
Mark Tapson is the Shillman Journalism Fellow on Popular Culture at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


Mark Tapson

The media is <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/05/26/gun-deaths-children-america">pushing</a> this misleading CDC press release because it fits the gun control agenda after the latest school shooting.

<blockquote>
	
		Firearms were the&nbsp;leading cause of death&nbsp;for kids one and older for the first time in 2020, the most recent year for which&nbsp;CDC data&nbsp;is available.

	
		Why it matters:&nbsp;The firearm death rate among children is steadily rising, as more kids are involved in gun-related homicides like Tuesday's&nbsp;mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas,&nbsp;as well as suicides and accidents.
</blockquote>


	Yeah, no.


	The CDC <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761">release</a> to the New England Journal of Medicine, which normally loves to talk up racial demographics in the name of equity, buries them in its appendix. Here's what those look like.


	<img height="519" width="571" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2022/05/cdc_appendix_1.png" alt="" />


	Those aren't school shootings, they're the black nationalists of Black Lives Matter at work.&nbsp;


	Crime shot up due to pro-crime measures, like police defunding and bail elimination, as well as the massive BLM riots. But the impact among most groups, including white people, was limited.


	There was however a massive increase in the already staggeringly high death rate among black kids.


	But this just means that the CDC's numbers for black kids are in line with <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/black-lives-matter-killed-2000-black-people-daniel-greenfield/">black men in general</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Homicide doesn't even make the CDC's&nbsp;top 10 causes&nbsp;of death for men in America, but it's number four for black men. In 2017, it caused 5% of the deaths of black men, more than strokes, diabetes, or most diseases. The only things more likely to kill black men than black-on-black crime are heart disease, cancer, and accidents.

	
		Among black men under the age of 20, homicide is the leading cause of death at 35.3%.

	
		It's also the leading cause of death for black men from 20-44 years old at 27.6%.

	
		Only at the age of 65 does homicide drop out of the top 10 causes of death for black men.
</blockquote>


	Since we can't blame "white supremacy" for this, we also can't talk about it.&nbsp;


	And the CDC buries this data inside the overall numbers for kids and then tries to act like school shootings, a rare event, have suddenly made guns a leading cause of death for kids.


	Look for the media to keep pushing this same lie, blaming guns, instead of crime and its BLM enablers.

CDC Releases Numbers Showing BLM is Killing Black Kids

The media is pushing this misleading CDC press release because it fits the gun control agenda after the latest school shooting.


	
		Firearms were the

CDC Releases Numbers Showing BLM is Killing Black Kids

Why did school shootings go from being a rare horror to an ongoing phenomenon? A big part of the puzzle is the Columbine Massacre.


	While there were school shootings before Columbine, the media frenzy, the live coverage, was a sea change, and police have often found that school shooters studied the Columbine psychos and wanted to be like them.


	We know mass shooters imitate each other and inspire copycat attacks. That's why school shootings<a href="https://www.center4research.org/copy-cats-kill/"> continue to pop up</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		In the month that followed, 400 related incidents were reported across the country. Students called in bomb threats and praised the shooters’ actions. Some schools feared additional shootings and shut down temporarily.

	
		In 2007, a Virginia Tech student killed 32 students and faculty at the university. Prior to the shooting, he expressed a desire in writing to repeat the shooting at Columbine. Since then, many shooters have cited the Virginia Tech gunman as an inspiration and others have threatened to kill more than the 32 victims killed.

	
		Studies indicate that the more media attention a shooter gets, the more likely the event will inspire a future mass shooter. For example, a 2015 study found that after a mass shooting, there was an increased chance of another one occurring in the next 13 days.&nbsp;A 2017 study found that media coverage of a mass shooting may increase the frequency and lethality of future shootings for much longer than two weeks.
</blockquote>


	The media knows perfectly well <a href="http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2013/02/the-wrong-track.html">the impact that it has</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Suicides spike after front page coverage of a suicide. After Marilyn Monroe's death, 197 more people killed themselves than the statistical norm. Suicides rise even after fictional suicides on soap operas. And murders are also influenced by the coverage of real and fictional murders.
</blockquote>


	The internet makes the genie harder to put back in the bottle, but the media doesn't even try.


