules, which stipulate, as the Times itself approvingly <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/movies/oscars-best-picture-diversity.html">reported</a> in September 2020, that a film won’t be considered for an Oscar unless (among much else) it stars “[a]t least one actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group” and its story “center[s] on women, L.G.T.B.Q. people, a racial or ethnic group or the disabled.” &nbsp;


	A few questions: if Hollywood is conservative, then why has it made hundreds of feature films about Nazi Germany, Hitler, and the Holocaust but not one about the U.S.S.R., Stalin, or the Gulag? If Hollywood is conservative, then why does it consistently lionize the likes of Dalton Trumbo (Trumbo, 2015) and demonize the likes of Dick Cheney (Vice, 2018)? If Hollywood is conservative, then why are Disney and Netflix in deep financial trouble for going so insanely woke? If Hollywood is conservative, then why has Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire jumped with both feet into the motion-picture business, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-why-the-daily-wires-getting-into-the-entertainment-business">promising</a> middle Americans to make theatrical films “that won’t mock your values”?


	Bottom line: Hollywood is woke. Way woke. And not just woke. It’s the West Coast capital of woke. The East Coast capital, of course, being the West 41st Street offices of the New York Times.

Twisting the Truth about Tinseltown

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If you happened to take a look at the New York Times website a few days ago -

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On the evening of November 2, 1965, two days after my ninth birthday, my parents dressed me up in a jacket and tie and took me from our home in central Queens to what I suppose must have been a hotel ballroom somewhere in Manhattan. It was crowded - or at least by the end of the evening would be crowded - but somehow we managed to secure seats at what appeared to be the center of the action, in proximity to people who, I was told, were leading figures in the candidate’s mayoral campaign. In my recollection we sat there in the middle of that high-spirited crowd for hours (although, of course, given the vagaries of childhood memories, it may have been much less), my parents chatting amiably with the campaign people while, every now and then, the crowd responded to election results with appropriate noises. We were, I understood, waiting for the candidate to arrive, and eventually, arrive he did, borne - and here again I rely on what may be a faulty memory - on the shoulders of a couple of his supporters. You would think he had won, given the cheery mood, but, as it happens, he had come in third. In fact he had never expected to win, telling a reporter during the campaign that by his own conservative estimate he would receive one vote, and replying to the question “What’s the first thing you’ll do if you win?” with an answer that became famous: “Demand a recount.”


	That was my first encounter with William F. Buckley. It was also my last. Though I would spend the first decade of my writing career contributing to conservative periodicals and counted many National Review writers as friendly acquaintances, somehow I never found myself in WFB’s presence again. It’s still something of a mystery to me how I ended up at that campaign headquarters on Election Night 1965: my parents were not politically active; indeed, they rarely if ever talked about politics. I do know that during the early 1960s my father, a lifelong New Yorker, had sensed that his beloved country and city were moving in disastrous directions, and I know that in the 1965 mayoral election he must have been appalled by both major-party candidates - John Lindsay, the glamorous but lightweight Republican congressman for an Upper East Side district that was described by Buckley as containing “probably the densest national concentration of vegetarians, pacifists, hermaphrodites, junkies, Communists, Randites, clam-juice-and-betel-nut eaters,” and city comptroller Abe Beame, a dreary Democratic Party machine hack of the first water. Both were (for the day) extreme left-wingers, soft on crime, beholden to unions, pioneers in the art of pandering to identity groups, and enthusiasts for public housing, high taxation, generous welfare systems, and “urban renewal,” that insane policy of replacing livable neighborhoods with hideous housing projects.


	They were, in short, devoted to policies that, in the view of people like my father (who turned out to be far more correct than they knew), would only drag New York further downhill. It was for this reason, obviously, that my father (in a move utterly out of character for him) decided to drag his wife and son to the election headquarters for Buckley, who had chosen to run against both Lindsay and Beame as the candidate of the three-year-old Conservative Party, explaining, in his magazine, National Review, that he wished to “give the people of New York an opportunity to vote for a candidate who consults without embarrassment, and who is proud to be guided by, the root premises of the Republican philosophy of government, the conservative philosophy of government.” Only now does it occur to me that my father, a Manhattan internist with tony patients, had likely ended up at Buckley election headquarters that night as a result of an encounter with some member of the Buckley team with whom, during some medical consultation, he had shared his thoughts.


	After that 1965 mayoral election, of course, both America and New York City went to hell in a handbasket. In the country at large, the Vietnam War led to intense social division; the era of hippies, LSD, and sexual license began, seemingly overnight; race riots destroyed Detroit, Watts, and other urban centers. Not until Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s did the country seem to find its way at least partially back. Meanwhile, the New York City of Breakfast at Tiffany’s transformed in the blink of an eye into the New York City of Taxi Driver; Lindsay proved a disastrous mayor, and Beame, who ended up succeeding him in 1974, was, if anything, even worse. Ed Koch, mayor from 1978-89, brought a degree of relief, but true recovery did not come until the city’s electorate, having watched the Big Apple rot to the core during the single term of the monumentally incompetent David Dinkins, dared to vote for a Republican, Rudy Giuliani, who’d been smeared in the New York Times and elsewhere as a fascist, and who, after taking up residence in Gracie Mansion, proceeded to put the city back together, as if by magic, one broken window at a time. And during all this time Buckley, having been rejected at the polls in 1965, remained at the helm of National Review, playing an important role behind the scenes in both national and municipal affairs - counseling Reagan and cheering on Giuliani.


	These reflections on Buckley and his times were prompted by my discovery of - or, more correctly, introduction to - a quirkily congenial tome entitled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Swords-William-Buckley-American/dp/1710040378">Crossing Swords: William F. Buckley and the American Left </a>by George Shadroui, who was a longtime friend and (as is amply evident from the book) a fervent admirer of Buckley, who died in 2008 at the age of 82. Posted online a few months after Buckley’s death, and published in book form two years ago, it seeks to “revisit the remarkable intellectual high-wire act Buckley sustained over a half century” as well as “to explore seriously the issues that Buckley and his counterparts debated, often lifting polemics into the realm of art.” Despite all the posthumous attention that Buckley has received from biographers and historians, asserts Shadroui, these debates haven’t been subjected to very close study - and they deserve such examination, he maintains, because such exchanges “remind us what political discourse should look like in a nation of informed and literate citizens.”&nbsp;


	Hence this book, which in addition to an explanatory preface and a biographical introduction, contains eight chapters each of which is devoted to one of the big-name leftists who publicly sparred with Buckley on one or more occasions, a ninth chapter giving somewhat shorter shrift to an assortment of other political adversaries of Buckley’s, and an appendix consisting of several Buckley-related essays and reviews by Shadroui. At the heart of each of those first eight chapters is an account of the highlights of Buckley’s debates with the interlocutor in question; but preceding each of these accounts is an informative outline and perceptive analysis of that person’s career and ideology. For readers who might not wish to peruse a full-bore 400-plus-page biography (such as Carl T. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Buckley-William-Rise-American-Conservatism/dp/1596915803/">Bogus’s</a> 2011 Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism) that focuses relentlessly on WFB, Shadroui has given us a highly agreeable alternative: a volume that, while providing generous doses of Buckley at his liveliest -&nbsp; engaged, that is, in lofty disputation in front of an audience - places him throughout in the context of his intellectual era, which was a mostly left-wing era, dominated by liberal and socialist thinkers many of whom were household names. Buckley, too, was for many decades a household name, but during much of his career was arguably the only conservative writer of whom that could be said.


	Here, then, are Dwight Macdonald (1906-82), the capricious critic and Partisan Review editor who was described by Norman Podhoretz as having been “a Trotskyist in the thirties, a pacifist in the forties, nonpolitical in the fifties, and…an anarchist for the sixties”; James Baldwin (1924-87), the black novelist and civil-rights activist who sought, he contended, to forge a middle way between Dr. King and Malcolm X; Michael Harrington (1928-89), the socialist writer whose 1962 book The Other America inspired LBJ’s War on Poverty; Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the bombastic egomaniac who, absurdly, considered himself not only America’s top novelist but also one of its most profound thinkers on race, sex, and politics; Gore Vidal (1925-2012), the toweringly vain writer of novels, essays, plays, and screenplays who was also a fixture at the Kennedy White House (and whose clashes with Buckley on ABC-TV during the 1968 Democratic convention provided the template for decades of televisionary disputation); Noam Chomsky (1928-), the distinguished linguist turned anti-American crank, apologist for Communism, and icon to generations of misinformed college students; Garry Wills (1934-), the Buckley protégé and NR staffer who ended up as a painfully predictably hard-left New York Review of Books regular and the author of scores of tendentious books about American history, Christianity, and literature; and John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006), the much-lauded economist and ornament of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.


	It’s interesting to note that several of these men, although diametrically at odds with Buckley on almost all political issues, were far from being his enemies. Macdonald was a yachting chum. Mailer was a pal. And Galbraith, despite the brickbats they frequently hurled at each other in print, was a man for whom Buckley felt immense affection. These ties of amity can seem baffling, to say the least. Mailer, after all, admired Castro, while Galbraith esteemed Mao - views that, one would expect, could not have filled Buckley with anything other than outrage. How, then, to explain these friendships? It’s simply not enough to say that Buckley was ecumenical in his social relationships, that he was gifted at separating people’s opinions from their personalities, or that, as Shadroui points out, he shared with Macdonald, for example, a disdain for popular culture and bonded with Galbraith over their love of the written word. In the end, it’s hard not to conclude that Buckley, who plainly relished his place of honor in the Manhattan elite, enjoyed his ability to win the affection of at least some of the power brokers of the American left - and did not mind being seen by some, consequently, as a leader of a controlled opposition.


	No, I can’t say I understand Buckley’s tenderheartedness for the likes of Mailer and Galbraith. But I always respected his willingness, on his TV program Firing Line, to debate almost anything with almost anybody. And I appreciated the courage of his unbending anti-Communism. But his widely admired writing style left me cold: I felt he used recondite words and labyrinthine sentences not to achieve greater precision but to cow opponents and, on occasion, to obscure his lack of a coherent argument. I was also, I have to admit, put off by his own brand of highborn Roman Catholicism, which brought to mind the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited at its most pompous and peremptory. Reading the texts of his exchanges with Baldwin, moreover, I’m reminded - as someone who spent much of his 1960s childhood in the small-town American South - that Buckley’s profoundly misbegotten picture of what was going on at the time below the Mason-Dixon line was based entirely on what he was told by white segregationists. He famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 people listed in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty; what emerges clearly from Crossing Swords is that he would rather have supped, skied, or gone sailing with pretty much any prominent Harvard prof than with any of those unsung Bostonians, to say nothing of the Southern blacks about whose lives he ignorantly pontificated.


	I began this article with my boyhood glimpse of Buckley on Election Day 1965. It was not until early one morning 29 years later that I came anywhere near that close to him again. In Washington, D.C., on a book tour in 1994, I had spent the night (chastely) as a guest of Marvin Liebman (1923-97), a veteran conservative activist and deeply loyal Buckley protégé who’d come out as gay in his book Coming Out Conservative (1992) and who, after begging Buckley in a letter to soften his position on gay rights, had received a reply, printed in NR, that was at once a condescending kick in the teeth and a textbook example of the way in which Buckley could use complex, convoluted verbiage to disguise his lack of a reasonable argument. In Liebman’s shoes I’d have said sayonara after that, but Liebman loved Buckley too much - indeed, it’s hardly an overstatement to say that he worshiped him - and they remained friends. On that morning in Washington, I was drinking coffee with Marvin, half-awake, when the phone rang - twice. The first call was from a ridiculous queer activist, then at the height of his fifteen minutes of fame, who went by the name Luke Sissyfag, and whom Marvin chatted with for a few minutes; the second was from Buckley. As Marvin sat on the line with him for (I would guess) close to a half hour, I could hear that familiar orotund voice at the other end, discoursing avidly and energetically, despite the early hour, about the political preoccupations of the moment. At the time, I couldn’t entirely make sense of Marvin’s adoration. But after reading Shadroui’s savvy, sensitive book, which, while not slighting Buckley at his weakest, time and again foregrounds Buckley at his feisty, eloquent best, I can fairly say that I’ve come a good deal closer to getting it.

Celebrating William F. Buckley

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On the evening of November 2, 1965, two days after my ninth birthday, my parents

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of many books.


	Of all the far-left radicals in our time who’ve smoothly parlayed revolutionary rhetoric into comfy establishment sinecures, Urvashi Vaid, who died on May 14 at age 63, was one of the smoothest. A daughter of privilege - her father was a writer and professor, her mother a poet and painter - she attended Vassar and Northeastern Law before diving headfirst into the world of progressive activism, first working for the ACLU’s National Prison Project and then, in the 1980s, landing powerful positions - first as Public Information Director, then as Executive Director - at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, at the time America’s most influential gay-rights group.


	In those days the gay-rights movement, as led from above by Vaid and likeminded leftist souls, might just as well have been run directly from Moscow. In Vaid’s New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/urvashi-vaid-dead.html">obituary</a>, Clay Risen puts it this way: “Ms. Vaid was at the center of a wide array of progressive issues…insisting that freedom for gay men and lesbians required fighting for gender, racial and economic equality as well,” her overarching and unapologetic goal being not to win acceptance for gays but to “build…a progressive movement.” In other words, well-off gay guys who donated money to the NGLTF thinking they were fighting antigay bigotry were actually funding a range of far-left causes that were, more likely than not, utterly at odds with their own interests.


	Recognizing that Vaid’s shrill rants against capitalism, Christianity, and the patriarchy only served to reinforce the public perception of gay people as social misfits and political extremists, a number of gay writers (among them myself, Jonathan Rauch, Walter Olsen, Andrew Sullivan, and the late Paul Varnell) threw ourselves into the fray, getting out the message, in countless articles as well as in such books as my own A Place at the Table (1993), that most gay Americans weren’t really all that different, in most ways, from most straight Americans.


	Since most of us happened to be white males, the first response to our arguments by Vaid and her fellow self-styled “queers” was to smear us as a bunch of straight-acting, politically reactionary white boys - gay Uncle Toms, as it were - who hated sissy types, people of color, you name it. But over the course of the 1990s, as gays came out of the closet in record numbers, our basic message was confirmed: the issues that resonated most with gay America were precisely those that we supported and that Vaid and her ilk reviled as “assimilationist” - namely, same-sex marriage and the right to serve openly in the military.


	In an effort to reverse the anti-leftist winds of change, Vaid wrote a book, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995), in which, ceasing for the moment to malign non-lefty gays, she tried to sell them - us - on her “liberationist” line. In my <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/05/books/radically-different.html">review</a> of Virtual Equality for the New York Times (yes, back then the Times would actually invite somebody like me to review a book like hers), I noted that, in some passages, Vaid told us non-lefty gays exactly what we wanted to hear - for instance, that the gay-rights movement “should seek to educate straight people instead of ignoring or demonizing them.” Yet on the whole, I added, Virtual Equality was “vintage Urvashi Vaid, proffering a vision of a ‘common, progressive movement’ for social, economic and political revolution led by gay people, who, in her view (though not, it seems to me, in the view of most gay people themselves), embody a radical differentness that makes them the natural vanguard for revolution.”&nbsp;


	Alas for Vaid, although Virtual Equality received glowing reviews from her cronies on the left, sales were pitiful: precious few gay readers were interested in a stultifying 400-page-long chunk of agitprop about the need for mass liberation from the white overclass. Yet Vaid was nobody’s fool. If she approached gay politics with a stubborn Marxist utopianism, she was eminently pragmatic when it came to running her own career. Failing to connect with the rapidly emerging gay mainstream, she made a point of bonding with Bill Clinton, staying tight with him (her purported principles to the contrary) even after he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, reneged on his promise to lift the gay military ban, and was credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults.


