U.S. Soccer Agrees to Pay Men and Women Equally. Americans Agree Not To Watch Either One.

(How John Kerry won Afghanistan)


	In groundbreaking news, Soccer players, a game usually played by toddlers and angry America-hating leftists with purple

U.S. Soccer Agrees to Pay Men and Women Equally. Americans Agree Not To Watch Either One.

The pro-crime party <a href="https://pitchfork.com/news/new-york-state-senate-passes-bill-limiting-use-of-song-lyrics-in-court/">keeps on pro-criming</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		New York’s State Senate approved a bill Tuesday (May 17) that would limit prosecutors’ use of song lyrics and other forms of “creative expression” as evidence in criminal cases.&nbsp;Senate Bill S7527&nbsp;would not ban prosecutors from presenting lyrics or other material to a jury, but would require them to show that the work is “literal, rather than figurative or fictional.”

	
		The bill, which was sponsored by Senators Jamaal Bailey and Brad Hoylman, received&nbsp;public support&nbsp;from Jay-Z, Meek Mill, Killer Mike, Fat Joe, and Robin Thicke, among others. Before the bill can become a law, it must pass the New York State Assembly; a&nbsp;companion bill&nbsp;sponsored by Assembly member Catalina Cruz is pending before a committee and awaiting a vote.

	
		The bill, while in the works for months, comes as Atlanta rappers Young Thug and Gunna&nbsp;face RICO charges&nbsp;in Georgia in a case where their lyrics and music videos make up the bulk of the state’s evidence of criminal conspiracy. In the 2013 case&nbsp;Dawson v. Delaware, the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to use protected speech as evidence, provided that speech is irrelevant to the case.

	
		The court&nbsp;declined&nbsp;to hear the case of Jamal Knox, a Pittsburgh rapper known as Mayhem Mal who was&nbsp;convicted&nbsp;on charges of terroristic threats and witness intimidation over lyrics in a 2012 song called “Fuck the Police.”&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	It is awkward when an entire genre based on violence whose members routinely engaged in violence toward each other and innocent people start pretending that they're engaging in fictional threats, not real ones.


	I usually err on the side of free speech, but a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/rap_song_that_threatened_police_officers_is_not_protected_speech_pennsylvan">recap&nbsp;the Mayhem Mal </a>case in a way that virtually no media outlet, which focuses on celeb rapper support, shows why it happened.

<blockquote>
	
		The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected a free speech claim by a rapper who threatened to kill two Pittsburgh police officers he identified by name in a video titled “F— the Police.”

	
		Using the name Mayhem Mal, Knox and another rapper threatened the officers who were scheduled to testify against them after arresting the pair on drug charges. The other rapper’s case was not before the court.

	
		One of the officers said the video was one of the reasons he left the force and relocated.

	
		Both officers are named, and Knox states in the song that the lyrics are for them. In one part of the rap song, Knox said, “I’ma jam this rusty knife all in his guts and chop his feet,” and, “Well your shift over at 3 and I’m gonna f— up where you sleep.” The song also suggests the rappers know the identity of a confidential informant and a have a plan to murder an informant with a Glock handgun.
</blockquote>


	This is what New York Senate Dems seem to driven to protect.


	Would such a law, clearly preferencing criminals of a certain culture, survive a Supreme Court test?

<blockquote>
	
		If the court found First Amendment protection for the video, Saylor said, “we would in effect be interpreting the Constitution to provide blanket protection for threats, however severe, so long as they are expressed within that musical style.”
</blockquote>


	It's a good question.


	If a criminal writes a death threat in words cut out from a newspaper, isn't that also an art project?


	The New York Senate Dem "F___ the Police" bill, "Establishes an assumption of the inadmissibility of evidence of a defendant's creative or artistic expression against such defendant in a criminal proceeding; requires the proffering party to affirmatively prove that the evidence is admissible by clear and convincing evidence."


	How are prosecutors going to prove that a criminal's communications aren't part of a creative project in an era where anything, from mutilated horses to a golden toilet to Banksy and rap can be considered art?


	There's no metric for art, which means anything is art.


	Drug dealers can freely send text messages brokering drug deals as long as they do it in rap form.


	I'm sure that this won't make New York an even worse hellhole.