	Columbine broke the unspoken rule about covering teenage suicides to avoid the copycat effect. The media breaks it every time since while blaming Republicans for not abolishing the Bill of Rights. The media understands perfectly well that it's promoting similar mass killings and it wants that to happen because it helps its agenda.

The Media's Obsession With School Shootings is Killing Kids

Why did school shootings go from being a rare horror to an ongoing phenomenon? A big part of the puzzle is the Columbine Massacre.


	While there were

The Media's Obsession With School Shootings is Killing Kids

“The Second Amendment is not absolute. When it was passed you couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons. There’s just always been limitations," Biden <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/3501244-the-haunting-reason-congress-wont-pass-sensible-gun-laws/">insisted</a>, during remarks exploiting the mass shooting in Texas.


	The thing about Biden is that he tells the same lies, gets called on it, and does it again.&nbsp;


	He does it when talking about his own made-up biography and when discussing America.&nbsp;


	Biden's dumb "cannon" line has been repeatedly fact-checked to death even by mainstream media outlets.


	Here's Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/28/bidens-false-claim-that-2nd-amendment-bans-cannon-ownership/">dealing with</a> this same Biden line last year.

<blockquote>
	
		“And I might add: The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn’t buy a cannon.”
</blockquote>


	As Kessler noted then, "In this case, he repeated a claim — that Americans were prohibited from owning cannons — that has already been&nbsp;fact-checked as false&nbsp;when he made it during the presidential campaign."


	Variations of this same lie had already been fact-checked by lefty fact-checkers like Politifact. That's how completely groundless it is.


	And yet it says something that Biden and, quite likely, his staffers won't stop pushing the same lie. And that there's no actual accountability for it. When the media disagreed with something Trump said, they made a spectacle of it, they would assemble lists of what they claimed were lies and declared that political norms were being violated.


	Nothing like that for Biden, who we're told never lies, just "misspeaks". Again and again and again.

Biden Lies About Gun Control Again

“The Second Amendment is not absolute. When it was passed you couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons. There’s just always been

Wokeness is a symptom of brokeness. The harder they virtue signal, the worse they are at doing their jobs.


	Anyone who thought that San Francisco schools were going to dump the absurd wokeness and focus on education has <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/SFUSD-drops-the-word-chief-from-job-titles-17199311.php">another thing</a> coming.

<blockquote>
	
		The word “chief” will no longer be used in reference to job titles in the San Francisco Unified School District in an effort, school officials said, to avoid the word’s connotation with Native Americans.
</blockquote>


	One can only imagine how the parents who watched their children's education<a href="https://sfstandard.com/education/new-data-show-s-f-public-school-students-slipped-further-behind-amid-pandemic/"> get nuked</a> feel about the exciting new SFUSD focus.

<blockquote>
	
		In math, every student group saw a drop in proficiency from the year prior, though some drops were more pronounced. Thirty-eight percent of African American students were marked “Proficient or above” in 2020-21, down from 46% one year earlier. Pacific Islander students with “Proficient of above” math marks dropped to 47% from 60%. District-wide proficiency was at 67%, down from 74%.
</blockquote>


	Now it's fixed though.


	If the scores drop anymore, teachers will get another raise, SFUSD will spend a fortune on equity consultants and rename some schools.&nbsp;


	That's bound to work, chief.

SF School System Solves 38% Black Student Proficiency Problem With Wokeness

Wokeness is a symptom of brokeness. The harder they virtue signal, the worse they are at doing their jobs.


	Anyone who thought that San Francisco schools

SF School System Solves 38% Black Student Proficiency Problem With Wokeness

Another way of reading this is that the majority party has abandoned its legislative agenda and will govern through executive orders while trying to hold test votes on whatever outrage is trending right now.


	Is this supposed to turn the public against Republicans?


	Since no one pays attention to Senate&nbsp;votes, mostly it's a stop-loss effort to placate furious Dem donors.


	Schumer tried this with abortion and it didn't go anywhere. Next up, <a href="https://thehill.com/news/senate/3502557-schumer-vows-to-force-vote-on-gun-control-legislation-after-memorial-day-recess/">guns, guns, guns</a>.

<blockquote>
	
		Senate Majority Leader&nbsp;Charles Schumer&nbsp;(D-N.Y.) told colleagues Thursday morning that they should be prepared to vote on gun control legislation when they return to Washington next month after the Memorial Day recess, promising a showdown with Republicans after mass shootings in New York and Texas this month left 31 people dead.
</blockquote>


	Next&nbsp;week, it'll be more BLM or #MeToo or whatever is trending in the media right now.