	And in the succeeding years, even as she continued to preach radical liberation, Vaid led a highly successful life as a jewel of the left-wing cultural elite, cruising through a series of big-ticket jobs at the Ford Foundation, the Arcus Foundation, and the Gill Foundation, founding a lesbian PAC, starting her own consulting group, sitting on various boards (including that of Planned Parenthood), writing another book (Irresistible Revolution, 2012), hanging with Tony Kushner, Rachel Maddow, and Hannah Gadsby, and living in Manhattan and Provincetown with her partner, the “political humorist” (i.e., unfunny stand-up comic) Kate Clinton.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	In a manifest attempt to sidestep the fact that Vaid wasn’t a reformer but a full-throated fount of revolutionary rhetoric, several of her obituaries have proffered a grotesque amount of revisionism. Just one example: at the website of the Boston public-radio station WGBH, the <a href="https://www.wgbh.org/news/national-news/2022/05/19/remembering-urvashi-vaid-the-lgbtq-activist-who-spent-decades-fighting-for-equality">headline</a> called her “the LGBTQ activist who spent decades fighting for equality,” and the article itself quoted another activist as saying that Vaid “wanted full justice and equality for all people.” No. No. No. First of all, during the period when she was primarily an out-loud-and-proud activist, there was no such thing as “LGBTQ” - a term that several obits have retrofitted onto her career. But far more important, Vaid was no more about justice or equality than Mao or Lenin. She wanted to use gays to spearhead a socialist rebellion -&nbsp; period.


	Well, there was no socialist rebellion. In the short term, then, she failed. But in the long term? Well, the sobering fact is that if we hadn’t had people like her in key institutional positions a quarter-century ago, preaching political revolt, social upheaval, and cultural transformation as a day-to-day way of life and quietly furthering the careers of those who shared her convictions, we wouldn’t have, in the year 2022, an America whose fundamental liberties are being shredded and whose kids are being perniciously and permanently damaged by such toxic dogmas as transgender ideology and Critical Race Theory.


	So for the time being, at least, it looks as if Urvashi Vaid won after all. And for those of us who care about the future of a free and strong America, nothing matters more than doing everything we can to undo her victory.

Provincetown Progressive

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of many books.


	Of all the far-left radicals in our time who’ve

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	October 1974 was the month I turned 18. It was also the date on the issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction containing Philip K. Dick’s unforgettable short story “The Pre-Persons.” An avid subscriber to F&amp;SF, I’d spent much of my teens devouring science fiction, including such classics as Arthur C.Clarke’s “The Star,” and the moment I finished reading “The Pre-Persons” I knew that this powerful story, with its deeply disturbing message, would also would become a classic.&nbsp;


	In 1973, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Roe v. Wade, that women possessed a fundamental right to an abortion. During the preceding years, many states had rolled back restrictions on the procedure, giving America some of the most liberal laws in the world in regard to the termination of pregnancy. In the wake of Roe v. Wade, which took things to a new level, “The Pre-Persons” imagined an America of the not-so-distant future in which, the Supreme Court’s logic having been taken just a bit further, children under twelve are considered “pre-persons” and can therefore, upon their parents’ request, be picked up by the “abortion truck” and euthanized.


	At the beginning of the story, a twelve-year-old boy named Walter sees the “abortion truck” in his neighborhood and freaks out - only to be mocked by his mother, Cynthia, who reminds him that he’s too old to be aborted. Later, we learn that she longs to get pregnant so that she can get an abortion. "Wouldn't that be neat?” she asks her husband, Ian. “Doesn't that turn you on?...it's the in thing now, to have an abortion." Suddenly, Ian realizes what he’s married to. And when Walter comes to him for the comfort he didn’t get from Cynthia, Ian explains to him: “It's a certain kind of woman advocating this all. They used to call them 'castrating females.' Maybe that was once the right term, except that these women, these hard cold women, didn't just want to - well, they want to do in the whole boy or man, make all of them dead, not just the part that makes him a man. Do you see?"


	At the time I read the story, I was pro-life. During his years as a hospital physician, my father had been obliged to perform abortions involving deformed fetuses and mothers at risk, but he hated abortion, and when I was young he described the procedure to me in all its graphic horror to ensure that I wouldn’t have any pretty liberal illusions about it. At the time I read “The Pre-Persons” I’d just started college, and not long afterwards, at a dormitory meeting that drew about a hundred students, the topic of abortion came up. When somebody asked for opponents of abortion to identify themselves, mine was the only hand to go up.


	In the ensuing decade or so, I developed close friendships with several women and was surprised to learn that every last one of them had her own abortion story. They told me the details, which were uniformly harrowing. For each of these women, having an abortion had been an unforgettable trauma. I couldn’t blame any of them for the decisions they’d made. For a while, then, I was pro-choice. At the time, the pro-choice line was that abortion is always a solution of last resort that takes a devastating psychological toll on a woman. Bill Clinton, every woman’s friend, famously said in 1992 that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” For a long time, pro-choice advocates parroted him religiously.


	But some more years went by, and the stigma of abortion disappeared almost entirely. I saw women having serial abortions, taking them very lightly indeed, and using them as birth control. Abortions began to be described routinely as “health care” - a reprehensible whitewash. Again, my views shifted. And as even more years went by, pro-choice rhetoric - already a patchwork of euphemism and equivocation, not to mention an utter denial of basic biology - moved ever further from reality and responsibility. The very term “pro-choice,” of course, is a dodge; a few days ago, amusingly, the House Pro-Choice Caucus made headlines (and won jeers) by suggesting that it’s time to retire the word “choice” - not because it’s a dodge, but because it’s not enough of a dodge. (As Planned Parenthood explained, some women just don’t have a choice.)


	As for “safe, legal, and rare,” it disappeared some time ago into the mists of history. To say that abortion should be rare, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/the-brilliance-of-safe-legal-and-rare/603151/">noted</a> Atlantic staffer Caitlin Flanagan in a 2019 article, implies that there’s something wrong with it - and these days the mere suggestion that there’s anything at all wrong with abortion is deeply offensive to, well, a certain kind of woman. “Today’s young feminists,” wrote Flanagan, “are determined to rid abortion of any lingering stigma, including the stigmatizing notion that it should be rare. They share their stories publicly and take part in a culture in which abortion is recognized and celebrated in stand-up comedy, television shows, movies.”&nbsp;


	Case in point: actress Lena Dunham, star of the HBO series Girls, who was asked on a 2016 podcast to recount “her own abortion story.” She didn’t have one, poor thing. And she later <a href="https://time.com/4608364/lena-dunham-wish-abortion-comments/">explained</a> that when the question came up, she perceived that she “was carrying within myself stigma around this issue….I had internalized some of what society was throwing at us….Now I can say that I still haven’t had an abortion, but I wish I had.” In the same year, comedienne Natasha Leggero, who’d recently converted from Catholicism to Judaism, told Conan O’Brien in an interview that one of the pluses of being a Jew is that “abortions are cool.” She added: “I’m not saying I’m going to get an abortion, but it’s like AAA [The American Automobile Association]. You’re not going to use all those tows, but no, it’s just nice to know.”


	The dictionary tells us that a woman is “an adult female person” and that a female, in turn, is “an individual that bears young.” Most women used to embrace their natural biological role. Whatever else a woman might do with her life, being a mother - for those who chose to become mothers - was viewed as the very essence of womanhood. It was the one thing women could do that men couldn’t. (This was before the era of “birthing persons.”) Even women who believed in a right to abortion under certain circumstances didn’t try to sidestep the fact that it amounted to the killing of a baby - an act that, they knew very well, should never be trivialized. Today’s woke mentality is utterly different. Woke women identify womanhood less with giving birth than with its exact opposite - with the absolute, inalienable right to have a baby vacuumed out of your womb, on command, at any point whatsoever during a pregnancy. The pride in one’s ability to bear a child has been widely replaced by a pride in one’s ability to kill it.&nbsp;


	When it comes to the nuts and bolts details of abortion - the inconvenient truths, as it were -&nbsp; woke women manage to embrace the most extraordinary fictions. Feminist columnist Katha Pollitt doesn’t just deny that a fetus being killed is a human being; she considers such a contention intolerably offensive: “fetal personhood,” she <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/abortion-csection-birth/">says</a>, “is maternal punishment.” (True enough, I guess, if a woman has pangs of conscience over having murdered her child.) Ethics professor Rebecca Gordon (who <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-rebecca-gordon-abortion-unselfish/">says</a> that “choosing not to bring another resource-devouring, fossil-fuel-burning, carbon-dioxide-emitting American into the world might actually have been the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done”) dismisses “fetal heartbeat” - a thoroughly real phenomenon - as a term disingenuously applied by fanatical pro-lifers to “the throbbing of a millimeters-long collection of cells.” (Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud of Gordon’s abortion is that she’d obviously have been a horrible mother.)&nbsp;&nbsp;


	A recent Facebook comment by a doctor named Rochelle Pudlowski Eissenstat provides an interesting contrast to the likes of Pollitt and Gordon. Eissenstat recalls that when she was a medical student she assisted at abortions. “Do you know what it feels like,” she asks, “to examine the little fragments of recognizable though tiny human beings[?] Hmmm, I see one femur here; but where’s the other one? These were first trimester abortions only back then. We had to make sure that no remnant was left in the uterus! AH, here’s the other part of the head! This was absolutely nightmarish.” In response, another woman on that Facebook threat told Eissenstat to “[s]top peddling this nonsense.” Alas, “deny, deny, deny” is the pro-choice mantra: if pro-choicers didn’t reflexively dismiss as “nonsense” the gruesome, candid testimony of people like Eissenstat, they probably wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.


	Back in the days when more people went to church and took its rituals seriously, the baptism of one’s newborn child was a special moment. For many woke women today, the sacred aura that once surrounded baptism envelops abortion, and preserving one’s absolute right to an abortion - at any time, in any place - is as important, as precious, as having access to the sacraments is for a devout Christian. People used to tell anxious expectant mothers that having a baby was “the most natural thing in the world”; now, in the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/authors/shout-your-abortion/">words</a> of the “Shout Your Abortion” network, posted recently at the Nation website, “Abortion is normal. Our stories are ours to tell. This is not a debate.” (No, none of the left’s pet prevarications - whether about racism, say, or about gender identity - is ever up for debate, because if you confront these fantasies with facts, instead of assenting to them meekly, they’ll evaporate.)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Before Roe v. Wade, even states that permitted abortion restricted it after the second trimester. Ever since Roe v. Wade, it’s been a fundamental tenet of American leftist orthodoxy that perfect justice would require nothing short of universal, unlimited abortion rights on demand. By this logic, every restriction placed on abortion - however minimal by historical or international standards, and however reasonable and just when the fetus’s natural rights are taken into account - is perceived as sheer evil. What pro-choicers rarely acknowledge is that American abortion laws are, on average, considerably more liberal than those almost everywhere else on earth - a fact that won’t change appreciably after the Supreme Court decision takes effect.


	Leftists love to compare America unfavorably with Europe. But In most of Europe, abortion is legal on request only during the first trimester. In Britain, it’s only permitted if necessary to save the mother’s life, prevent injury to her - or her children’s - health, or prevent the birth of a child with serious birth defects. (On May 10, the U.S.-based Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/10/overturning-roe-v-wade-will-destroy-our-civil-rights-so-dont-ask-us-to-be-civil">ranted</a> that American women’s civil rights were being wiped out - even though abortion laws in the U.S. will still be far more liberal than those in the U.K.) Seventeen European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, require waiting periods for women seeking abortions; in those three countries and several others, such women must undergo counseling. And in Andorra, Malta, and San Marino, abortion is illegal, period.


	By contrast, in 19 U.S. states abortion is permitted up to the point of viability, while in Oregon, Vermont, New Jersey, Colorado, New Mexico, and Alaska, an abortion may be performed right up to the moment when a baby is about to be born. (The only European countries with comparable laws are Sweden and the Netherlands.) It’s been pointed out that some of these American laws would presumably allow a doctor to deliver a live baby and then let it die. Recall Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s enthusiastic promotion of a 2019 bill that would’ve permitted just that: “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”


	Why all the rage, then, over the incipient and effectively all but meaningless overturning of Roe v. Wade? Because that Supreme Court decision has become a symbolic landmark in the history of the women’s rights movement, and a litmus test for leftism. Since half a century of euphemism and evasion has obscured the harsh reality of baby-killing, the issue can sometimes seem to have nothing at all to do with speculums and dilators and suction machines; like many other first-order left-wing dogmas - for example, the claims that whites are all oppressive racists and that a man becomes woman the moment he says he’s one - the sanctity of abortion rights seems oddly abstract, untethered from everyday reality. Which explains, I guess, how “reproductive justice advocate” Renee Bracey Sherman can <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-rebecca-gordon-abortion-unselfish/">say</a> with a straight face that a “commitment to women’s abortion rights” is “profoundly life affirming.” Could anything be further from the truth, or from simple morality?

Abortion and Wokeness

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	October 1974 was the month I turned 18. It was also the date on the issue of The

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but every now and then we’re reminded that that wretched left-wing propaganda sheet, the New York Times, is still capable of publishing objective works of investigative journalism. Witness its bombshell May 7 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/world/americas/un-loan-project-services.html">report</a> on corruption at the United Nations. Yes, the reporters bylined on the story are David A. Fahrenthold, who won a Pulitzer for smearing Donald Trump,&nbsp; and Farnaz Fassihi, who’s been accused of shilling for Iran. But this time around their work looks legit.


	Over the decades, of course, there’s been a lot of shameless, bald-faced corruption at the U.N. But the story served up by Fahrenthold and Fassihi is particularly ludicrous. It involves an obscure U.N. agency called the Office for Project Services (UNOPS), which, until May 8, was headed by Grete Faremo, formerly Norway’s Minister of Defense. The agency, as the Times reporters noted, serves as “a kind of general contractor,” hired by other U.N. agencies “to build schools and roads, deliver medical equipment or perform other logistical tasks.”


	In short, UNOPS is low-profile and unsexy. But Faremo, after taking over in 2014, sought to change that. UNOPS “had stockpiled tens of millions of dollars in excess fees paid to it by other U.N. agencies,” and Faremo’s idea was “to lend out the money, like a bank, to fund profit-making projects in the developing world,” thereby converting UNOPS into “a revolutionary in-house investment firm.”


	But how to find people to lend money to? Any responsibly run foundation would solicit applications and put together a committee of experienced advisors to select deserving applicants. Faremo’s answer was to throw a cocktail party - where she met British businessman David Kendrick and his daughter Daisy.


	First Faremo awarded a $3 million grant to Daisy, a recent college graduate whose nonprofit hadn’t been registered with the IRS and listed people as directors without their knowledge. In exchange for the $3 million from UNOPS she “produced events, a website, ocean-themed games…and a pop song about the ocean that was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OBsagVe268&amp;ab_channel=JossStoneVEVO">recorded</a> by the British singer Joss Stone.” Stone performed this ditty for free because she’d been told she was helping raise money for the U.N.


	Jonas Svensson, who left UNOPS after realizing it was a hotbed of “[a]mbition and stupidity,” told the Times that during all this activity “his bosses were focused on arranging a performance of the song by Ms. Faremo,” which ended up taking place during a 2017 environmental conference. Yes, long before you heard Biden’s disinformation czar, Nina Jankowitz, sing her own version of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” the head of UNOPS was belting one out in the General Assembly chamber. To wit:


	Can't you hear the ocean crying


	Calling out to be revived?...


	Just a drop of rain, that's all I am


	And we're all the same


	We have the power to make a wave


	If we move together as one…


	We are the ocean


	We are the ocean


	We are the ocean


	In addition to the $3 million handout to Daisy Kendrick, Faremo loaned $22 million to several firms that were controlled, directly or indirectly, by Daisy’s dad. The money was supposedly intended to go to construction projects, but in the end nothing was built, and the firms used much of the UNOPS cash to pay off debts.


	Immediately after the Times article was posted online, Faremo resigned. Apparently there’s already been an internal investigation into this matter, but, given the lack of transparency at the U.N., it’s unclear whether the results will ever be made public.


	At the Times website, the reader comments on all these hijinks divide into two categories. Some are by self-deluding lefties who insist on seeing the U.N. as idealistic and incorruptible. Others are by people who know better. A veteran of UNHCR and UNICEF operations around the world recalls that “incompetence and dithering were the order of the day.” A former UN intern states that “the experience left me very disgruntled. My boss, a high ranking official, often did not show up to work and when he did, did not complete his responsibilities….It was a running joke that the unpaid interns were the hardest working people in the office.” Another reader opines that the UN should “cease to exist,” since it’s “no more than a source of well-paying jobs for incompetents, charlatans, work-averse socialites, con artists and white-collar criminals.”&nbsp;


	In Norway, it was widely noted that Faremo is only the latest of several Norwegians-turned-U.N.-luminaries who ended in disgrace. In 2018, Erik Solheim quit his post as head of the United Nations Environmental Programme amid questions about his nepotism, grotesquely high travel expenses, and eager promotion of Chinese development projects. Two years ago, Terje Rød-Larsen resigned from the presidency of the U.N.-linked International Peace Institute when it emerged that he’d borrowed a large sum from Jeffrey Epstein and then tried to pay it back with IPI funds.