NY Senate Dems Pass "F___ the Police" Bill Protecting Violent Rap Threats

The pro-crime party keeps on pro-criming.


	
		New York’s State Senate approved a bill Tuesday (May 17) that would limit prosecutors’ use of song lyrics

NY Senate Dems Pass "F___ the Police" Bill Protecting Violent Rap Threats

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio shouldn't have had a political career. Radicalism is not a problem in NYC, but even most radicals hate his guts. Bill de Blasio's combination of arrogance, incompetence, laziness and corruption contrived to make him widely hated across the spectrum.


	So of course he ran for president.


	After that fizzled, thought was given to running for governor and <a href="https://nypost.com/2022/05/17/bill-de-blasio-eyeing-run-at-newly-drawn-ny-seat-nadler-has-left-behind/">now the House</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Ex-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told a state lawmaker he plans to run for New York’s&nbsp;newly drawn 10th Congressional district&nbsp;— the seat entrenched Rep. Jerrold Nadler is vacating to fight it out with former longtime ally Rep. Carolyn Maloney in the rejigged 12th.

	
		De Blasio&nbsp;considered a run&nbsp;for the NY-11 district – before the&nbsp;state’s redistricting maps&nbsp;were thrown out the first time – but then&nbsp;dropped his bid in February before it started.&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	As the Post notes,&nbsp;Bill de&nbsp;Blasio&nbsp;blew a presidential and gubernatorial campaign. If he abandons a House run, what's left? City Council? Assemblyman? Dogcatcher?


	De Blasio's own Twitter feed is a mishmash of attacks and virtue signaling at the state and the federal level, barking about state gun laws and federal social media regulation as if his own online persona can't figure out which office he wants to run for and is just keeping all of his possible options open.


	It seems as if it might be kinder to take him off the street and give him some kind of job where a complete incompetent would be allowed to mismanage billion-dollar budgets and just misplace $800 million.


	Maybe Burger King or Starbucks?

Won't Someone Hire Bill de Blasio To Do Something?

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio shouldn't have had a political career. Radicalism is not a problem in NYC, but even most radicals hate his guts. Bill de Blasio's

Won't Someone Hire Bill de Blasio To Do Something?

Give Chesa Boudin some credit, the Soros DA is responsible for the deaths of a lot more Americans than his Weather Underground&nbsp;parents. This is why the counterculture lefties decided to <a href="https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/da-chesa-boudin-fentanyl-court-data-drug-dealing-immigration/">destroy the system from within</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Despite a surging fentanyl crisis that&nbsp;killed nearly 500&nbsp;people last year in San Francisco, the office of District Attorney Chesa Boudin did not secure a single conviction for dealing the deadly opioid for cases filed during 2021, according to a review of court data.
</blockquote>


	No drug dealer is illegal apparently.

<blockquote>
	
		Another big factor is the DA’s attention to offenders’ immigration status, which by law they are required to consider. Prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys point out that drug dealing convictions are grounds for deportation, and a substantial number of drug dealers in the city are Honduran nationals who could face deadly consequences if deported. The accessory charge still gives them and their families a path toward eventual citizenship.
</blockquote>


	So Americans have to die so that Honduran drug dealers can become citizens.

<blockquote>
	
		The DA’s approach is not winning many fans in the most-affected neighborhoods. “I know the horrors of being undocumented and selling drugs, but we can’t let our people continue to die,” said Rene Colorado, executive director of the Tenderloin Merchants Association.&nbsp;

	
		“My best friend died of a heroin overdose here in San Francisco, because I couldn’t help him. There have to be limits,” he said. “If you’re undocumented and selling fentanyl, guess what, you have to face the consequences. You have to do your time here in the States and you’re probably going to be deported.”&nbsp;
</blockquote>


	Not on Chesa Boudin's watch. Or on any Soros DAs watch.

<blockquote>
	
		In one example of using the “accessory after the fact” conviction for fentanyl dealing, a defendant was arrested and charged five different times from July 2020 through December 2021 for dealing fentanyl, heroin, meth and crack cocaine. According to court documents, evidence included a backpack with cash and “numerous” colorful plastic baggies of drugs. All five cases were consolidated for a January 2022 sentencing where he received two “accessory after the fact” felonies and served several months in jail.