	This is what virtue signaling defeatism looks like.


	Schumer is announcing his own irrelevance.

Schumer Will Continue Holding Meaningless Votes on Whatever Issue is Trending Right Now

Another way of reading this is that the majority party has abandoned its legislative agenda and will govern through executive orders while trying to hold test

Schumer Will Continue Holding Meaningless Votes on Whatever Issue is Trending Right Now

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	<a href="https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/team-biden-finally-admits-theres-a-war-on-cops/">Writing last month in the New York Post</a>, Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald noted that even the Biden Justice Department has finally acknowledged there is a war on cops underway in America. &nbsp;FBI Director Christopher Wray declared on CBS’s 60 Minutes that in 2021 there was a 59% increase in cop murders – nearly one every five days – driven by what Mac Donald calls “a national rhetoric of cop hatred and racial animosity.”


	In this hostile environment, comic book writer and artist <a href="https://bloodyredbaron.com/">Mike Baron</a> (The Flash, Nexus, Star Wars, and The Punisher), winner of two Eisner Awards (the comic industry equivalent of the Oscars) teamed up with active-duty police officer&nbsp;Joseph Arnold&nbsp;(on pencils and layouts) and illustrator Jeff Slemons to create Thin Blue Line, a police-positive graphic novel which&nbsp;follows officer Valeria Baca and her partner Bob Mack as they fight for their community and their own survival amid rioting in the streets.


	“It’s not polemic, and definitely isn’t a cop recruitment book,” Baron noted. "It’s just a thrilling action drama, similar in many ways to elements my fans may recall from the five years I wrote The Punisher, which were grittier and more realistic than most mainstream superhero comics.”


	<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/holding-thin-blue-line-mark-tapson/">I wrote previously for FrontPage Mag, last November</a>, how Baron chose to crowdfund the project after the concept was rejected by major publishers, who were repulsed by a story line that presented cops as heroes rather than villains. Since then, the response on its Indiegogo page was tremendous. Thin Blue Line earned nearly three times its goal.


	“I was shocked at how easily we beat our modest crowdfunding goal,” editor Chris Braly says. “Mike's fans, as well as the law enforcement community, came out in a big way on Indiegogo. We’re at the printer now and expect to ship in mid-June. Latecomers still have a chance to own a first printing of 'Thin Blue Line' by visiting <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thin-blue-line-the-graphic-novel-by-mike-baron#/">thinbluelinecomics.com</a> and grabbing a copy of what’s destined to be a VERY rare comic.”


	The book’s penciller Arnold, a police officer, added, “I was eager to show another side of policing. The story emphasizes family, interpersonal dynamics, and shows police officers from many different backgrounds. I've put my heart into every page, and hope it has a positive impact on policing.”


	I asked Mike Baron some questions about Thin Blue Line.


	Mark Tapson: Mike, can you flesh things out about Thin Blue Line for readers – its storyline and characters, and your purpose behind creating it?


	Mike Baron: Thin Blue Line is about two cops trying to survive a night of riots. It was inspired by the summer of 2020 where dozens of cities were under siege, thousands of small businesses destroyed, hundreds murdered, millions in damages, and out front, a proud news reader explaining these were “mostly peaceful” protests. Then tapeworms, by which I mean people who have seized power through demagoguery, called for defunding the police. My reaction was, “What the fuck?” You're either for the rule of law or you're not. Without the rule of law we have...we have what we had in the summer of 2020.


	MT: Tell us about the support you received from law enforcement, and by contrast, what happened when you, a longtime successful veteran in the field, approached publishers about the concept?


	MB: Police officers contacted me from all over the country expressing gratitude. It was inspiring. We submitted the book to over a dozen publishers and the responses ranged from “not our brand” to “fuck the police.”


	MT: The crowdfunding campaign apparently went extraordinarily well...


	MB: After <a href="https://video.foxnews.com/v/6290765909001#sp=show-clips">I appeared on Fox News</a>, we did very well. Many publications expressed interest as well, including FrontPage Mag, The Federalist, the National Police Association, and some others.


	MT: Tell us what you did on behalf of Thin Blue Line for National Police Week, which runs from May 15-21.