	U.N. corruption is an old, old story, and prominent Norwegians have made a sad joke of their country’s relentless promotion of U.N. worship. And yet that promotion continues non-stop. Every October 24 - United Nations Day - Norwegian schoolchildren are put through North Korea-like celebrations of the saintly souls at the U.N. They hold parades in which they wave U.N. flags. They’re shown short films claiming that the U.N. is the only thing standing between them and war, oppression, poverty, and climate crisis.


	As I wrote ten years ago in a piece about the first-rate documentary exposé UN Me, the U.N.’s real priorities are clear: it exists to “perpetuat[e] its own existence,” to “enhanc[e] its own image,” to “squelch the truth about its fecklessness, incompetence, and absolute lack of a moral compass,” and (last but not least) to “provid[e] hack politicians from around the world with yet another career steppingstone, once they’ve risen to the top of the ladder in their own crummy little countries and finished emptying their own citizens’ pockets.”


	Well, that final item on the list certainly sums up the U.N. career of Grete Faremo - who, after lying low for a few months, will, I’m all but certain, re-emerge as the head of some EU body or NGO. In the same way, can anyone doubt that another U.N. scandal isn’t that far down the pike? The lessons of all this being that (a) you can’t keep a corrupt, power-hungry European politician down and (b) the U.N., no matter how much it’s been proven, especially during the current war in Ukraine, to be a Ship of Fools - a luxury yacht for mediocre international elites rather than a lifeboat for the world’s poor - will somehow manage to stay afloat.

Another Year, Another U.N. Scandal

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but every now and then we’re reminded that

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It began on Easter weekend. In <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2022/04/18/dozens-arrested-after-days-of-far-right-clashes-across-sweden?fbclid=IwAR1PT6ESRhwzNdgIMApfuK5WTUUm70lcoRwuFz6FHK-NeSVzM6GvIiUH0J8">response</a> to a rally in Örebro, Sweden, by Stram Kurs, a Danish party that opposes Islamic immigration and whose members threatened to burn copies of the Koran, mass violence broke out in Stockholm and several other Swedish cities, with scores of Muslims - mostly young men, both also women and children - throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at cops and setting cars, buses, dumpsters, and buildings on fire. Injuries resulting from these disturbances - widely dubbed the “Koran riots” - were in the mid two figures, with police officers the hardest hit. Further Stram Kurs events had been planned, but the party’s appropriately named leader, Rasmus Paludan, paladin of Denmark’s anti-Islamization movement, canceled them on the grounds that Swedish police had shown themselves to be “completely incapable of protecting themselves and me.” By the end of the month Swedish police had <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/04/28/paludan-far-ikke-holde-nye-markeringer-i-sverige/?fbclid=IwAR0WMmIT6Fmw0E2fZ2OAbbP91HvqMD3evOOx87bCFU8bYdLElsPCUkK4SF0">forbidden</a> any further public gatherings by Stram Kurs.


	Of course, the tumult didn’t spring from out of nowhere. Among young Muslims in Sweden, car-burning is old hat. But the scale of these events was new - and, to Swedes who still have their heads in the sand about this issue, alarming. Still, for many observers in Scandinavia, the real affront wasn’t the physical brutality but the very notion of harming a Koran. Hanan Abdelrahman, a college teacher in Norway, wrote a teary <a href="https://vartoslo.no/hanan-abdelrahman-islam-islamofobi/til-deg-som-brenner-koranen-det-som-er-i-hjertet-mitt-kan-du-ikke-ta-ifra-meg/371653?fbclid=IwAR3IAtWymKb8td7oUfNWLVimHzbPnK0EHayhPJ6qJPqtRICjSuLW7yMHYkQ">op-ed</a> on the topic in which she asserted that Paludan and his ilk made her “feel a bit scared and unsafe.” She asked: “How many camels is one really supposed to swallow? To what degree and for how long should a group of people have to tolerate feeling unsafe and unwanted?” Yes, the danger to human safety that weekend wasn’t the savagery that sent people to the hospital - it was a peaceful rally. Abdelrahman charged that if Paludan and his friends had been “braver” and “smarter,” they’d have invited somebody like her to engage in a discussion of their differing views. A pretty weird proposal, given that if she’d actually read her beloved Koran, Abdelrahman would know that it tells her not to consort with infidels but to kill them - especially if they seek to talk her out of her beliefs.


	In another <a href="https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikk/i/9K4yJ5/opptoeyene-i-sverige-har-synliggjort-det-antimuslimske-samfunn?fbclid=IwAR1iOQ-p-u4ozydEGIAzz9mSW7jJ8XimpRgV37ZaRUbnK9KV2uS73Xg_5bQ">op-ed</a>, Bilan Osman, who apparently makes a career of giving lectures about “Islamophobia” all over Sweden, sounded an alarm about how “anti-Muslims attitudes have gained ground” in that country. Views that were once marginal, he warned, are now mainstream; the curtain has been pulled back on “our anti-Muslim society,” where “even people close to me expres[s] the most disgusting ideas about Muslims.” Such as? Such as the absurd assertion that they’re “a threat to the West,” that “they want to bring down liberal democracy,” that “Islam is fundamentally misogynistic, hostile to gays, and anti-Semitic,” that it’s “hostile to everyone who isn’t a Muslim,” and that Muslims seek “to ‘Islamize’ the Western world.” As someone who’s just spent a lot of time absorbed in Robert Spencer’s monumental new <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/robert-spencers-koran-bruce-bawer/">edition</a> of the Koran, I’d call this a top-notch summary of the Koran’s main points. But Osman insisted that these are lies that must be resisted. “It can’t keep going on like this,” he contended. “How did we end up here? When did Sweden become so radicalized that flagrant, ideologically motivated Muslim-hate has been a totally ordinary point of view?” Interestingly put. What’s “radical” to Osman aren’t the murderous canons of Islam but the reaction thereto by civilized Westerners. As for “Muslim-hate”: yes, many people in Sweden are indeed hostile (not necessarily to Muslims, but to Islam), and that hostility is indeed motivated by an ideology - namely, the ideology that’s spelled out in the Koran and that, quite understandably, strikes fear into their hearts.&nbsp;

<blockquote>
	
		Another person who <a href="https://www.gp.se/debatt/vi-m%C3%A5ste-b%C3%B6rja-prata-om-att-riva-upp-medborgarskap-f%C3%B6r-v%C3%A5ldsverkare-1.71034086">wrote</a> an op-ed in the wake of the Easter-weekend fracas was Richard Jomshof of the Sweden Democrats, the party that for a long time was a marginalized voice of truth about Islam, and that has steadily gained power over the years. Observing that “Sweden has literally been on fire” and that the kind of conduct displayed by the Muslim rioters was not Swedish by nature but rooted in another culture, Jomshof submitted that it was high time that responsible Swedes began to talk about stripping such people - and their families - of their citizenship, taking them off the welfare rolls, and expelling them from the country. They’re creating havoc, after all, not just in the lives of native Swedes but in the lives of other immigrants who also have backgrounds in the Muslim world - but who came to Sweden not to be warriors for Islam but to escape its tyranny.
</blockquote>


	Jomshof’s proposition was sheer common sense - and, consequently, had Swedish elites sputtering with outrage. Needless to say, what they should've been outraged over was the rampage itself, which had taken the expression of Swedish Muslim hubris to a new level and portended even greater aggression in the not-too-distant future. But for the Swedish establishment, to speak of denying Muslims anything at all, for any reason whatsoever, is tantamount to tossing a crying infant into the street and letting it starve.


	The weekend after Easter, it was Norway’s turn. The scenario was strikingly similar. In the central square of the city of Sandefjord (pop. 45,000), members of the group Stop the Islamization of Norway (SIAN) threatened to burn a Koran. Muslims - including women and children - rioted. And in response, Progress Party leader Sylvi Listhaug <a href="https://www.facebook.com/listhaugfrp/posts/546803020134450">echoed</a> Jomshof’s suggestion that such troublemakers be sent back to where they came from. Listhaug noted that a not inconsiderable percentage of Muslims in Norway - around seven percent - are willing to admit to pollsters their belief that “blasphemy should be punished with death,” in Europe as well as in the Muslim world. “If you don’t appreciate the hospitality of the Norwegian society and respect our values,” wrote Listhaug on her Facebook page, “it’s just a matter of moving back to your Muslim land of origin. I those countries, freedom of speech and of belief are foreign words, and the death penalty for blasphemy is widespread.”


	“My city is destroyed. My country is in danger,” a tearful Sandefjord septuagenarian told Helge Lurås of the Resett website as they both coughed up tear gas. Lurås, who’d reported on earlier displays of rage by Norwegian Muslims, <a href="https://resett.no/2022/04/23/innvandreropptoyer-i-sandefjord-byen-min-er-odelagt-landet-mitt-er-i-fare/?fbclid=IwAR2nukHb-ZQ-I4dh3Gqa2FI2IvGRg7HW2ZoiZAUc8FFmVFMvcRsEcxKDwAQ">declared</a> that this latest dustup in Sandefjord - at which participants shouted “Allahu akbar” while throwing rocks, shoes, and eggs at gas-masked cops with ballistic shields - outdid them all. This time around, moreover, the most aggressive participants weren’t the gang-aged youths but older men, ranging in age from their mid-thirties to their mid-fifties, some of whom had brought along small children whom they encouraged to imitate their barbarity. “Also present,” added Lurås,

<blockquote>
	
		were a dozen ethnic Norwegians from the Red [Communist] Party…But in fact you could see in their eyes that they felt uneasy standing together with the aggressive Muslims. For they were aggressive. There was no dignity at all, no attempt to stand still and turn their backs [on the members of SIAN]...And they had no respect for the police.
</blockquote>


	Then again, as is usual in Norway, the cops behaved in such a way - offering repeated assurances, for example, that they disagreed with SIAN - as to guarantee that they’d never earn the Muslims’ respect. Perhaps, Lurås proposed, it was time for Norwegian police to start acting like police. As for SIAN, Lurås noted that he himself doesn’t share their views, although the conduct of the Muslims in Sandefjord confirmed absolutely every ugly thing that the speakers from SIAN said about them.


	This past Sunday, May Day, without forewarning, and in defiance of a police order, Paludan <a href="https://www.document.no/2022/05/01/rasmus-paludan-brente-koranen-i-stockholm/?fbclid=IwAR2r-slC8vEG61QOtw0qS4bcES0yLcaXvXvnsVML532bEPUGei_X_8Mmiq8">burned</a> a Koran on a small square in Stockholm. He did it without hoopla, and with no crowd of supporters present. Before doing so, he made a statement in which he drew a distinction between his own action and Nazi-style book-burning: far from wanting to see all copies of the Koran destroyed, he emphasized, he wants everyone in Sweden to read it and discover for themselves how evil it is. Later in the day, planning to burn a Koran outside a mosque in Uppsala, he was<a href="https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/tumult-vid-mosken-i-uppsala/"> forced</a> to flee when a mob of Muslims chased him back to his car, where some of them climbed on it and tried to break his windshield and had to be dealt with by police with batons.


	In Sweden and Norway, and for that matter pretty much everywhere else in the West, fewer and fewer ordinary citizens find themselves able to keep telling themselves comforting lies about the Religion of Peace. Yet the left’s leading lights keep selling those lies. The other day, an <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2022/04/rasmus-paludan-protest-riot-muslim-neighborhoods-stram-kurs">article</a> entitled “No, Burning Qurans in the Street Isn’t ‘Part of Our Democracy’” by one Ryan Switzer - identified as a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Stockholm University - appeared at the socialist website Jacobin. In the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Jotam Confino, a journalist for Denmark’s TV2, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium.HIGHLIGHT-far-right-provocateur-rasmus-paludan-burning-koran-setting-sweden-on-fire-denmark-1.10766679">deplored</a> the fact that Scandinavia’s “liberal values” were under assault and that it had just experienced violent riots - but in his view those values had been attacked, and those riots caused by, none other than Paludan. And the Norwegian newspaper Bergensavisen ran an opinion <a href="https://www.ba.no/nar-ytringsfriheten-blir-redskap-for-fascismen/o/5-8-1888376">piece</a> headlined “When Freedom of Speech Becomes a Tool of Fascism” - the point being that Paludan, not Islam, is fascist. All of which served as a handy reminder that we’re not just up against Islam, but up against a left-wing establishment whose members are perversely committed to defending our most monstrous enemies and destroying our most valiant heroes.

They Call Them the 'Koran Riots'

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	It began on Easter weekend. In response to a rally in Örebro, Sweden, by Stram

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
	 
	Robert Spencer's The Critical Qur’an is coming out May 3. It has zoomed to the <a href="https://robertspencer.org/2022/04/the-critical-quran-zooms-to-the-top-1-bestselling-quran-in-the-u-s">top: #1 bestselling Qur’an in the U.S.</a> Pre-order: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Quran-Commentaries-Contemporary-Historical/dp/1642939498/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21I2VAWW3EJKA&amp;dchild=1&amp;keywords=the+critical+quran&amp;qid=1624648703&amp;sprefix=the+critical+qu%2Caps%2C283&amp;sr=8-1">HERE</a>.


	The fate of the Western world has been bound up with Islam ever since that religion was founded - but its impact has been especially dire during the last few decades of mass immigration and large-scale terrorism. It’s obviously important, then, for people in the West to know as much as possible about Islamic values and beliefs. But where to find the facts, and how to know that they really are the facts? The Islamic Studies departments of universities, which are staffed almost entirely with devout believers and other apologists, won’t give you the real dope. Neither will most online resources or the overwhelming majority of the books on the subject issued by the large corporate publishers. One might assume that the solution lies in reading the&nbsp;Qur’an - but the English-language editions aimed primarily at non-Muslim readers are notoriously unreliable: the most problematic passages are routinely translated in such a way as to minimize the problems, and the editors, in their introductions, footnotes, and other apparatus, systematically put the most benign interpretations on everything.


	Which is why the brilliant, prolific Robert Spencer’s newest <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Quran-Commentaries-Contemporary-Historical/dp/1642939498/">book,</a> The Critical Qu’ran: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research, is so immensely valuable. As Spencer himself writes in his introduction: “The Critical Qur’an is designed to equip the English-speaking reader with a knowledge of the Qur’an and how it is interpreted in Islam, and to see how mainstream Islamic commentators understand the text, particularly its passages that are most problematic for non-Muslim readers: the exhortations to jihad warfare, the Sharia provisions that call for the denial of various rights to women, and the like. In numerous other editions of the Qur’an, these are obscured with apologetic intent. Here, they are explained in full.”


	Indeed they are - and hurrah for that. About time! Spencer, the single most nearly indispensable student of Islam in our time, provides an introduction to each of the&nbsp;Qur’an's 114 suras (chapters), explaining its title, clarifying its theological significance, expounding upon its role in Islamic tradition, and discussing any textual issues. He also states whether it is one of the earlier suras, purportedly revealed to Muhammed when he lived in Mecca (the limited number of suras that sound relatively benign date to this period), or one of the later (and not at all benign) suras, which were supposedly revealed during Muhammed’s later years in Medina, and which are viewed by Muslim believers as “abrogating,” or superseding, the gentler Meccan ones.


	In addition, Spencer provides a dizzying array of footnotes, some of them veritable essays on key topics in Islam. In them he points out any Biblical borrowings, influences, or parallels (“This passage is loosely based on Genesis 2:19”) and any contradictions between the footnoted verse and other passages of the Qur’an: “The identification of Iblis as an angel here contradicts 18:50, which states that Iblis is a jinn”; “Allah here creates the universe in eight days, but at 7:54, 10:3, 11:7, 25:59, 32:4, and 50:38, he does it in six days.” (For any believing Muslim, it is impossible to acknowledge that the&nbsp;Qur’an contains any internal contradictions at all.) Spencer draws reader attention to&nbsp;Qur’anic statements of objective physical reality - for instance, about the sky and stars (“the sky would fall upon the earth were it not for the fact that Allah holds it up”) and the male and female reproductive systems - that are wildly at odds with actual cosmological and biological fact, and that are thus, for Muslims, causes for concern as well as sources of embarrassment, given the unassailable claim, to which all Muslims are obliged to subscribe, that the&nbsp;Qur’an was dictated to Muhammed directly by Allah and is thus entirely without error.