	
		Another example in San Francisco involved a man with four separate drug dealing arrests last year between June and December. He was charged with selling fentanyl, crack, more than an ounce of meth and over 14 grams of heroin. His ultimate conviction was for two misdemeanors for&nbsp; “accessory after the fact,” and his sentence was two days in county jail, which he had already served.
</blockquote>


	Remember when lefties complained about California's "draconian" drug laws. Then go look at the bodies on the street. That's what the alternative looks like.

Americans Die of Fentanyl Overdoses as Soros DA Protects Foreign Drug Dealers From Deportation

Give Chesa Boudin some credit, the Soros DA is responsible for the deaths of a lot more Americans than his Weather Underground&nbsp;parents. This is why the

Americans Die of Fentanyl Overdoses as Soros DA Protects Foreign Drug Dealers From Deportation

It's official. Women don't exist and neither does "<a href="https://www.mediaite.com/weird/democratic-pro-choice-caucus-releases-language-guide-saying-choice-is-harmful-language/">choice</a>".

<blockquote>
	
		The House Pro-Choice Caucus has released a language guide with suggestions about what to say and not to say on the issue of abortion, including an admonition on the harmfulness of the word “choice.”

	
		In addition to “choice,” words deemed “harmful language” include “reduce abortion,” “safe, legal and rare,” “unwanted pregnancy,” “conscience clause/protections” and “back-alley abortions/coat hangers.”

	
		“Helpful language,” on the other hand, includes words like “decision,” “safe, legal and accessible,” “unexpected pregnancy,” “refusal of care/denial of care laws” and “criminalizing healthcare.”
</blockquote>


	This reeks of a focus group being convened on how to best market abortion to millennials.&nbsp;


	Why is the&nbsp;House Pro-Choice Caucus dumping "choice"?


	Choice, a key element in pro-abortion branding, is 'freedom' language. It's likely been concluded that freedom language is out of sync with an illiberal Left. And thus "choice" has been replaced with the illiberal "decision" which was probably determined to be far more empowering.


	The implication is that abortion is not a choice, that there aren't two sides or options, but an absolute decision. Abortion, the message goes, is not optional.


	But nothing under the Left is. Just ask China's One Child Policy.

The End of "Choice"

It's official. Women don't exist and neither does "choice".


	
		The House Pro-Choice Caucus has released a language guide with suggestions about what to

The End of "Choice"

[NOTE: The following is adapted from Mark Bauerlein’s new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dumbest-Generation-Grows-Stupefied-Dangerous/dp/1684512204">The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults</a>.]&nbsp;


	Those moderate and sensible liberals who’ve told me that cancel culture has gone too far and believe that the pendulum is swinging back are fooling themselves.&nbsp; Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that they know that America has taken a one-way path into totalitarian political correctness and they are too anxious to admit it.&nbsp; Either way, they’re wrong—wrong about the enduring force of cancel culture, and wrong not to open their mouths and voice old-fashioned liberal arguments against it.&nbsp; In fact, the latter is proof of the former.&nbsp; Cancel culture is in high gear, and it will be so for a long time.&nbsp; U.S. demographics ensure it.


	That came through in a July 2020 poll of registered voters by Morning Consult and Politico that <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000173-7329-d26c-af77-7b7f646a0000">included questions </a>about cancel culture.&nbsp; Asked whether cancel culture has gone too far, not far enough, or neither, 36 percent of respondents age 18-34 answered “too far,” only one-third of the age group, a dismayingly low figure.&nbsp; Older cohorts showed greater concern: 41 percent of 35-44 year-olds believing it has gone too far, 47 percent of 45-64 year-olds that it has done so, and 59 percent of those sixty-five and older.&nbsp; Worse, nearly one in six of the younger respondents (16 percent) claimed that cancellation hadn’t yet claimed enough victims (the wording was “not far enough”), a bit higher than the next older age group (14 percent) and much higher than the other two (seven and five percent).


	That “not-far-enough” number is worse than it seems, for two reasons.&nbsp; First, 23 percent of 18-34 year-olds answered “neither”—that cancel culture had gone neither not far enough nor too far, implying that the current level of cancellation is just fine with them.&nbsp; So if we add together the rates for not-far-enough and currently-just-fine, Millennials who wish to restrain or reverse cancel culture are outnumbered by those who don’t.&nbsp; We should note, as well, that another 25 percent of the age group answered “don’t know/no opinion”—an apathy that favors the aggressors.