	MB: We gave thousands of dollars to three charities: <a href="https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fadoptacopbjj.org%2F&amp;data=05%7C01%7C%7Cb7ba535337674a71795a08da39345c32%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637885194297849651%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=zW7jwV9ZEf4jbD%2F1ebDRIFw8dxDcixkVkYW1ckaB378%3D&amp;reserved=0" target="_blank">Adopt A Cop BJJ</a>, which trains officers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu; the <a href="https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnleomf.org%2F&amp;data=05%7C01%7C%7Cb7ba535337674a71795a08da39345c32%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637885194297849651%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=YtzgXhCUNNOTHxRWnKi4wLiMPQGaMkDWYG%2FBQQOMxhA%3D&amp;reserved=0" target="_blank">National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund</a>, which improves officer safety and honors the fallen; and <a href="https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalfof.org%2F&amp;data=05%7C01%7C%7Cb7ba535337674a71795a08da39345c32%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637885194297849651%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=LDVBmUNczYi1GKctWmAR5tzLgdfxQhruSGrH93QZQV0%3D&amp;reserved=0" target="_blank">the National Fallen Officer Foundation</a>, which helps families of officers slain in the line of duty.


	MT: That’s a testament to your respect for law enforcement. What’s the latest on Thin Blue Line and when can readers get hold of it? 


	MB: We would have fulfilled by now, but like half the independent comics in the U.S., we're at the tail end of a traffic jam that leads with the high school yearbooks. The publisher has to do the high school yearbooks first. I say Fie! on the high school yearbooks! We will ship Thin Blue Line in June.


	MT: Congratulations, Mike, we’ll be looking forward to it.

Drawing the Thin Blue Line

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Writing last month in the New York Post, Manhattan Institute

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Before the news media focused everyone’s attention on Ukraine as the world’s flashpoint of democracy in peril, that flashpoint was rightfully centered on Hong Kong, where a courageous pro-democracy movement rebelled against the oppressive, communist Chinese regime. That rebellion is still ongoing, and still being suppressed. Just this week, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, retired Cardinal Bishop of Hong Kong and one of the world’s leading human rights activists, <a href="https://www.crisismagazine.com/2022/all-eyes-on-the-vatican-after-cardinal-zens-arrest">was arrested in Hong Kong</a> with three others as trustees of an organization that helps local democracy activists pay their legal fees. The trustees’ crime was “collusion with foreign forces,” part of a new security law implemented last year by Beijing to crush the protests in the former British colony, which has been under Chinese control since 1997.&nbsp;


	Few Western conservatives can write as intimately and knowledgeably about Hong Kong and its people as the late writer Bruce Herschensohn, whose final book has just been published by <a href="https://www.beaufortbooks.com/">Beaufort Books</a>*. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Profile-Hong-Kong-Current-Maintaining/dp/0825309492/">A Profile of Hong Kong</a>, subtitled “During Times Past, Times Current, and its Quest of a Future Maintaining Hong Kong’s Liberty,” is composed of Bruce’s personal reflections upon, and historical analysis of, one of the most highly-developed, densely-populated cities in the world, one in which the people yearn for freedom from the communist yoke and look to America as their inspiration (you will recall that the protesters in 2019-2020 waved the Stars and Stripes and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” together). His insights stem from 37 trips to Hong Kong made annually from 1960 through the British handover of the city in 1997, and they include his thoughts on what he calls “the frightening days and nights” when thousands of protesters were arrested and many brutalized by excessive police force.


	The extraordinarily accomplished Herschensohn had a long and distinguished career in political analysis as a senior fellow at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, former Distinguished Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Fellow at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, and former Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics. He received the Distinguished Service Medal, served as Deputy Special Assistant to President Nixon, was selected as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in the Federal Government, traveled to over ninety countries, and even worked with Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He authored such books as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/An-American-Amnesia-Surrenders-ebook/dp/B0043D2CF6/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1349832462&amp;sr=1-2">An American Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia</a>; <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Above-Empyrean-Islamic-Terrorism-ebook/dp/B007TK77I2/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1349832462&amp;sr=1-3">Above Empyrean: A Novel of the Final Days of the War on Islamic Terrorism</a>; and the 2012 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Obamas-Globe-Presidents-Abandonment-Allies/dp/082530685X/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1349832462&amp;sr=1-1">Obama’s Globe: A President’s Abandonment of US Allies Around the World</a>, a concise and hard-hitting indictment of former President Barack Obama’s disastrous foreign policy (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag <a href="https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/obamas-global-epic-fail-mark-tapson/">here</a>).