	Spencer’s annotations also draw the reader’s attention to passages that have played a significant role in shaping Muslim views on various topics. The sentences beginning at verse 4:34, for instance, have influenced Islamic attitudes toward women in a major way. The passage itself reads in part as follows: “Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend of their property. So good women are obedient, guarding in secret what Allah has guarded. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, give them a warning and banish them to separate beds, and beat them.” Spencer’s gloss, also in part: “Wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction.”


	And here’s Spencer on verse 4:24: “Allah forbids Muslims to marry women who are already married, except slave girls….According to Islamic law, once a woman is captured and enslaved, her marriage is immediately annulled. This verse is the basis for the practice of seizing infidel women and making them sex slaves, practiced in the modern age by the Islamic State (ISIS), Boko Haram, and other jihad groups.” At 65:4, in the sura entitled “Divorce,” Spencer makes sure that readers don’t miss a passing reference to wives “who do not yet menstruate” - which, as he puts it, “assumes that the believers will be marrying, and divorcing, prepubescent girls.” An assumption that, alas, is still valid in the twenty-first century.


	Many of Spencer’s footnotes comment on passages that reflect telling contrasts between Islam and Christianity. For example, he underscores that “there is nothing akin to Jesus’s ‘turn the other cheek’ (Matthew 5:39) in the Qur’an.” And he observes that “Islam considers Muhammad as just a human being, yet he cannot be depicted and insults to him must be avenged, while Christianity considers Christ divine and yet has no problem with visual depictions of him, and bears insults of him with patience, or at the very least without responding violently.”&nbsp;


	Furthermore, Spencer highlights the fact that “there has been no development in Islam of the historical and textual criticism that has transformed the ways Jews and Christians understand their scriptures today. This is in large part because there is no doubt about the Qur’an and no questioning of it; to study it in a historical-critical way would be impious in itself.” Then there’s this: “In a notable departure from the Christian concept of martyrdom, Allah allows Muslims to deny their faith when forced to do so” - a highly useful and oft-employed dodge known as taqiyya, which the&nbsp;Qur’an slickly distinguishes from lying, even though there’s no real distinction at all.


	For anyone familiar with the Bible, the experience of reading this unexpurgated, candidly footnoted&nbsp;Qur’an can’t help but provide powerful insight into the stark contrast between Christianity and Islam. Anyone searching in the Qur'an for gospel-like passages about love, kindness, and forgiveness (or parables about virtuous non-believers, such as the good Samaritan) is wasting his time. In fact, the&nbsp;Qur’anic passages about non-believers - which have had a profound impact on Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims - could hardly be less congenial. Indeed, to examine just a few of the passages that Spencer flags for having influenced those attitudes is to acquire a vivid sense of just how students of the Qur'an have been taught to view the infidel. A few samples of Spencer’s commentaries on those passages:

<ul>
	<li>
		In a footnote to verse 2:8, Spencer notes that the Jews’ rejection of Islam is the reason “why most Muslims don’t accept the idea that the Jews have any right to the land of Israel.”&nbsp; 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Commenting on verse 2:18, Spencer notes that “[t]he charge that those who do not believe in Islam are ‘deaf, dumb, and blind’ (cf. 2:171) is an indication of the Islamic assumption that those who reject Islam are not operating in good faith, but are suffering from a moral defect.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		The passage beginning at verse 2:63, Spencer notes, is one of the scriptural foundations “for the common tendency among Islamic jihadis today to refer to Jews as apes…or as both apes and pigs.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		At verse 4:76 (“Those who believe fight for the sake of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight for the cause of taghut [idols]”), Spencer notes: “there is no moral gray area in jihad warfare; the believers fight for Allah, while the unbelievers fight for Satan. Osama bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Qur’an quotations, this verse and 22:39.81.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		The “equation of unbelievers with animals” in verse 8:55, notes Spencer, “is another indication that unbelievers are worthy of no respect or consideration.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 8:60, notes Spencer, “is the Qur’an’s third mention of the imperative to strike terror in the unbelievers.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 9:111, he notes, “has become in the modern age the rationale for suicide bombing.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Verse 9:29, Spencer notes, “is the one place where Muslims are explicitly directed to make war against and subjugate Jews and Christians, the ‘People of the Book’...” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		By way of illuminating a rather murky statement at 39:9, Spencer sums up the Qur'anic view of Muslims and infidels: “The unbelievers are not equal to the believers, for the believers are the ‘best of people’ (3:110) while the unbelievers are ‘the most vile of created beings.”’ (98:6). There is no compatibility of this with the idea of the equality of dignity of all people as created by the same God.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Spencer underscores the thrust of verse 40:10 by noting that “Allah hates the unbelievers even more than they hate themselves.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		Commenting on verse 56:79, Spencer notes that “[n]on-Muslims, because they are unclean (see 9:28), are not to touch the Qur’an. This was why American guards at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where many jihad terrorists were held, would only touch the Qur’an while wearing gloves.” 
		&nbsp;</li>
	<li>
		And finally, there’s Spencer’s annotation of verse 98:6-7. The Qur'anic text reads: “Indeed, the unbelievers among the people of the book and the idolaters will remain in the fire of Gehenna. They are the most vile of created beings. Indeed, those who believe and do good works are the best of created beings.” Spencer’s comment: “This verse is one of the most striking examples of the Qur’an’s dehumanization of unbelievers.”</li>
</ul>


	One of the most striking examples, but far from the only one.


	Indeed, the Qur'an is packed with passages that point up - incessantly, repeatedly, obsessively - the utter contrast between Muslims and non-Muslims , with the former always being described as virtuous and the latter as evil, repulsive, indeed just short of subhuman, invariably deserving of abuse and murder, and without question marked for eternal punishment. It’s impossible for a Jew, Christian, or secular Western reader to peruse this book and not recognize that people who were raised on the Qur'an and who’ve heard it preached from in mosques every weeks of their lives can’t very easily be reconciled to the idea of viewing non-Muslims as fellow humans, to say nothing of friends.


	Indeed, to read this book is to be struck time and again by its feverish preoccupation with the infidel, with the evil of apostasy, with the mischievous attempts by miscellaneous miscreants to turn believers away from Allah, with the coldblooded way in which believers should relate to infidels, with the obligation of believers to make war on infidels, with the nature of the punishments that should be meted out to infidels, and with the nature of the eternal suffering that awaits infidels in the hereafter.


	Simply put, it’s a book rich in hatred and drenched in death, again and again calling for the faithful to murder, exhorting non-believers to kill themselves, and reminding the reader that believers await an afterlife in paradise and non-believers an afterlife in hell. To read this holy book is to understand the malice toward the infidel that countless Muslims have demonstrated, in one way or another, in our time.


	Given this malice, why have so many Muslims relocated to the West? At least part of the answer can be found in verse 4:100, in which, as Spencer explains, “the Qur’an states the cardinal importance of ‘emigration for the cause of Allah,’ that is, moving to a new land with the intention of bringing Islam to it” - and, one might add, bringing it to Islam. Food for thought for Europeans and North Americans whose countries have become increasingly Islamized in recent decades, and whose inhabitants, to an alarming extent, are still in the dark about the motives of their new fellow countrymen.


	Have I made it clear what a remarkable accomplishment The Critical Qu’ran is? Breathtaking in its ambition and achievement, it’s a monumental contribution to the effort to educate Western readers about the bellicose ideology that masquerades as a Religion of Peace. Line by footnoted line, it brings a desperately needed level of clarity and candor to a field of study that’s awash in deceit, deception, and duplicity. The only question now is how many readers will avail themselves of the wisdom that this book holds out to them - and that may well mean, for them, the difference between submission and survival.

Robert Spencer’s Qur’an

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 
	
	Robert Spencer's The Critical Qur’an is coming out May 3. It has zoomed to the top

[Order David Horowitz's Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hating-Whitey-Other-Progressive-Causes/dp/189062621X/">HERE</a>.] 


	Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	For a couple of years toward the end of the last century, David Horowitz contributed a regular column to the online magazine Salon. In 1999 he gathered those columns in a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hating-Whitey-Other-Progressive-Causes/dp/189062621X/">book</a> entitled Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. To return to this book today is to recognize that it could’ve been published yesterday, for the issues it addresses are now even more urgent, and the bizarre ideological tendencies now even more extreme, than they were then. To revisit in this book the subjects discussed in these columns - from Camille Cosby’s claim that her son’s murder was motivated by a racism that is endemic in American society to the self-professed anti-white rage of feminist scholar bell hooks (sic); from the black leftist celebration of Bill Clinton as “our first black president” to the black leftist contempt for black conservative thinkers like Larry Elder; from the entrenched leftism of the American academy to the leftist elite’s shunning of one of its own, Christopher Hitchens, for “betraying” his friend, Clinton bagman Sidney Blumenthal - is like looking at an old photograph of the tree in one’s front yard and exclaiming, “Wow! We thought it was big then, but look how much it’s grown since!”


	Given that Horowitz, in these columns, looks back time again to the days of the New Left in which the Clinton-era events he’s discussing had their beginnings, what we have here is a text that, revisited today, operates on several temporal levels, taking us to the Sixties, as it were, by way of the Nineties, and thereby shedding light on the process by which many of the intellectuals, rabble-rousers, and outright gangsters of six decades ago, all of them determined to tear down the American establishment in the name of Black Power or Women’s Liberation or explicit Leninist or Maoist revolution, became themselves, by the 1990s, firmly entrenched members of the cultural, political, and academic elite, and are at present, to an alarming extent, our éminences grises, in all but absolute control of the legacy media, Ivy League, Democratic Party, movie business, Silicon Valley, an increasing number of major corporations, and even the military, FBI, CIA, and mainline Protestantism.


	As for Horowitz, in the 1960s he was one of the left’s leading figures. But while other, lesser lights of the left rode the wave of anti-establishment rebellion to entrenched establishment power, Horowitz, recognizing the toxicity of the movement he’d helped lead and the value of the American institutions he and his cronies had sought to dismantle, switched sides, and by the 1990s, in one of recent history’s supreme ironies, had ridden his pro-American stance to a position as an outsider in an America rapidly being taken over by its (former?) enemies; and while writers whom he’d once edited at Ramparts contributed to the reshaping of American culture from their corner offices at the New York Times, L.A. Times, and elsewhere, Horowitz, by far a finer writer (and thinker) than any of them, was grateful for a perch at Salon. And today - when Salon is perhaps most famous for celebating pedophilia, and the very idea of conservatives getting a toe in the door even there is a quaint memory - Horowitz continues to shout through newer (and thankfully proliferating) cracks in the wall, such as the Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin podcasts, about his ex-comrades’ enduring perfidy, while they wield microphones so large that they can afford to ignore him entirely - or, if they do choose to pay him attention, to dismiss him as a crank.


	But, dammit, he was there, back when the New Left was new. And he remembers. He remembered in 1999, and he remembers now. And he’s more aware than anybody in America of the guileful ways in which his old comrades have rewritten their histories, and that of the New Left generally, to make themselves and their former movement look sympathetic and heroic. Take a 1998 PBS documentary entitled 1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation, in which the old lefties Steve Talbot, Todd Gitlin, and Tom Hayden presented themselves as having been liberal followers of the peace-loving Martin Luther King at a time when they had, in fact, been aligned with the violent and murderous Black Power movement. Also dropped down the memory hole in the PBS film was their Vietnam-era support not just for U.S. withdrawal from southeast Asia, as they’d have you believe, but for Vietnam’s “liberation” - a “liberation” that, precisely as many onlookers had warned, resulted in Communist genocide. As Horowitz declares with a thoroughly warranted bluntness, “The mass slaughter in Cambodia and South Vietnam from 1975 and 1978 was the real achievement of the New Left.”


	Repeatedly in Hating Whitey, Horowitz dismantles his ex-comrades’ Clinton-era résumé rewrites and corrects the record with surgical precision. He notes that even the Marxist journalist (and Soviet spy) I.F. Stone’s own “adoring biographer” acknowledged Stone’s ineradicable belief that “in spite of the brutal collectivization campaign, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the latest quashing of the Czech democracy and the Stalinist takeover of Eastern Europe…communism was a progressive force, lined up on the correct side of historical events.” Horowitz also quite properly derides the audacious claim by many old leftists that they’d celebrated and even contributed to the end of the Cold War - when in reality they’d “aided and abetted” the Soviet system “throughout its career” and mourned its passing. “Even in its best moments,” Horowitz recalls, “the western left disparaged the threat from the communist enemy as a paranoid fantasy of the Cold War right.” To be sure, even as he calls the dissemblers to account, Horowitz is capable of giving credit even to a murderous thug like Eldridge Cleaver for having finally admitted on 60 Minutes, not long before his death in 1998, that “[i]f people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.”&nbsp;&nbsp;


	To read Hating Whitey is to be reminded that in the 1990s there still seemed reason to hope that the cultural war might yet be won by the partisans of truth so long as they presented their arguments cogently and respectfully. The only thing that’s astonishing about Horowitz’s account of a presentation he gave at Bates College is that he was treated with a degree of tolerance by almost everyone (except for the student who called him a fascist and raised a Nazi salute); these days, such a relatively civilized reception would be unimaginable. Similarly, the only surprise about Horowitz being the sole conservative at a book festival is that he was invited at all (however curtly) and that the host was actually “embarrassed” when Horowitz was heckled.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	How to describe David Horowitz? By turns, in these pages, he’s Daniel in the lion’s den, Diogenes looking for an honest man, Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Throughout, he’s an American (and non-socialist) Orwell, bringing moral clarity to topics that have been twisted beyond recognition by odious ideology and duplicitous rhetoric. One reason why this 23-year-old book remains required reading is that it reminds one again and again that the left, over the decades, has kept proffering the same cynical lies and perpetrating the same destructive slanders - and thereby seducing ever new generations of naive, idealistic young people.


	Not only is Horowitz one of the few sometime New Left members who, as of 1999, was telling the truth about that movement and his role in it; he’s also one of the few commentators anywhere who, also as of 1999, was already calling out phenomena - such as Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory - that were then marginal but that currently occupy center stage. Likewise, if you’d read Hating Whitey when it first came out, you wouldn’t have been blindsided by the recent transformation of the Democratic Party into a veritable Communist Party - the culmination of a process that, as outlined by Horowitz in this book, began way back in 1968.


	On top of everything else, Horowitz is a wellspring of abiding truths about the left. For many progressives, he writes, it would be more offensive to support their own country’s democratic government in a struggle against a palpable communist threat than to “serv[e] a totalitarian state and ai[d] an enemy power.” The “acceptance of conservative truths while avoiding conservative conclusions,” he observes, apropos of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “marks the intellectual cul de sac in which the left finds itself in the post-communist era.” Pondering the left’s shunning of Hitchens over the Blumenthal matter, Horowitz declares: “This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith.”


	Faith, you ask? Yes, faith - for “the community of the left is…bound by ties that are fundamentally religious,” with “messianism [as] its political essence.” Moreover, the left isn’t just a “faith” but a “romance” - and, as such, will never perish, because every day new romantics are born while old romantics die still clinging to the dream, unwilling to abandon the role of bold crusader and own up to the “unheroic, ordinary, and unredeemed” nature of their own existence.


	Yes, some, like Horowitz himself, do snap out of the leftist illusion. “But,” he laments, in the closing words of this still-powerful book, he realized long ago that “there would always be others, and in far greater number,” who would keep the faith. “A century of broken dreams and the slaughters they spawned would, in the end, teach nothing to those who had no reason to hear. Least of all would it cure them of their hunger for a romance that is really a desire not to know who and what we are.”

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey

[Order David Horowitz's Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes: HERE.] 


	Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey 

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls would close and the results of the presidential election would be announced, a correspondent for the English-language service of France 24 stood outside Emmanuel Macron’s campaign headquarters and said that the 1300-odd international journalists who were gathered there exuded an “optimism” that the incumbent “has this in the bag.” Well, at least they were honest about the fact that Macron was very much the candidate of the establishment to which they belong. Back in the France 24 studio, to be sure, one of the panelists present expressed concern that the reportedly high turnout was “maybe not good for French democracy,” meaning not good for Macron - for in France, as in the Anglosphere, when journalists use the word “democracy” nowadays, they mean keeping the left in power and erecting a cordon sanitaire around the “populists.” In the end, they need not have worried: although there were hopes that Marine Le Pen might pull an upset, Macron won, as expected, this time by a vote of 58.2% to 41.8%. Yes, the margin between the two was half as wide as when they faced each other in 2017. But a win is a win.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;


	For those whose chief concern is the advance of Islam in the West, the significance of that victory is manifest. During the latter part of Macron’s term, they heard, on the one hand, the cringing statements by Emmanuel Macron’s appointees: the ambassador to Sweden who in 2020 called France “a Muslim country” and the Foreign Minister who, shortly therafter, on a visit to Egypt, assured Muslims of his “deep respect” for Islam. On the other side, there were the defiant members of the French military - more than a thousand of them, including no fewer than twenty generals - who, last year, sending a message that was consistent with Le Pen’s own, declared in an open letter that France is endangered by Muslim enemies within who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and who want to see it dissolved by removing its past and its history.” And there was also Pierre Brochand, former director of the DGSE (France’s CIA), who <a href="https://rmx.news/france/frances-former-intelligence-chief-warns-against-possible-civil-war-due-to-mass-immigration/">told</a> Le Figaro just a few weeks ago that “the type of immigration we have been experiencing for half a century” is “without precedent in our history,” bringing to the shores of France armies of immigrants who are filled with a “spirit of post-colonial revenge” and, loath to mix with native Frenchmen, produce children who are “even less integrated…than their parents.”


	This drama has been going on - and intensifying - for years, amid much hand-wringing, speechifying, and dissembling, but little in the way of productive action. Over and over again, polls have shown that a large majority of the French people believe that their country will, before too long, find itself under a sharia government; and yet those same people, In election after election, have rejected presidential candidates who might conceivably have prevented that fate in favor of empty suits who they know will do nothing. So it was that on April 10, in the first round of this year’s presidential balloting, voters rejected the bid of Éric Zemmour, who spoke eloquently and passionately about the need to rescue France, turning the second round of voting into a rematch between Macron and Le Pen.


	Last Thursday, the two faced each other in debate. One need not have been a French citizen, or to know very much about the specific conditions in France today, to make sense of their two-and-a-half-hour exchange. Any American, observing their demeanor and listening to their arguments, would have figured out soon enough that Macron, like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, was the voice of the professional, globalist urban establishment, which favors mass immigration, and that Le Pen, like Donald Trump, was the voice of the “deplorables” - the workers, farmers, and others who’d been burned by globalism as well as by their country’s steady Islamization. Brits, for their part, would’ve recognized a vote for Macron as a rough equivalent of a vote for Remain, and Le Pen as the Gallic counterpart to Brexit.&nbsp;


	As with the Democrats in the U.S. and the Remain cause in Britain, it was, as noted, Macron who enjoyed the support of the media. The panel of journalists and commentators who took part in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKtZprAHJwM&amp;ab_channel=FRANCE24English">France 24’s</a> English-language panel discussion prior to the debate were at pains to remind viewers, who’d heard it all a thousand times before, that while Macron is “centrist,” Le Pen is “xenophobic” and “far-right” (in fact, leaving aside her stand on immigration, she’s very much a woman of the left) and that, as one pundit put it, she’s guilty of “disinforming” (sic) her supporters on the issues. There was no suggestion, needless to say, that the endlessly slippery Macron had ever misled anybody about anything, and no mention of the tyrannical manner in which he’d enforced lockdown rules. Also supporting Macron - quelle surprise! - were French Muslim leaders. The head of Paris’s Grand Mosque urged fellow believers to vote for the incumbent, as did the Organization of Muslims of France. Yes, Macron has given stirring speeches in which he’s promised to fight Islamization - notably an October 2020 address in which he vowed to defend French secularism from “Islamist separatism” - but Muslim leaders knew that it was all talk.


	The first couple of hours of the debate were less than electrifying. The candidates traded barbs on taxes, welfare, housing, retirement arrangements, and the like. In a brief flash of amity, Le Pen praised Macron’s efforts to help Ukraine. Accused by him of being in thrall to Russia, she professed: “I am a patriot. I have been a patriot my whole life.” He was testy, irritable, arrogant, imperious, smug, as if he resented even having to talk to her or defend himself before a national audience; at times he even seemed rattled (or perhaps this is just how he behaves when in the presence of a vibrant, self-assured older woman). Le Pen, for her part, came off throughout as relaxed, by turns amused and ardent, consistently in command of the facts and unafraid of telling voters exactly where she stood. What mattered less than the details was her fundamental charge, to which he could offer no cogent reply: namely, that he lacks concern for the ordinary French citizen. Indeed, even as she made the charge, he stood there radiating an imperial indifference, as if to prove her right.&nbsp;


	On the subject of the EU she was fervent. As a member of the European Parliament, said Le Pen, she’d observed that Germans in Brussels defend their own interests, but the French never do. Why not? “How come France doesn’t defend its farmers, its businesses, its industry?”&nbsp; She denied wanting to take France out of the EU, but insisted: “I want to overhaul the European Union from the inside.” When he said something implying that the EU is a superstate, she shot back at him impressively: “There is no European sovereignty, because there is no such thing as a European people. France is a sovereign country because France has a people….You replaced the French flag with the EU flag at the Arc de Triomphe!” And she pushed further: “Your vision of things stunts France…We are a global power.”


	But all this was mere prelude. In the game’s last quarter, the candidates took on Islam. Well, Le Pen did. “Our country is in dire straits,” she pronounced.” And I’m mincing my words….We are faced with barbaric behavior. Things are getting wilder and wilder. Everywhere I travel, even deep into the countryside, I have people telling me, ‘We can’t keep doing this anymore.’” Stating that “unbridled, mass-scale immigration is a problem that we must resolve,” she called for an immigration referendum, insisted on the need to deport illegal aliens and immigrant criminals (“you have deported absolutely nobody!”), the need for firmer and more visible policing, the need for tougher sentencing and fewer probations and more prison cells. The more dauntless she sounded, the more Macron seemed to fade into the background.


	France, she maintained, is at risk from “Islamist ideology,” which “seeks to impose sharia law,” and which therefore needs to be “fought by a republic that is proud of itself.” Radical Muslims must be deported; radical mosques must be closed. Furthermore, she called for “banning hijab in public areas,” quite rightly describing it as “a uniform that is imposed on women by Islamists.” Such a state of affairs, she stated, “is unacceptable in our country. We need to free those women. We need to push back against islamism.” There are, she pointed out, Islamic countries that have stronger hijab laws than France does. All this was too much for Macron, who finally pushed back, although at first not very coherently. “What I find concerning with your train of thought,” he said, “is where it leads.” That “train of thought,” he continued, “doesn’t really hold up….If you go down your avenue, you will ban all forms of religious signs.” Yes, he conceded, it’s appropriate under the French constitution to ban veils in schools. But in streets? In suburbs? If you go that route, he warned, “then you are just going to create civil war.”


	And there it was. The key sentence of the whole debate - indeed, of the whole election.


	For years, critics of Islam, myself included, have warned that unless major policy changes were made on the Islamic front tout de suite - that is, if Western Europe continued to experience a high level of Islamic immigration, and if current demographic trends prevailed, and if official efforts at integration persisted in being utterly disastrous - then Western European societies and cultures would become increasingly Islamized, in ways big and small (a process that is already well underway), and these countries’ systems of laws would steadily come under the influence of sharia. Eventually, either the natives would simply give way fully to a new Islamic order (as chillingly depicted in Michel Houllebecq’s brilliant novel Submission) or there would be urban and suburban pockets of Islam inside otherwise secular national entities and/or armed conflicts over control of different areas. Such predictions - which are nothing more than commonsensical extrapolations - have been routinely mocked by legacy media, academics, and establishment politicians as “conspiracy theories.” Yet there was Macron, the president of France, live on national television, saying that a mere ban on women wearing hijab in public would cause a civil war.&nbsp;


	It was striking. Stunning. He didn’t even pretend to make a principled argument, one way or another, on the subject of hijab. He simply made the colossal admission that in France, in the year 2022, it’s too late in the day for his government to prohibit the wearing in public of an item of clothing that symbolizes not just a religion but an authoritarian ideology - because that ideology already wields too much power. Macron’s implication, then, was that in the struggle to resist Islamization, France has already lost. Surely Macron didn’t go into the debate intending to&nbsp; admit this; he may not even have grasped quite what he was saying even as he was saying it.


	But he said it.


	Le Pen challenged him: did he really think that so many people would refuse to accept such a law? Macron replied that France would be the first country in the world to enact such legislation. Le Pen agreed, adding that France has been the first country in the world to enact many kinds of legislation. Yes, he said, but those laws were made in the name of freedom. And there she had him. On previous occasions, he’d acknowledged that being forced to wear hijab was a matter of being denied one’s freedom. She asked whether he still believed that, given that it now sounded as if a hijab ban would amount to a restriction on individual freedoms. “Or have you changed your mind again?” she asked. In reply, he had nothing but feeble nonsense to offer: “We mustn’t mix up Islam and Islamism….We have French citiizens who wouldn’t be able to go into the public arena under your proposal.”&nbsp;


	So it went. For one brief shining moment, the mask slipped. Macron, who in the last couple of years had made pretty little shows of boldness on this issue in the name of political expediency, had shown his true colors, presenting the French electorate with a clear choice between two distinct alternatives. No, she’s definitely no gift from heaven. And he’s far from the worst European leader to come down the pike in recent years. (She opposes NATO; he supports it.) But still, on the things that matter most, the difference was stark. In their closing remarks, Macron lamented that they hadn’t had a chance to discuss “gender equality” (maybe when the Muslims take over), while Le Pen admirably summed up her platform: “France is the only country we have….We are seeking to protect our identity, our landscape, our language, our culture and to do it without any inhibition.” She even quoted Lincoln: “I believe in government for the people, of the people, by the people.” How could the contrast have been more obvious? Voters could opt for acquiescence - for persisting in the gradual surrender to Islam that has been the unspoken French policy for years - or they could choose patriotic defiance.&nbsp;


	Well, they chose surrender. Why? Can so many French voters be so unaware of what their country’s ongoing Islamization portends? Are they in denial about it? Are they scared even to admit the facts to themselves? Could it be that they actually believe their legacy media? Granted, if you take a quick look around the Western world, the French electorate’s myopia - if that’s le mot juste - is scarcely unique. Why, one might just as well ask, isn’t Geert Wilders the prime minister of the Netherlands? Why do the Swedes keep electing Social Democrats, even as their country burns down around them? How can the Canadians have returned the vile yet ridiculous Justin Trudeau to power? Yes, Californians are crazy, but even so - with their economy going down the tubes, their cities turning into homeless encampments, and their middle class fleeing en masse to Texas and Arizona - how could they have failed to recall the avatar of disaster that is Gavin Newsom?


	Eh bien. In her concession speech, Le Pen looked forward to the National Assembly elections on June 12, after which she and her supporters sang a patently heartfelt Marseillaise. Shortly thereafter, to the strains of the European Union anthem, the Ode to Joy, Macron made his way to a stage erected outside the Eiffel Tower, where, delivering a platitudinous address to an audience of his voters, he promised to make France “a great green nation.” I don’t think he was alluding to the key role of the color green in Islam, but you never know. His speech was followed by a lovely performance of the Marseillaise by a professional singer. Some of Macron’s fans sang along, although it felt, shall we say, rote.

Macron Stays in Power

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	I’ve just discovered a compelling new essayist - who, as it happens, is a 74-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo) and screenwriter (The Verdict, Hannibal). To be sure, I was already aware that David Mamet, a red-diaper baby and erstwhile showbiz lefty, had made a right turn some years ago, but I hadn’t encountered the fruits of his second thoughts until I read his just-published collection of essays, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Recessional-Death-Free-Speech-Lunch/dp/006315899X">Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch</a>. It’s a gratifying, bracing, and electrifying, read.&nbsp;


	What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about? In one essay after another, he seeks to make a big point about life, or America, or human nature, or art, and in doing so he leaps from one image or story or idea to another, drawing connections across time and space in an energetic stream-of-consciousness manner. In one essay, for example, he links Sigmund Freud to the movie King Kong to the friendship between Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. In another, he strings together a childhood anecdote, a historical tidbit, a joke, a couple of lines from Kipling, and a passage from a humor book. Impatient to stay in one place for long or to overstay his welcome, he begins and ends his essays abruptly, and in between the beginning and ending may well veer from social and literary criticism to historical commentary to biblical exegesis and back.


	Mamet has the same gripes about the world today that many of us have, but he serves them up in a thoroughly original way, with a spin all his own, and with a wit that should hardly be unexpected given that this is the man who wrote Wag the Dog. A tummler, kibitzer, kvetch, and rabbi all in one, he’s as book smart as he is street smart, gifted both with common sense and with a wisdom about the present rooted in a deep knowledge and understanding of the past, not to mention in the Jewish and Christian faiths. And - remarkably enough in the year 2022 - he’s a conservative, and a Trump fan to boot, who has yet to be dragged down by the mob from his position as a leading figure of mainstream American culture.


	Reading through Recessional, I kept looking for something to disagree with strongly. I never found it. Literature? While Mamet confesses that he “can’t read the sea novels of Conrad” or most of Dickens and is cool on George Eliot, he loves Trollope. Right there with you. He considers The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a masterpiece. Ditto. And he thinks Yeats is “the greatest English poet since Shakespeare.” Agreed. (Of course he means “English-language poet.”) “The talentless,” he posits in one of many thought-provoking apothegms, “seem to feel a ‘sense of wonder at the beauty of the world.’ Such may give us, at its uttermost best, the anodyne of Robert Frost but not the poetry of Yeats.” I wouldn’t second “anodyne,” but otherwise, nice point.


	Granted, I was surprised to see Mamet name Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928) as the greatest of American plays - I always found it corny and creaky - but his enthusiasm is so convincing that I’m tempted to revisit it. (Elsewhere in the book he calls Our Town America’s finest play, but I don’t plan to reopen that question.) I’m not at all familiar with Virginia Faulkner (1913-80), a writer whom he calls “more droll than Dorothy Parker,” but on his say-so I’ll definitely be checking her out. And while I don’t share his view of Whitman’s poetry as “heartfelt drivel,” I couldn’t agree more that, as he maintains, Walt’s barbaric yawp has spawned mountains of “poetic trash.”


	As suggested by its title, the theme of Mamet’s book is decline - in poetry, in art, in pretty much everything. Broadway is dead. The movies are dead. But he was there when they still had life in them. In one essay, a memoir of the Broadway subculture during his early years as a playwright, he amusingly describes Lee Strasberg, who taught “method acting” to Brando, Clift, et al. (and who played Hyman Roth in Godfather II), as “the King of the Hucksters” and persuasively slams Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich’s 1955 stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank as “a sitcom.”


	It’s when he turns to politics, in the broadest sense, that Mamet is at his best - and bravest. An unashamed patriot, he refers to America as “our magnificent country” and as “the freest and most prosperous [nation] in history.” Looking back at some of the individuals and organizations whose cockeyed ideas helped shape the contemporary scene, he puts Margaret Sanger and John Dewey in their place and deplores the ACLU as “the most absurd bunch of Jews since the Three Stooges.” He recalls that his initial reaction to the coinage “Department of Homeland Security” was to find it (as I did) not just “loathsome, clunky, and offensive” but “un-American” and, indeed, rather unpleasantly “Teutonic.” Moving on to the present, he’s splendidly dismissive of all the claptrap du jour - from Critical Race Theory and man-made global warming to covid hysteria, gender insanity, and Trump Derangement Syndrome.


	Indeed, it’s wonderfully gratifying to see an author with Mamet’s record and reputation who, far from reflexively despising Donald Trump (like virtually everyone else in the Dramatists Guild, Directors Guild, and Writers Guild of America West), repeatedly praises and defends him. “Part of the Left’s outrage at Trump,” Mamet writes, “was his refusal to speak in hieratic language….He speaks American, and those of us who also love the language are awed and delighted to hear it from an elected official.” And: “Trump was vilified with greater vehemence than anyone in Western memory. He was hated because he was feared - because he held that prosperity was to be enjoyed as the legitimate reward of sacrifice, struggle, patriotism, and the American culture that was their conjunction.”