	Given this breakdown, the advantage that the last group (the indifferent ones) gives to extremists helps explain the success of cancel culture.&nbsp; It’s a pattern one sees all the time.&nbsp; In episodes of protest, an inspired minority can often influence the course of events far more than their numbers would suggest. &nbsp;There is the “chill” phenomenon, of course, whereby one case of censorship and punishment compels others to stay quiet for good, but there is more to the power of the minority than that. &nbsp;Squeaky wheels are the ones that get the grease.&nbsp; If, for example, three students complain of a teacher’s prejudice, while the other thirty-two students say nothing about it, the few complainers inevitably take priority.&nbsp;


	The “Law of Group Polarization”— the tendency of groups in which most members hold to a particular opinion to drift toward more extreme versions of that opinion as they discuss it—is an instance of the same phenomenon.&nbsp; The Law was outlined in a 1999 paper by Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, who examined certain deliberative bodies such as trial juries and found the phenomenon repeated again and again.&nbsp; In product liability cases, for instance, when an individual sues a company whose product resulted in an injury, if the jury generally regards the company as liable, but ten members initially favor a modest award to the plaintiff while two push for a stiff award, in the deliberations to follow, the two will pull the ten far in their direction.&nbsp; The final judgment will <a href="https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1541&amp;context=law_and_economics">end up much higher</a> than the average figure as calculated from the beginning.


	The psychology is perfectly comprehensible.&nbsp; The extreme members feel more strongly about their opinion than the others.&nbsp; That’s the way extremists are.&nbsp; But the moderates basically agree with the extremists about (in this case) the culpability of the manufacturer.&nbsp; The difference lies in the intensity of feeling, and so the moderates don’t regard concessions to extremists as a compromise of principle.&nbsp; They are more flexible, willing to defer to people more passionate about a principle they share.


	Thus the 16 percent rate of young Americans who want cancel culture to move farther and faster is worse than it seems, particularly in light of the 23 percent who regard cancel culture as at just the right level and the 25 percent who don’t-know or don’t-care.&nbsp; If young social justice warriors find someone who has raised objections to homosexuality on Facebook or wrote once on Twitter that Americans of African descent are low-IQ, the extremists spring into action, coaxing peers to sign petitions, send emails, and make phone calls to the culprit’s employer.&nbsp; The moderates may feel uncomfortable about getting someone fired, but they don’t like homophobia and racism, either, and so they sign and send, the pressure of the extremists works, and the numbers of protesters swell.&nbsp; What starts as distaste over a politically incorrect opinion turns into a campaign of intimidation.&nbsp; The moderates can’t resist joining in because the extremists paint the original crime in the lurid colors of historic oppression, which calls for a hammer response, and moderates don’t want to argue over the severity of the original misdeed.&nbsp; In this hothouse zone, it’s impossible to say, “C’mon, it was just a stupid remark, we all do it sometimes.”


	And so the extremists set the tone.&nbsp; Their “idealism” and commitment bring a fair number of their more easygoing peers on board.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.arizonachristian.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CRC_AWVI2020_Release10_Digital_01_20200922.pdf">Another recent survey</a>, the American Worldview Inventory 2020, shows the reach of such illiberalism.&nbsp; On the very virtue for which Millennials were hailed but a few years back, tolerance, the survey found a stark divergence by cohort: “findings show Millennials—by their own admission—as far less tolerant than other generations.&nbsp; In addition, they are more likely to want to exact revenge when wronged, are less likely to keep a promise, and overall have less respect for others and for human life in general.”


	As for the call for mutual respect commonly heard from Millennials, the survey concluded: “Millennials are also twice as likely as other people to say that the kind of people they always respect are those who hold the same religious and political views as they do.&nbsp; Despite their well-known advocacy of ‘tolerance,’ they emerged from the survey as the generation that is the least tolerant—by their own admission—of people who possess different views than they do.”