	And again: “Trump was vilified by the Left because ‘he lied’; in fact, he was at a disadvantage because he did not lie. He was, by inclination and experience, a superb director - that is, one who achieves a goal through inspiring employees - but he had neither the inclination or the experience to rule, which is to control disparate groups through false promises, stealth, deception, propaganda, and lies.” Alas, Trump was brought down by the same forces that are bringing down America as a whole. And when it comes to that falling-off, Mamet doesn’t mince words. Raising the specter of “national death,” he asks: “How can a country survive, whose electorate has never seen a man, except their gardener, with dirty hands?” How indeed?

Mamet’s Wisdom

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	I’ve just discovered a compelling new essayist - who, as it happens, is a 74-year-

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Even before he announced for president, the French media were out there, along with prominent academics and sundry bien pensant observers, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/frances-trump-bruce-bawer/">warning</a> potential voters that he was a “populist,” a “polemicist,” and a “provocateur” who was “obsessed with Islam” - and not, mind you, in an an affectionate, Obama-like way - and hence patently “dangerous,” “divisive,” and “discriminatory.” Worst of all, as you could tell from reading his books, including the huge 2004 bestseller Le Suicide français, Éric Zemmour subscribed - as do the majority of his countrymen - to the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that the people of France are in the process of being supplanted by Muslims and their society, culture, and laws are gradually giving way to their Islamic counterparts.


	On November 30, Zemmour released a seven-minute video in which he officially <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bawer-zemmour-bruce-bawer/">declared</a> his candidacy. In powerful words matched with equally powerful images that contrasted present-day France with the France of history, he stated: “You walk the streets of your city and you don't recognize it. You look at your screens and you are spoken to in a language that is strange and, quite frankly, foreign….you have the impression that you are no longer in the country you know.” He cited the threats posed by mass Muslim immigration to French liberty, French civilization, French film and food and fashion and “the charm of our art of living.” It was, I commented at the time, “an oration for the ages.” And of course the elites sneered: in the New Yorker, the execrable Adam Gopnick compared Zemmour to Hitler and Stalin.


	In fact Zemmour seemed to be the only candidate for president of France who was truly serious about - and remotely capable of - saving it from an Islamic future. But despite that stirring kick-off video, and despite what should have been a sensational endorsement by Marion Maréchal, the niece of perennial “far-right” presidential also-ran, Marine Le Pen, his campaign went nowhere. Yes, even before his announcement he’d drained support from Le Pen; but she recovered. Then Valérie Pécresse entered the race, echoing many of Zemmour’s talking points, and not only briefly captured the attention of the media but also briefly stole the #2 spot in the public-opinion polls from Le Pen.


	But Zemmour? Two weeks ago, Le Monde columnist Gilles Paris was already writing his <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/03/29/the-slow-fall-of-eric-zemmour_6119635_5026681.html">epitaph</a>, saying that Zemmour had been his own worst enemy. “When voters are asked about his image and character traits,” explained Paris, “he comes out on top for everything negative and dead last for almost everything positive.” In overwhelming numbers, voters said Zemmour “didn’t give a good image of France abroad.” His only solid constituency is that “radical faction” - as Paris put it - “for whom immigration…is the main issue of concern.”


	Now, it seems to me that any French patriot with at least one foot in reality should have immigration as his or her “main issue of concern.” Similarly, I consider it obvious that Geert Wilders should be the prime minister of the Netherlands. But in last year’s election Wilders’s Freedom Party got only 11% of the vote. In Sunday’s first round of the French presidential balloting, Zemmour received a lamentable 7%, coming in a distant fourth behind the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron (28%), Le Pen, (23%), and Socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%). In the second round, then, as in 2017, Macron will face Le Pen.


	Why did Zemmour have such a poor showing? Commentators deride him for his “hubris,” his touches of vulgarity, his sometimes inappropriate humor. Women, one reads, are turned off by him. It all brings to mind the American voters whose delicate distaste for Trump’s tweets - for his “rudeness” and “meanness” and so on - blinded them, when voting in the 2020 election, to his administration’s remarkable achievements. On Sunday, Liberation <a href="https://www.liberation.fr/politique/elections/eric-zemmour-le-grand-degage-20220410_HFXYUAF6GBECTJQRWL34565AJA/">sneered</a> that Zemmour’s campaign had been “exclusively based on media noise.” Sound familiar?


	In fact, Zemmour, like Trump, was a non-politician who went into politics only because he saw his country being failed - potentially to disastrous effect - by its professional politicians, and whose campaign platform was a carefully designed plan for a heroic act of rescue. No president before him had ever kept as many of his campaign pledges as Trump did; we will never know now how faithful Zemmour would have been to his own promises. But it is clear from his years of books and columns and speeches that Zemmour, like Trump, is a man of solid convictions who had no motive for seeking power other than a sincere determination to save his country. By contrast, Le Pen, long identified with the immigration issue, felt no hesitation during this campaign about shifting to economic issues when she felt it served her interests.&nbsp;


	In any event, France now faces a choice, on April 24, between Macron and Le Pen. The good news is that Le Pen’s chances now look considerably better than they did five years ago. Zemmour, who criticized her lustily during the campaign, has already urged his supporters to unite behind her. Indeed, notwithstanding her wishy-washiness, there’s no other reasonable choice for serious voters. During the last couple of years, to be sure, in a response to the challenge posed by Zemmour, Le Pen, and others, Macron has parroted some of their tough rhetoric about Islam, immigration, and integration - delivering big speeches and making big promises - only to walk it all back. To vote for Macron is to vote for more of the same; it’s to vote for a France that continues its long, fatalistic march into the arms of the ummah. 


	For the left, needless to say, there’s no choice but Macron: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/11/emmanuel-macron-far-right-le-pen-zemmour">writing</a> in the Guardian on Monday, a French journalist named Pauline Bock, after smearing Zemmour as a “racist,” expressed alarm over the surveys that show Le Pen doing well: “these polls bring the Brexit result to mind. A victory for Le Pen should terrify anyone who cares about democracy and peace.” In other words, Marine Le Pen embodies an existential threat to All Good Things just as horrifying as - gasp - Brexit. For those of us who recognized Brexit as a boon for democracy, what more needs to be said?

'France’s Trump' Out of the Running for President

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Even before he announced for president, the French media were out there, along

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Mea culpa. Last Friday I predicted here that the Sunday night Oscar ceremony would be wall-to-wall political rants, virtue signaling, celebrations of diversity, and lame, politically correct comedy.


	For the first couple of hours of the show, that was true. The attempts at humor by the hosts - Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Regina Hall - might well have been scripted by Amy’s cousin Chuck. Amy’s first joke was about the (fictitious) gender pay gap: “This year the academy hired three women to host, because it’s cheaper than hiring one man.” Then she took a gratuitous jab at an aging straight white male: “Look at Timothee Chalamet,” she said as the camera focused on 67-year-old J.K. Simmons. “What happened?”


	Sykes proffered a jest about Mitch McConnell that went right by me, then promised: “We’re gonna have a great night. And for you people in Florida, we’re gonna have a gay night!” - a reference, of course, to the new law (signed Monday by Governor DiSantis, and dishonestly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by its detractors) against grooming schoolchildren. Schumer cracked that at a time when we’re supposed to be celebrating women, the movie King Richard, about the father of tennis players Venus and Serena Williams, celebrates a man. And in another aging-white-man dig, she jibed that Leonardo DiCaprio is working hard to heal the environment and thereby “leave behind a cleaner, greener planet for his girlfriends.”&nbsp;


	And oh, the diversity! The number of blacks on camera must have broken records. (The show began with Venus and Serena introducing Beyonce and a bevy of black backup singers, live from Compton.) Much was made of the fact that this year’s Best Supporting Actor, Tony Kotsur, is deaf. Accepting Best Supporting Actress, Ariana DeBose, who played Anita in Spielberg’s disastrous West Side Story remake, announced that she’s an “openly queer woman of color, an Afro-Latina.” The winner of an animation award gushed: “I am proud to be part of a film that puts beautiful, diverse characters front and center.” Presenting the costume prize, two black women spoke of “Afro-futuristic looks” and “express[ing] diversity in storytelling.” Then diversity itself stepped onstage in the form of a tiny little man whom it took me a moment to recognize as Elliot - formerly Ellen - Page.


	And then it happened. Chris Rock, who’d been tapped to present the award for Best Documentary Feature, started off with a couple of jokes - the first real humor of the evening. Taking in the sight of Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head - she was seated down front, next to her husband, Will - Rock quipped that he looked forward to seeing her in G.I. Jane 2. (It will be recalled that Demi Moore went bald in the 1997 movie G.I. Jane.) Whereupon Will Smith stepped onstage and slapped him in the face. Returning to his seat, he twice shouted at Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out your f--king mouth!”


	At first, I thought it was a stunt. Some people are still saying it was. I doubt it. Both Smith and Rock have striven to be seen as good role models for young blacks: why would either of them have wanted to plan a fake confrontation that made them look like gang members in tuxedos? Also, if it had been planned, Rock, one of the funniest men alive, would’ve contrived a witty reaction to the slap. He didn’t; in fact, he struggled to get back on script. Finally, would Smith have used the F-word - twice - on live network TV if he hadn’t really been out of control?


	As far as I’m concerned, Smith acted abominably, whereas Rock was a class act. Although visibly stunned, he kept his cool and kept at his job. Some observers, noting that Pinkett Smith shaves her pate because she suffers from a skin disorder called alopecia, have actually praised Smith for “standing up for her.” But as Hadley Freeman <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/28/dont-mention-that-slap-why-no-one-was-talking-about-will-smith-and-chris-rock-at-the-oscars-after-party">pointed</a> out in the Guardian, “It’s quite weird that Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith were fine with the host Regina Hall joking about their open marriage early in the evening, but not with Rock joking about Pinkett Smith’s hair, no?”


	What compounds the weirdness is that Smith laughed at Rock’s joke - until he saw that Jada wasn’t laughing. Could it be that he was really stewed at Hall - and still burned, deep down, by the recent revelation that Jada had two-timed him with a guy half her age - but, unable to slap either Hall or Jada, took it out on Rock? Or did the slap have more to do with the fact that he was on tenterhooks, desperate to know if he’d won Best Actor - an accolade that he’s long considered long overdue?


	One big question: why did they let him get away with it? A lesser member of the audience who’d struck someone on camera and hurled F-bombs would’ve been hauled out of there prontissimo and handed over to the L.A. cops. Instead, Smith was allowed to stay, collect his award, and bask in applause - a standing ovation, even. On Monday’s The Five, Jesse Watters suggested that if, say, a white hothead like Mel Gibson had slapped Rock, he’d have been booed roundly by the audience and dragged out by security, superstar or not. Was there indeed an element of racism - an unarticulated feeling that the assault, being black-on-black, wasn’t quite as horrible or shocking as it might otherwise have been - in ABC execs’ decision to leave Smith alone?&nbsp;


	In any case, that slap wasn’t just the evening’s headline event; to me, it felt like a defining moment for Hollywood in our time, and even for the American left. Because it pulled back the curtain on Tinseltown’s, and the left’s, pious virtue-signaling, its phony embrace of diversity, to reveal at least a hint of the ugliness, the narcissism, and the potential for violence that lie beneath. And who better to pull that curtain back than Will Smith? He’s always been one of the phoniest of showbiz phonies, constantly turning up on talk shows to polish his image as the most evolved person in the room. “I don’t want to be an icon,” he’s said. “I want to be an idea.” He’s declared that his life’s goal is to “advance and elevate humanity.” (He’s also expressed the desire to see the U.S. “cleansed” of Trump voters.)


	Shortly after the big slap came the Academy’s “In Memoriam” tribute, which reminded us that Sidney Poitier died in January. Poitier was always aware of being viewed, fairly or not, as a representative of black people, and he did black people - and America - a profound service by always comporting himself with dignity. So did Hattie McDaniel, the first-ever black Oscar winner, who in her 1940 acceptance speech tearfully expressed the hope that she would always be “a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry.” These days, of course, you’re not supposed to talk about being “a credit to my race.” I don’t see why. Any excuse to behave properly is a good one. Jews used to talk about fellow Jews who were a “shanda for the goyim” - i.e., they gave Jews a bad name. Years ago, at Gay Pride parades, there were always the handful of participants who insisted on acting and dressing like freaks, and who made the rest of us bite our tongues, knowing they’d be the ones shown on the news that evening. Chris Rock himself, in a hilariously brilliant 1996<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4&amp;ab_channel=SatiricalGameReviews"> routine</a>, acknowledged that, yes, there are some blacks who are a credit to their race and others who aren’t.&nbsp;


	In the year 2022, maybe we’ve heard enough about white supremacy and black victimhood, about the patriarchy, about transphobia. Maybe we need to talk more about individual decency, responsibility, and what it means to be civilized - whatever your skin color.


	Later in the evening Will Smith won the Best Actor award for King Richard. In his acceptance speech he apologized to the audience - but not to Chris Rock - for the slap. He actually tried to put a noble spin on his thuggish conduct: “Love will make you do crazy things.” He compared himself to Richard Williams, his character in King Richard, who “was a fierce defender of his family.” And he played the victim card, saying that in show business “you’ve got to be able to take abuse” and accept “people disrespecting you.” But he displayed not the slightest hint of humility. Instead, he fell back smoothly into his habitual grandiosity, saying that he wants to be “a vessel for love” and “an ambassador for love.” “In this time in my life, in this moment,” he stated,

<blockquote>
	
		I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world….I’m being called on in my life to love people and to protect people and to be a river to my people….It’s not about winning an award for me, it’s about being able to shine a lot on all the people.
</blockquote>


	According to the Guardian’s Freeman, who dropped in on the hottest post-Oscar parties in L.A., the big stars were all silent on the big slap. Of course they were. They realized that Will Smith hadn’t just smacked Chris Rock - he’d dealt a blow to all the reigning left-wing myths, Hollywood myths, Oscar myths. Namely, the myth that being left of center is a mark of virtue; the myth that anybody in the film industry has a right to lecture the rest of America about character and ethics and morality (let alone to posture pretentiously as, heaven help us, “an ambassador for love”); and the myth that everything, everywhere, is all about, and can be explained by, the oppression of blacks by whites. Those pieties have been too potent for too long now. Thanks to Will Smith, they’re at least a little bit shakier today than they were last week.

Slaps and Double Standards

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Mea culpa. Last Friday I predicted here that the Sunday night Oscar ceremony

<a href="https://brucebawer.com/">Bruce Bawer</a> is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of multiple books. 


	It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of the worst features of contemporary American society and culture. At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU&amp;ab_channel=Oscars">stepped</a> onstage to present the Best Actor award. For some reason, Ullmann decided to quote her frequent collaborator Ingmar Bergman: “Often to be most eloquent is to be silent.” This aperçu didn’t seem particularly relevant at the moment, but about five minutes later it would seem the very deepest wisdom.


	Anyway, Moore and Ullmann broke out the envelope. The winner: Marlon Brando for The Godfather. But the person who walked down the aisle to accept the award wasn’t Brando. It was a young woman in an American Indian getup straight out of Central Casting. When Moore held the statuette out to her, she held up her palm to refuse it. And then she spoke.


	“Hello. My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I'm Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I'm representing Marlon Brando this evening.” Brando, she explained, was turning down his Oscar in protest against “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry…and on television in movie re-runs.” He was, she added, also displeased by the government’s aggressive response to the recent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the Oglala Lakota tribe.


	Then she went on to explain what Brando thought about Hollywood’s depiction of Italian Americans. Just kidding.


	As we approach this year’s Oscar telecast (Sunday&nbsp;night, ABC - you remember ABC, don’t you?), an event now identified primarily with inane political self-indulgence, let it be remembered that in 1974 a statement like Sacheen Littlefeather’s (real name: Marie Louise Cruz) was unheard of. It was a time when people actually looked forward to this now-moribund annual celebration of the movies. But Brando’s stratagem would mark the beginning of the end of all that. To be sure, Littlefeather’s brief turn didn’t take place in a vacuum: during the half dozen or so years leading up to The Godfather’s big night, Hollywood had been churning out product with considerably more aggressive social and political content than had been common in earlier decades. And the Motion Picture Academy had recognized some of these movies, with Best Picture nominations or victories to In the Heat of the Night and Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967), Z and Midnight Cowboy (both 1969), Patton and M*A*S*H (both 1970), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).


	But the social and political commentary had stayed in the movies themselves. Now, that was about to change. Politics had begun to seep into every corner of American culture. And that included the Oscars.


	Cut to April 3, 1978, and the 50th-anniversary Oscar ceremony. One of the most nominated films that year was Julia, based on a memoir by Lillian Hellman that had appeared in her 1973 book Pentimento. The story told in the film is as follows: after Hitler’s rise to power but before the outbreak of World War II, Hellman (played by Jane Fonda), at the request of her close childhood friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave), risks her life by smuggling money from the Soviet Union to Berlin to help the anti-Nazi cause.


	Years later the whole story would be proven to be total hogwash, although any sensible reader of Hellman’s story in 1973 would’ve raised an eyebrow at it. (It was Hellman, an inveterate Stalinist, about whose memoirs the writer Mary McCarthy famously said, on a 1979 Dick Cavett Show, “every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'") In any event, Julia won Oscars not only for its screenplay and for Jason Robards (playing Hellmann’s longtime beau Dashiell Hammett), but for Vanessa Redgrave, who portrayed the title character - and who, when she was called up to the stage to accept the award, she <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QUacU0I4yU&amp;ab_channel=Oscars">said</a> that she believed she and Fonda had “done the best work of our lives,” in part “because we believed and we believe in what we were expressing. Two, out of millions, who gave their lives and were prepared to sacrifice everything in the fight against fascist and racist Nazi Germany.”


	Yes, millions had made sacrifices to defeat the Nazis. But one of the two warriors to whom Redgrave paid tribute had never existed (in fact, her exploits had been based on those of a woman, Muriel Gardiner, whom Hellman had never known), and the other (in what would become perhaps the most famous case ever of stolen valor) had invented her own heroism. Redgrave, a notorious Communist and Palestinian partisan, then went on to denounce “Zionist hoodlums,” to imply parallels between Israel and the Palestinians, on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and the wartime Jews, on the other, and to congratulate Academy voters for having, through their vote for her, “dealt a final blow against that period when Nixon and McCarthy launched a worldwide witch hunt against those who tried to express in their lives and their work the truth that they believed in.”


	That “truth,” of course, was the “truth” of Communism.


	Redgrave’s speech was enough of a curve ball to elicit boos and, later in the same ceremony, an onstage takedown by screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky. But in later years such moves would become routine. Leonardo di Caprio (a high-school dropout) would warn of climate change; Patricia Arquette (who left school at fourteen) would champion wage equality for women. Eventually the awards themselves would become politicized. After all forty acting nominations for 2014 and 2015 went to white performers, the #OscarsSoWhite movement was formed, and in 2016, amid much industry self-congratulation, Denzel Washington, Ruth Negga, Dev Patel, Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, Naomie Harris, and Octavia Spencer all made the short list. Four years later, the Academy unveiled a complex new set of rules dictating just how diverse the casts and crews of movies have to be in order to merit an Oscar nod.


	These latest woke moves, of course, took place in the long shadow of Donald Trump, during whose presidency the political hysteria at the Oscars grew even more intense, so that it can now seem almost inappropriate not to mistake the stage of the Dolby Theater for Speakers’ Corner in London. Presenting the Oscar for animated feature film in 2017, Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal decried Trump’s call for a border wall; on the same night, Anousheh Ansari, accepting the Best Foreign Film award on behalf of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, read to the audience Farhadi’s explanation that he was boycotting the ceremony “out of respect for people of my country and those of other six nations whom have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S. Dividing the world into the us and the enemy categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for regression and war.”


	Yes, an Iranian criticized the American president for dividing the human race “into us and the enemy.” Why, you’d almost think that America was as evil as…Israel.


	Sometimes these days it can seem as if the search for a fresh cause to front at the Oscars has driven an actor around the bend. Accepting his trophy for Joker (2019), high-school dropout Joaquin Phoenix held forth about the fact that “[w]e artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” Also evident is a widespread eagerness to present one’s woke bona fides ASAP: last year, the Oscar ceremony was only seconds old when Regina King, in her opening monologue, referenced the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial six days earlier. “If things had gone differently this past week in Minneapolis,” she said,” I might have traded in my heels for marching boots.” The name of George Floyd rang out so often during that show that you might’ve been excused for thinking he was some Hollywood legend.


	Sorry, slight correction: you’d never have been excused for that.


	As an obvious result of all this politics - as well as of the increasing woke-ness of the Academy-anointed movies themselves - the ratings for ABC’s Oscar telecast have dropped from 43.7 million in 2014 - the last year before everything in American pop culture was about Trump - to 10.4 million in 2021. Although network TV is on life support anyway, this massive decline terrified ABC executives, who decided that the Oscars, in order to be rescued, need a big change. And so they demanded that twelve award categories be removed from this year’s telecast; after negotiation, the Academy agreed to omit eight awards from the show, including editing, score, make-up, and sound.


	Yes, that’s the change. That’s it - as if the problem with the Oscars were the running time and not the content. Ironically, the categories cut from the show are those whose winners are least likely to inject their woke politics into the evening. Meanwhile, this year’s orgy of Tinseltown self-congratulation will be co-hosted by the black actress Regina Hall (who, appearing on The View in 2020, described Trump as causing a “crisis” in America and said she’d vote for anybody with a “D” after his or her name), black lesbian comedienne Wanda Sykes (a fanatical partisan who even defended Biden’s “you ain’t black” stump line), and the once-funny standup Amy Schumer (cousin of Chuck), whose political radicalization has utterly vaporized her funny bone. In 2016, as CBS News <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amy-schumer-gets-political-some-fans-walk-out-tampa/">reported</a> at the time, “[a]round 200 people walked out of her Tampa show when Schumer launched into a withering takedown of Donald Trump,” whom she called an “orange, sexual-assaulting, fake-college-starting monster.”


	Take it from me, she’s gotten worse since.


	And these are the people whom the geniuses at ABC and the Motion Picture Academy are putting front and center this year in hopes of re-engaging the interest of American viewers in their now utterly discredited golden booty.


	There’s one bright spot - or so I thought - to what will, remarkably, be the 94th annual Academy Awards. Earlier this week I <a href="https://www.nettavisen.no/livsstil/liv-ullmann-mottar-ares-oscar-egentlig-veldig-forbausende/s/12-95-3424258783">read</a> that Liv Ullmann, now 83 and a two-time Oscar nominee, will receive an honorary Oscar this year. Ah! I thought. At least there’ll be a touch of class and a reminder of the heyday of cinema. But nope: it turned out that, as part of the network’s brilliant time-shaving scheme, Ullmann’s prize, along with honorary accolades to Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, and Danny Glover, will be handed out on Saturday, at a private dinner that won’t be on TV.


	In short, if you don’t tune in to ABC on Sunday&nbsp;night, the only thing you’ll be missing is tirades by twits.&nbsp;

Tirades by Twits

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of multiple books. 


	It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Question: What’s scarier for Ukrainians at present than being in Ukraine? Answer: Being in Sweden.


	Because of an incident that took place early last week, <a href="https://samnytt.se/ukrainska-kvinnornas-skracknatt-somalier-tog-sig-in-pa-boendet-jag-ar-sa-radd-att-jag-vill-aka-hem/">according</a> to the alternative Swedish website Samnytt, some of the Ukrainian women and children who’ve been housed at a hostel in the city of Örebro want to go back home. It began when two tall, slim black men, apparently Somalis, came knocking at the hostel’s front door at 3 A.M. and claimed to want to see a friend who was living there - but the person they named, if he or she exists at all, was not, in fact, a resident. After a third Somali man appeared, one or more of them managed to enter the hostel, by which time the women had retreated to their rooms and locked their doors. One of the Somalis knocked on one of the doors and addressed the woman inside, presumably in Somali, causing her two-year-old child to scream in fear. Then, at five A.M., some Arab men showed up and tried to force their way in.


	In standard Swedish fashion, the hostel’s managers played down the episode and didn’t report it to police. But several of the women, according to Samnytt, “are so shaken by the events of the night…that they regret that they fled to Sweden.” One of them said, “I’m so scared that I want to go home. When there are bombs, I know at least that I can go down to the basement and hide there.”


	None of this should be terribly surprising. As has been widely reported, many of the Muslims who came to Western Europe as refugees are resentful of the new wave of refugees now coming from Ukraine. As I <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/finally-real-refugees-bruce-bawer/">wrote </a>earlier this month, many of them have charged native Europeans with racism because, they claim, the Ukrainians are getting a warmer welcome than they did. (This is like complaining that your dad gave your brother a Lamborghini but only gave you a Ferrari.) It’s probably closer to the truth that Western Europeans are responding to the fact that the new arrivals are virtually all women and children, whereas the tsunami of Syrians that swept over Europe several years ago consisted almost entirely of aggressive-looking young men of military age.


	Surely the sex of the refugees in that hostel was what brought those Muslims out in the dead of night. How do you say “sitting ducks” in Arabic? One imagines that for those late-night callers, the hostel full of unaccompanied European women looked like an unattended candy store.


	These are, after all, people with a well-nigh unbounded sense of entitlement to whatever might cross their paths in the land of the infidels. Their common view of their relationship to Sweden has been succinctly articulated by Basem Mahmoud, a Jordanian-born imam in Malmö. “Sweden is ours,” Mahmoud proclaimed in a recent sermon. “It's ours, whether they like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it will be ours.” Mahmoud has also called Jews the “offspring of pigs and monkeys,” and two years ago he defended the decapitation and butchering of the French teacher Samuel Paty - who’d used the Danish Muhammed cartoons in class to illustrate the principle of free speech - on the grounds that he was “unclean” and had “sinned by insulting the Prophet.” Like many a Muslim paterfamilias, and in accordance with his holy book, Mahmoud is something of a domestic bully: his ex-wife has unsuccessfully sought restraining orders against him, and his teenage daughter claims to have been “mentally and physically abused” by him “for a long time.” But Mahmoud has paid no price for any of it.


	Needless to say, Mahmoud’s number is legion. Western Europeans are accustomed to Muslim immigrants who, having supposedly fled chaos in their homelands, have for decades accepted Swedish government largesse with one hand while punching Jews, gays, and their own wives and children with the other. Quite a difference from the thousands of Ukrainian men who, until last month, were working in Western Europe - and making real economic contributions to the societies in which they were living - but who, when Russia invaded Ukraine, packed their bags at once and valiantly went home to fight. Anton Zheleznov, who had been employed by a building management company in Södertälje, <a href="https://www.thelocal.se/20220301/you-protect-your-country-the-ukrainians-leaving-sweden-to-help-those-at-home/">told</a> The Local, “What do you do if your country is invaded? You fight. You protect your country. For me, this is not a question.”


	The contrasts between the Muslims and Ukrainians in Sweden, then, could hardly be starker. The Ukrainians are fleeing an invasion of their country; the Muslims have been prosecuting&nbsp;their own invasion of Sweden for nearly half a century. Here’s another contrast. For years, as Hege Storhaug <a href="https://www.rights.no/2022/03/hykleriet-forst-na-kan-vi-snakke-om-kostnader-ved-flyktninger/">noted</a> the other day, Swedish government and media pretended that Muslim immigration was an economic boon for Sweden. That was a lie: it was, in reality, a massive burden, and many of the new arrivals were serious criminals. The Ukrainians who’ve come in recent years to Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe to work, however, have been a boon. They fit in and they kept their noses clean. And yet now that Ukrainian women and children are pouring into Western Europe, guess what? The media, politicians, and academics, which considered it sheer racism to talk about the costs of taking in refugees, have decided, Sweden Democrats politician Johan Nissinen complained last week, that “it is suddenly OK to talk about how much it costs.”


	Thus it wasn’t too surprising when Swedish Labor Minister Eva Nordmark <a href="https://www.friatider.se/regeringen-ukrainska-flyktingar-ska-forsorja-sig-sjalva">announced</a> on Monday that the new Ukrainian refugees, unlike the Muslim refugees who preceded them, will be expected to support themselves financially. Got that? Women who’ve just arrived, probably with children in tow and perhaps with bad cases of PTSD, will have to register as job-seekers and go out on interviews if they want to put food on the table. So it turns out that, yes, Sweden is discriminating among refugees, apparently on the basis of race: to Ukrainian women, it’s saying: “Get a job, you bum,” while to Muslims who’ve lived in Sweden for decades on public assistance and never worked a day, it’s saying: “Don’t worry, boys. Soon enough these Ukrainian women’s tax payments will be helping to cover our welfare disbursements to you.” As they say in Somalia, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Sweden’s Unequal Hospitality

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	Question: What’s scarier for Ukrainians at present than being in Ukraine? Answer

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every day’s news through the lens of woke ideology and the Democratic Party narrative, the New Yorker is our flagship “serious” weekly magazine. So when the New Yorker runs a sober 5700-word article about what is arguably, in the minds of our woke brethren, the major issue of the day - namely, trans athletes - it merits notice. The <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-one-swimmer-became-the-focus-of-a-debate-about-trans-athletes">text</a> in question, dated March 17, was written by sports journalist Louisa Thomas (hereafter “Louisa”) and focused primarily on University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas (hereafter “Lia”), who at a meet in Atlanta last Thursday became, as ESPN <a href="https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/33529775/amid-protests-pennsylvania-swimmer-lia-thomas-becomes-first-known-transgender-athlete-win-division-national-championship">reported</a>, “the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport.”


	Lia was born Will Thomas in 1998 or 1999 and, according to Louisa, “realized she was transgender in the summer of 2018.” But you won’t find the name Will Thomas in Louisa’s article, which begins as follows:

<blockquote>
	
		Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events.
</blockquote>


	In fact, during all that time, Lia was Will. And Will was a “he.” Lia is a “he,” too, of course. But in the year 2022, under the rules set down by our woke overlords, we are expected to pretend that Will’s decision four years ago to start calling himself Lia, and to identify as a “she,” had the magical effect of retroactively rewriting his entire life, turning Will Thomas into a girl from the moment of his birth.


	Although Louisa’s article starts by introducing us to Lia, it isn’t an athlete profile. Rather, it’s an account of the controversy surrounding the question of whether male-to-female transgender athletes should be allowed to compete as women, and the shifting rules on the subject that have been laid down by the International Olympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, U.S.A. Swimming, and other bodies. Louisa is emphatically on the side of inclusion - as she makes clear, any other position seems to her to be “transphobic” - and she knows that in order to win sympathy for a cause you need to focus on a single individual. So it is that she repeatedly returns to Lia, whose emotional travails we’re invited to empathize with.


	Of course, for every transsexual athlete who’s allowed to participate in women’s sports, there are hundreds if not thousands of biological females whose athletic careers are being affected by that decision. But Louisa doesn’t invite us to empathize with those athletes, let alone with their parents or supporters. On the contrary, the very title of Louisa’s article, “The Trans Swimmer who Won Too Much,” implies that the reason why female swimmers and their supporters have criticized Lea isn’t that he’s beating them unfairly but, quite simply, that he’s beating them. As Louisa puts it: “Lia Thomas would have attracted little attention if she always lost.”


	In batting away at Lia’s critics, Louisa also plays the conservative card. “There was something absurd,” she writes, “in the spectacle of conservative politicians who have never shown any interest in supporting women’s sports, which are chronically underfunded and underexposed, moralizing about the sanctity of collegiate women’s swimming.” No, what’s “absurd” is the total redefinition of man and woman that began to be foisted upon us in the last five or ten years and that we’re now expected to parrot without hesitation. True enough, many of the conservatives who have weighed in on the trans issue may not be particularly interested in women’s sports - but that doesn’t keep them from recognizing an outrage and an injustice when they see it. In these woke times, when the left has gone all in on the radical redefinition of sexual identity, it is, yes, pretty much only on the right that you can find people willing to assert traditional sex distinctions.