	If you think that this passion for punishment will wane as Millennials proceed in life and deal with kids, taxes, mortgages, healthcare and other adult burdens that temper the schoolyard mindset, keep in mind that Millennials aren’t youths anymore.&nbsp; The oldest ones are 40, and they have grown more intolerant as they’ve aged.&nbsp; Don’t expect them to change their attitude any time soon.&nbsp; The mindset has been decades in the making, reinforced in classrooms, in popular culture, on social media, and by Democrat politicians (and many Republicans, too).&nbsp; We have, indeed, raised a generation of illiberal, closed-minded leftists.&nbsp; The progressivist transformation of schooling, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, news media, the art world, publishing, academia and professional schools, and human resources has done its job.


	Only thing will stop Millennial cancellation: a few cases of the cancellers themselves being cancelled for what they’ve done.&nbsp; This is how adolescents grow up, through punishment for misdeeds.&nbsp; Without fear of retribution, a Millennial will not long resist the joy of virtue signaling, the high of scapegoating, not to mention the danger of rejecting the mob and becoming a suspect person himself.&nbsp; As long as there is no cost for emailing a dean and demanding an “insensitive” teacher be fired; if the perpetrator of a hate-crime hoax walks away unscathed; if signing a petition to get someone fired for mocking a minority group is painless; if <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/disqus-de-platforming-frontpage-frontpage-editors/">pushing to de-platform</a> a group because of its conservative positions only boosts your status . . . the behavior will continue.&nbsp;


	It is not enough to call for free speech and pluralism and an open marketplace of opinion.&nbsp; That doesn’t impress the motivated Millennial.&nbsp; Conservatives must face an unfortunate conclusion: the freedoms they honor have licensed the undoing of traditional America.&nbsp; The open society they respect has allowed “soft” totalitarians to prosper within it.&nbsp; Most of all, conservatives have failed—failed consistently and completely—to pass along to the young the precious inheritance of the First Amendment, Valley Forge, Walden, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Grant and Lee at Appomattox, Booker T. Washington, Citizen Kane, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Airlift . . . and all the other things of American Greatness that should endow them with the very thing that would end cancel culture for good, namely, gratitude. 
	 
	Mark Bauerlein is Emeritus Professor of English and an editor at <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/">First Things Magazine</a>.

Cancel Culture is Here to Stay

[NOTE: The following is adapted from Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.]&nbsp;


	Those

<div>
	
		[Order David Horowitz's new book, <a href="https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/books/products/mortality-faith-reflections-on-a-journey-through-time">Mortality &amp; Faith: Reflections on a Journey through Time</a>.] 

	
		“The meaning of life is that it stops.”&nbsp; That line from Kafka is the epigraph David Horowitz selects for this <a href="https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/books/products/mortality-faith-reflections-on-a-journey-through-time">compilation of autobiographical reflections</a> that pick up where Radical Son (1997) left off.&nbsp; The opening of the first section has another aphorism on death, this one from his father: “We begin to die the day we are born” (3).&nbsp; Horowitz admits how well the lesson stuck: “feelings of mortality have made themselves as familiar as hello and goodbye” (4).

	
		Death is everywhere—the death of his father and of himself; the 20th-century master of death Joseph Stalin and the 17th-century thinker of death Blaise Pascal; old friends who are gone; Freud on the “death wish”; doctors who treat terminal patients; Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 leader who wrote a few days before his mission, “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death”; Dostoevsky’s mock execution; and the killing diseases cancer and diabetes.&nbsp; Radical Son gave us a view of the Black Panthers and the anti-War movement different from that offered in pop versions of “1968,” and it confirmed to Horowitz’s ex-comrades that he had made peace with the Devil (that is, Reagan, the neocons, the Republican Party . . .).&nbsp;

	
		But at the center of that story of political upheaval, too, lay a death, the murder of friend Betty van Patter by the ruthless militant figures Horowitz believed were his allies. &nbsp;Radical Son he now calls the “first half” of his autobiography, Mortality and Faith the second.&nbsp; The “political odyssey” of the former is over; now is the time for “a meditation on age, and on our common progress towards an end which is both final and opaque” (ix).&nbsp;

	
		The result is a moving and wise and honest account of a life on the ebb.&nbsp; Much of the material has been published before in The End of Time (2005), A Point in Time (2011), and You’re Going to Be Dead One Day (2015), reworked here into a new narrative mixing personal anecdote, medical care, family turmoil, and political analysis.&nbsp; The narration isn’t chronological, or even sequential, but it’s nonetheless affecting.&nbsp; A battle with prostate cancer arises, then disappears, then comes up again in sobering vignettes.&nbsp; So do the errors of his father and of Horowitz himself, scenes from his marriages, profiles of his children, and asides on literary eminences (Proust, whom his mother loved, Marcus Aurelius, Ivan Karamazov, Brecht) and on the –isms that have wrought so much suffering (communism, progressivism, nihilism, terrorism).&nbsp; Through every episode runs the sad truth that “We are rootless and alone and threatened with extinction” (60).&nbsp;

	
		I can’t summarize it; the content is too rich and heterogeneous.