	Mentioning a group called the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, which seeks a “middle way” on trans athletes, Louisa notes that “its most famous member” is Martina Navratilova. Here’s the totality of what Louisa has to say about Martina: she’s “angered many trans athletes and advocates with comments she has made in the past.” So much for one of the world’s great tennis players and early champions of gay rights. As it happens, the same gutsy devotion to the truth that decades ago made Navratilova a pioneering gay-rights activist led her, in a 2018 tweet, to state the plain facts about transgenderism and sports: “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women. There must be some standards, and having a penis and competing as a woman would not fit that standard.”


	A few years ago, virtually everyone on earth would have agreed. But by 2018, such a sentiment made Martina “transphobic” in the eyes of the bien pensant. Facing an onslaught of criticism, she promised to explore the subject further. “Well, I’ve now done that,” she wrote in a February 2019 <a href="https://archive.ph/20190217022611/https:/www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rules-on-trans-athletes-reward-cheats-and-punish-the-innocent-klsrq6h3x">article</a> for the London Times, 

<blockquote>
	
		and, if anything, my views have strengthened. To put the argument at its most basic: a man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organization is concerned, win everything in sight and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair.
</blockquote>


	Straight talk from a gay icon (who, on Thursday, said that Lia’s Division I victory should be marked in the records book with “an asterisk” because the rules allowing his participation “are not correct”). Although Louisa doesn’t address Martina’s comments directly, it’s obvious that her own views are as far removed as possible from Martina’s. “The International Olympic Committee,” Louisa writes, “began allowing trans athletes to compete in 2004. At first, the I.O.C. required athletes to legally change their gender and undergo genital surgery, as if a mislabelled passport and the presence of a penis gave them a leg up on the competition.” (My emphasis.) For Louisa, apparently, nothing should be required of a trans athlete other than that athlete’s assertion that what appears to be a “he” is, and has always been, a “she.”


	Since the only thing that matters in woke world anywhere near as much as transgenderism is race, Louisa drags that into her story, too. “Female athletes have bodies of different sizes, colors, shapes, and sexualities,” she writes. “Those bodies, especially those that differ from a feminine - and, often, white - ideal, have, for a long time, been castigated as too muscular, too masculine, too threatening.” (Again, my emphasis.) What does race have to do with it? When you talk about female bodies looking “too muscular, too masculine, too threatening,” the case that leaps to mind for me is that of the hulking East German woman swimmers who were suspected of doping at the 1976 (and other) Olympics. Those suspicions were later confirmed by Stasi records; but at the time the American swimmers who dared to speak up about a manifestly shady situation were demonized in the media - the U.S. media included - as sore losers and disruptors of international harmony.


	Again bringing up race, Louisa writes, apropos of the I.O.C.’s changing rules on transgender women, that “a number of observers remained troubled by the idea of a traditionally white, patriarchal institution defining, and policing, the supposed boundaries of womanhood.” Again, what does whiteness have to do with it? As for “patriarchy” and “the supposed boundaries of womanhood,” one of the ironies of the new trans dispensation is that this purported new frontier in women’s rights is, in fact, the most audacious patriarchal move ever, enabling middling male athletes to destroy the careers of the very best female athletes - while getting applauded by the PC crowd not just for their athletic prowess but for their personal courage.


	What about Louisa’s point that female athletes have “bodies of different sizes,” etc.? Sure. But they’re all female bodies. Whatever Lia may assert about her “inner identity,” her “authentic self,” her body remains that of a man. And swimming meets are not contests between “authentic selves” - they’re contests between bodies. This is a point that Louisa, like most of those who argue for trans inclusion in sports, is at pains to avoid. The photograph accompanying her article shows Lia in the water -&nbsp; but it’s a pretty innocuous image that fails to capture Lia’s looming size and broad, manly build. A more honest article would have included a photo showing Lia alongside his smaller female teammates. But then such a photo would have made it obvious from the git-go just how much of a joke Louisa’s argument is.


	At one point Louisa reports on a discussion she had with lawyer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, who founded the above-mentioned Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. It’s a curious exchange. In response to Hogshead-Makar’s matter-of-fact observation that the sole justification for sex segregation in sports is biology, Louisa maintains that “the biology of sex differences between athletes [is] murky.” Murky? What’s murky about the differences between male and female? Are they murkier than the question of whether a person with a male body should be believed when he says he’s really a woman? Louisa adds that “the legacy effects of testosterone-driven puberty [are] not totally established or understood.” By “testosterone-driven puberty,” of course, she means “male puberty.” Exactly what about male puberty is a mystery? What balderdash.


	Louisa proceeds to tsk-tsk at Hogshead-Makar because the latter, she complains, “insists on referring to ‘biological’ genders” - an inappropriate practice, apparently, that puts her “deeply at odds with those in favor of broader trans inclusion.” Well, yes, if you’re trying to make a case for trans inclusion in sports, the straightforward facts of biology do tend to get in the way. But to take biology off the table when you’re talking about sports is ridiculous, because - again - sports is a matter of pitting body against body, not “authentic self” against “authentic self.” It’s fascinating how woke folk who parrot the mantra “follow the science” when they think it bolsters their own case in other matters have tried to rule the very mention of the science of biology out of line when it comes to the trans issue.


	Louisa isn’t the only female sportswriter to have weighed in on Lia’s Division I victory. At the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins took the angle that “everyone is trans” - yes, you read that right - because we’re all

<blockquote>
	
		on the way to becoming someone profoundly different than we were, and keeping score is just a way to track the arc of a person from youth to prime to past it. If you subtract the aim of becomingness from competition just because you’re afraid of a Lia Thomas and make it strictly about the chance to win a prize, then you might as well go to an amusement park and shoot a squirt gun at a clown face because it will have about as much meaning.
</blockquote>


	Jenkins urges us to look past the science - whatever it may be - and recognize that “the real aim and value of NCAA competition” isn’t to “vault… small subset of young talents on to a podium” but “to grow people,” to help them “explor[e] who [they] are.” Which, Jenkins says, means that the real question is, or should be, this: “Is Thomas’s presence preventing other swimmers from finding out who they are?” I’d have to say no: on the contrary, Lia’s presence is shaping their fate. After having spent much of their lives striving, with immense discipline and determination, to improve as swimmers in hopes that they might one day end up on that podium that Jenkins dismisses so blithely, these biological females have turned out to be losers in a game whose rules have been rewritten overnight so as to deny&nbsp; them a fair competition and bestow undeserved laurels on the likes of Lea Thomas - all so that privileged people like Sally Jenkins and Louisa Thomas, who will never be obliged to give up their own dreams for such a reason, can bask in their own superior virtue.&nbsp;


	But back to Louisa. Toward the end of her article, she serves up some of the usual rot: reading arguments for excluding trans athletes from women’s sports, she says, you might think “that trans women are a conquering horde, swarming the leaderboards,” when in fact “trans women are grossly underrepresented at high levels of all sports.” Nonsense: they’re only “grossly underrepresented” if you accept as legitimate the grotesquely high numbers of young people who, in the last few years, obviously in response to a calamitous generation trend, have begun identifying as trans. Naturally, Louisa also plays the suicide card: “Transgender youth are more likely to be homeless and live in poverty. They are more likely to experience violence, bullying, rejection, depression, and suicidal ideation.” None of which amounts to an argument for anything. In addition, Louisa quotes an academic who accuses opponents of trans inclusion in sports of “trying to erase trans kids from existence.” On the contrary, the campaign to let men who identify as women compete against biological women will, if taken to its natural conclusion, effectively erase biologically female athletes.


	Louisa concludes her piece with a truly cockamamie flourish: “It may be that [Lia] Thomas retains a significant metabolic and physiological advantage over cisgender women. It may be that she is an outlier. It may also be that she is swimming faster relative to her competitors than before in part because she is in a better place now - no longer battling gender dysphoria, able to swim, as she put it, as her authentic self, comfortable pulling on a swimsuit and feeling her body for what it is, slipping through the water.” Read that last part again: “feeling her body for what it is.” And what exactly is Lia’s body? It’s a male body, the product of a process of male puberty, each cell of it containing an XY chromosome. It’s exactly the same body that it was before Lia purportedly found her “authentic self.” And while her discovery of that “authentic self” - assuming it really happened at all - may have transformed Lia psychologically, it didn’t effect the slightest change in that tall, strong male body that keeps “slipping through the water” past one shorter, weaker female body after another, winning women’s awards and breaking women’s records.

Lia Thomas and the 'Authentic Self'

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	From one end of Western Europe to the other, the mass migrations of the last generation or two have turned the words “immigrant” and “refugee” into veritable synonyms for “Muslim.” Thanks to government generosity on a Herculean scale, Muslims by the million have been provided, at taxpayer expense (but without taxpayers ever being consulted), with incomes, homes, furnishings, cars. They’ve been allowed to bring over their family members, who in turn have been allowed to bring over their family members. Some have been grateful; some have even gone on to pursue estimable careers and contribute to the general welfare. Many, however, have responded to all this largesse with a contempt for their hosts - a contempt rooted largely in the Koran’s teachings about infidels - and a staggering sense of entitlement.


	And now that Western Europeans are suddenly extending all their hospitality toward fellow Europeans and Christians - that is, of course, toward Ukrainians who are fleeing for their lives from Putin’s bloody war of conquest - a great many Muslims and their allies are up in arms. And in one country after another, their cri de coeur is the same: how dare you be so much more generous to Ukrainians than you ever were to Muslims! The charge is ludicrous: it would take a very long time, and a lot of handouts indeed, for the Ukrainians, either per capita or en masse, to get anywhere near as much out of Europeans’ pocketbooks as Muslims have received in the last half century or so.


	Yet the absurdity of the charge hasn’t kept a lot of highly placed people from making it. In the Netherlands, for instance, a number of prominent leftists - including historian Tayfun Balçik, politician Thijme Hoffmann, and professor Leo Lucassen - have <a href="https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/waarom-gaan-grenzen-nu-wel-open-vluchtelingen-die-op-ons-lijken-zien-we-als-echte-vluchtelingen~b54c5b4c/">griped</a> that Europeans are being more munificent toward Ukrainian refugees than toward Muslim migrants, and that’s it’s because of xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism. And in Denmark, three journalists - Line Rønn Tofte, Line Jenvall, and Theodora Amalie Høgsted Renard - growled in a joint <a href="https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/hvorfor-er-der-forskel-paa-ukrainere-og-andre-flygtninge">op-ed</a> that while native Danes, in 2015, “spit on” Syrian refugees, Danes in 2022 are driving to Poland “to transport Ukrainian refugees to Denmark.”


	What, the three journalists demanded to know, “is the difference between the Ukrainians and the Syrians?” Well one not insignificant difference is that whereas today’s Ukrainian refugees are almost all women and children, the folks flooding into Europe from Syria in 2015 were mostly military-aged men. Why, one wondered at the time, hadn’t all these fit young men stayed home to fight? Why were they here, and not their parents, grandparents, sisters, wives, children? What kind of refugee crisis was this? Even so, the fact remains that thousands of Western Europeans did open their arms to those Syrians. They greeted them at airports and railway stations. They handed them truckloads of free stuff. They took them into their homes.


	And then what happened? On New Year’s Eve 2015-6, the central squares of Cologne and dozens of other German cities were the sites of horrific gang rapes by hundreds of these recent Syrian arrivals. I suspect that for the many Germans who experienced those chilling, eye-opening violations of trust, the question of the difference between those criminal Syrian freeloaders of 2015 and the Ukrainian women and children of today could hardly be more dramatic. As former Swedish parliamentarian Kent Ekeroth <a href="https://samnytt.se/ekeroth-riktiga-flyktingar-ger-riktigt-engagemang/">wrote</a> on March 7 in response to such grumbling in his own country, “This is probably the first time in human memory that Sweden, or for that matter Western Europe, has gotten to see real refugees.” (Including real refugee children, as opposed to bearded thirty-somethings claiming to be minors.)


	The same perverse complaint about preferential treatment for Europeans has also been voiced in Norway. After the Progress Party (FrP) called for the nation’s refugee quota to be reserved for Ukrainians, Katrine Nødtvedt, a Green Party member of the Bergen City Council, <a href="https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2022-03-01/kan-ta-mange-raskt">worried</a> that Ukrainians would squeeze out other potential refugees.


	Abid Raja, perhaps Norway’s most famous Muslim, agreed. Two decades ago, Raja was spokesman for an Oslo mosque, championing arranged marriages and savaging the West. Today, he’s a Parliament member for the Liberal Party (and recent Minister of Culture) who presents himself as a benign Norwegian patriot. But now, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, a glimpse of the old Raja - the soft jihadist - came out. “FrP’s use of the [Ukrainian] crisis as a way to harm other refugees is immoral,” he <a href="https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2022-03-03/opprort-over-frp">told</a> Klassekampen. By seeming to prefer Ukrainians to Muslims, he said, FrP is causing people like him to “die inside.” Such is the voice of entrenched privilege - of a man accustomed to a recognized victim status that has made him a media darling and given him a lucrative career. Note that Raja isn’t “dying inside” out of grief and sympathy for Ukrainian women and children: he’s “dying inside” because, as he sees it, they’re stealing attention - and may soon be stealing money, food, clothing and shelter - that should, by all rights, be given to his fellow Muslims.


	In the U.S., the notion that Ukrainians have been the beneficiaries of anti-Islam bigotry was <a href="https://www.investigativeproject.org/9148/anti-israel-voices-push-all-the-wrong-lessons-on?fbclid=IwAR2KojQAT2uFpdNCWOIf5WSNZJYz4tuUC38qFt3wkfcSgvnDhyUXMfaLU80">served</a> up at a livestreamed conference featuring, among others, several officials of the Council on American Muslim Relations (CAIR). During the conference, UC Berkeley’s Hatem Bazian maintained that Ukrainians enjoy favor in the West because they’re “European people with blue eyes and blonde hair.” Bazian professed that Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s invasion is comparable to the Palestinians’ war with Israel - but that Westerners don’t support Palestinians because they’re dark-skinned. Of course the comparison of Ukrainian resistance to Palestinian terrorism is absurd. So is the suggestion that Westerners don’t support Palestinians. On the contrary, naive do-gooders have pumped a fortune into the Palestinian terroritories - cash that could’ve made Palestinian life better but that has instead been used to rain death upon Israelis.


	Who better to close with than Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times propagandist who created the perfidious 1619 Project, and whose concern about Ukrainians, unsurprisingly, isn’t that they’re upstaging Muslims but, rather, upstaging blacks? In a couple of February 27 tweets, she <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/02/28/nikole-hannah-jones-blasts-racialized-coverage-of-ukraine-war/">charged</a> that if Western media have been covering Ukraine so much, it’s because of “[white] supremacy”: “we should care [about Ukrainians] because they are like us.” Just as many Muslims can’t help attributing the attention currently being lavished on Ukrainians to Islamophobia, then, for Hannah-Jones, this - like everything else on earth - is all about race. (MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah pontificated along similar lines.)


	On the contrary. The Ukrainian crisis is about real women and children - not grown men posing as kids - who have real refugee status and who have fled from a country whose ongoing destruction, right before our eyes, is quite terrifyingly real. Race? Islam? A word to the left: for once, keep your noxious group-identity obsession to yourselves while Europeans, for once, open their arms and their hearts to suffering women and children who really need - and really deserve - their help.

Finally, Real Refugees

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. 


	From one end of Western Europe to the other, the mass migrations of the last

Frontpage Mag

bruce bawer

Terror in Oslo

What’s Wrong With the Brits?

Voting for the Status Quo in California

What Is a Woman?

Twisting the Truth about Tinseltown

Celebrating William F. Buckley

Provincetown Progressive

Abortion and Wokeness

Another Year, Another U.N. Scandal

They Call Them the 'Koran Riots'

Robert Spencer’s Qur’an

Revisiting David Horowitz's Hating Whitey

Macron Stays in Power

Mamet’s Wisdom

'France’s Trump' Out of the Running for President

Slaps and Double Standards

Tirades by Twits

Sweden’s Unequal Hospitality

Lia Thomas and the 'Authentic Self'

Finally, Real Refugees

FPM Series

Disloyal Military

Progressive Fascists

Racist Mayors

The Point

'Woke' Gets Cancelled. Literally.

California to Spend $200 Million to Help Fund Abortion Tourism

Biden Announces $200B Plan to Aid Poorer Countries Because America is Made Out of Money

The Abortion Insurrection Leads to Violence From Arizona to Portland

Islamic Terror Attack Hits Norwegian Gay Bar

Events