	<ul>
		<li>
			A particular image of his mother haunts him: her frightened plea just before her death.&nbsp; One night in a rest home in Los Angeles, she summoned an attendant to her bed and muttered, “Something is terribly wrong,” before dying moments later.&nbsp; Horowitz wasn’t there—the manager told him about it—but while he feels even today the terror she felt in those seconds, he is able to notice the impersonal voice she assumed at this terminal moment.&nbsp; It typified her habit of always trying “to hide herself and avoid unnecessary embarrassment,” he remarks (15).</li>
		<li>
			While the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2011/anti-muslim-inner-circle">Southern Poverty Law Center in 2011 listed Horowitz</a> among the ten most prominent anti-Islam “hard-liners” in the United States, in an eight-page commentary on mass murderer Mohammed Atta Horowitz manages to treat him in fully human terms as a person with understandable desire for the good and the pure, but carried to maniacal lengths.&nbsp; Yes, he was a zealot, but “Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not.&nbsp; We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked” (47).&nbsp; Indeed, up until his flight into the north tower of the World Trade Center, Atta lived a quiet and modest, if unhappy, existence.&nbsp; “He appears to have been an ordinary man who was seduced into committing a great crime in the name of a greater good,” Horowitz comments with what we sense is an insinuation about his own youth.&nbsp; “Is this not the most common theme of the human tragedies of our time?” (51).</li>
		<li>
			The home page of Frontpagemag quotes Horowitz declaring, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” but Morality and Faith explains that it’s not just a case of people of evil intent finding the courage to overcome moral restraints.&nbsp; No, the vehement progressive believes firmly in his moral mandate. &nbsp;His inner dictator has the highest aspirations—the end of human misery, the dream of a better world.&nbsp; “This is the paradox of a redeemed future,” Horowitz concludes in a section on Soviet tyranny.&nbsp; “The more beautiful the dream, the more necessary and more total the crime” (55).</li>
		<li>
			Horowitz has a guardian angel, his wife April, whose faith challenges his dim agnosticism again and again.&nbsp; She is there during his surgeries and recoveries, driving him to events, teaching him to honor his mother, revealing to him the souls of animals, and begging him “not to thrust the darkest of my philosophical thoughts in her direction” (160).&nbsp; She also “refuses to hear my reflections about the cosmic emptiness toward which we are all headed” (163).&nbsp; She may even believe in ghosts, in one episode convincing Horowitz that they have been visited by the spirit of his deceased daughter during a lunch one day.&nbsp; It’s funny.&nbsp; For decades, leftists in media and academia and advocacy organizations have been trying to get Horowitz to shut up.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2019/05/08/horowitz-suspended-twitter-twice-two-days">Twitter briefly banned him twice</a> in May; last August, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/34955/visa-mastercard-block-donations-david-horowitz-paul-bois">VISA and MasterCard blocked donations</a> to the Freedom Center after complaints from the Southern Poverty Law Center.&nbsp; Those setbacks haven’t slowed Horowitz much at all, but here we have the person who shares his bed, his beloved, doing just that, meeting every word and thought of the ex-radical with what his father would have regarded as greeting-card sentimentalism.&nbsp; And he submits.</li>
	</ul>

	
		And so on.&nbsp; The personal and the political mingle fluidly in these reflections, which may be what happens when you reach a certain age and realize that the principles you adopted in your youth didn’t have an origin quite as abstract and principled as you thought.&nbsp; At one point, while discussing his father’s idolatry of Stalin, which “millions of decent souls” shared, Horowitz ties their faith to deep anxiety over life’s uncertainties (he takes the Jewish condition of homelessness and persecution as exemplary).&nbsp; To acknowledge the fear-full sources of grand political visions and the hero-worship they inspire, he implies, is wisdom.&nbsp; It doesn’t necessarily invalidate those visions, but it does entail a more honest accounting of their purpose.&nbsp;

	
		“But if you were to ask them,” Horowitz says of his father and the vast troupe of true believers in the worker’s paradise, “not a single one of these enlightened souls would concede any connection between their personal anxieties and their social agendas” (53).&nbsp; Their theorists assured them that their commitment was “scientific,” as if Marx and his followers had figured out the workings of history and had become more empirical, more reality-based, than liberals and capitalists could ever be.&nbsp; In truth, Horowitz concludes, they sunk ever further into delusion, especially when they denied the very faith-based wellsprings of their dream: “They would be repelled by the idea that the progressive fantasy is really the expression of a religious desire” (53).

	
		Mortality and Faith is a confession of precisely this: in whatever direction they flow, our politics mingle private desires with social practices, the parents we had and people we marry with the books we read and ideas we absorb, existential worries with ethical arguments.&nbsp; However just and proper and obvious a political goal appears, we must wonder, too, about the essentially religious satisfaction it yields.&nbsp; Apart from any material gain it produces, what human disquiet does pursuing that goal resolve?

	
		The progressives who deny this all-too-human, semi-irrational origin of political visions are at it again.&nbsp; <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reparations-slavery-house-hearing-tanehisi-coates_n_5d0235eae4b0304a120ab01a">Democrats in Congress have just announced</a> that they plan to hold hearings on reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, ennobling their design with talk of “restorative justice”.&nbsp;

	
		We may be sure, however, that these proceedings will devolve straight off into a carnival of white guilt.&nbsp; The goal will not be the patient formulation of policy recommendations.&nbsp; It will be what we have seen before: finger-pointing, victim-identifying, virtue-signaling, and race-hustling.&nbsp; The point will be to work off ressentiment, not to devise legislation.&nbsp; None of the organizers will admit how much they relish the chance to knock white America.

	
		Bernie Sanders, too, doesn’t acknowledge anything smacking of instinct and anxiety in politics.&nbsp; He won’t admit the personal animus behind his socialism.&nbsp; In <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-socialism-capitalism-2020/">a recent interview</a> with The Nation, Sanders explained it in the most benign, sympathetic, charitable terms.&nbsp; “Democratic socialism” is premised on the simplest humane conditions:

	<blockquote>
		
			the right to a decent job, a job that pays you at least a living wage. We’re talking about the right to quality health care for every man, woman, and child. Health care is a right, not a privilege. We’re talking about affordable housing. That means everybody in America should be able to live in decent, safe housing that is affordable . . . &nbsp;a decent retirement for our parents . . . &nbsp;the right to a clean environment . . .
	</blockquote>

	
		Who could argue with such selfless axioms?

	
		Horowitz is living testimony to that dangerous simplicity.&nbsp; I think that he has taken up the autobiographical mode in order not only to render the full truth of himself, which his opponents have tirelessly distorted.&nbsp; He has exposed himself in order to expose the impersonal, altruistic mode of the dreamy progressive as a sham, be it conscious or unconscious.&nbsp;

	
		Mortality and Faith contains many poignant and tender, troubling and regretful, pictures of one man’s eventful and conflict-ridden existence.&nbsp; The tales and portraits make for nonstop reading.&nbsp; But the book has a critical function, too.&nbsp; Politics are partly moral and partly utilitarian.&nbsp; Justice and practicality are part of the stew, to be sure.&nbsp; But there is an experiential element to political opinion and action as well—your domineering father, perhaps, or your sexual appeal, or the way you’ve made money, or how strongly you feel the shadow of death . . .&nbsp; Horowitz has invited people into his life so that they may see why he believes what he believes.&nbsp; Some people do the opposite, shying away from the question, “What religious or personal need do your politics meet?”&nbsp; They may reject the very notion that their politics are personal in any way.&nbsp; They are the dangerous ones.

	
		Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University, editor of FirstThings.com, and author of The Dumbest Generation.
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Horowitz on “Mortality and Faith”

[Order David Horowitz's new book, Mortality &amp; Faith: Reflections on a Journey through Time.] 

	
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