	Herschensohn passed away in December 2020 and was <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/bruce-herschensohn-rip-michael-finch/">eulogized at FrontPage Mag</a> by Horowitz Freedom Center President Michael Finch, who wrote this of the conservative stalwart:


	What many don’t remember or know about Bruce is that he was also an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, wrote classical music scores, was a longtime teacher of politics, most recently at Pepperdine University, and served under four Presidents: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon as a Deputy Special Assistant, and as part of Ronald Reagan’s transition team in 1980. He also was the author of numerous books and countless articles during several decades as a columnist.


	Most of all, Bruce was simply one of the kindest, humblest, and nicest people that one could meet. He was the epitome of class, always with a positive outlook on life and a kind word.


	Those characteristics, as well as Bruce’s compassion for the Hong Kong freedom-lovers whom he calls “the angels of our times,” are in evidence on virtually every page of A Profile of Hong Kong. “The inhabitants of Hong Kong prove on a daily basis that no one knows better what to do with liberty than those who have lived under an absence of liberty,” he writes.


	Herschensohn’s short but densely informative book begins, as the chapter heading indicates, “Looking Centuries Back in Hong Kong” and progresses through the city’s uniquely interesting history up to the aforementioned pro-democracy protests in 2019-2020. In short chapters along the way he covers such topics as “The Cultural Revolutions of 1966-1976,” “Margaret Thatcher vs. Deng Xiaoping,” “How Hong Kong Became a Beacon of Liberty,” “The Tiananmen Square Massacre,” “The Midnight of Broken Promises” detailing the sorrowful British handover of the colony to the Chinese regime, and the period thereafter when the territory lacked the underpinning of Western support, in “Hong Kong Without a Net.”


	Amid his recounting of Hong Kong history are such gems as details of the Tiananmen Square massacre and what he calls “one of the most incredible end-of-a-war stories ever to take place”: the tale of a flag of Great Britain hidden by a British citizen when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941. The citizen was sent to a prisoner of war camp but in August 1945 escaped, retrieved the flag, and raised it in defiance of the Japanese occupation. As it turns out, and as Herschensohn explains, that act saved Hong Kong for the British, and had it not, Hong Kong’s “triumph of freedom and free enterprise, including the most magnificent skyline in the world, would never have existed.”


	Regarding present-day Hong Kong, Bruce laments that “those who are currently [in 2020] being taken through the streets of Beijing are being sent to be ‘tried’ for ‘crimes’ against [President] Xi Jinping’s demands.” They are “the angels of our times” who “cherish future liberties for all Hong Kong people and for all those who want to join them in being free without… liberty ever being taken away again.”


	In the epilogue Bruce closes the book with an expression of gratitude to its readers, and an endearing apology: “If I editorialized at times within this book, I am sorry.” Then, in an amusing afterthought a few pages later: “But not very sorry.”


	As Beaufort Books publisher Eric Kampmann notes at the beginning of the book, he “had complete trust that [Herschensohn] would bring respect, discernment, and expertise when telling Hong Kong’s turbulent story.” And he certainly did. To understand where the territory stands today and where it may be headed, anyone who cares about the fate of those pro-American, pro-capitalist Hong Kong protesters risking their lives for freedom, must begin with Bruce Herschensohn’s slim but enlightening book, A Profile of Hong Kong.


	* Beaufort Books will generously donate 50% of the book’s net proceeds to a&nbsp;scholarship fund in Bruce Herschensohn’s name.

Hong Kong Without a Net

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Before the news media focused everyone’s attention on

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Hundreds of righteously concerned parents gathered recently outside the Walt Disney Company’s Burbank, California, headquarters <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/boycott-disney-chants-as-hundreds-of-protesters-outside-california-hq/ar-AAVXHKL?ocid=uxbndlbing">to protest</a> the corporation’s woke stance on gender ideology. The following weekend, Moms For America <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mother-advocacy-group-plans-disney-protest-over-stance-on-parental-rights-bill">hosted a rally</a> at Florida’s Disney World for the same reason. Now a mainstream media outlet has finally chimed in to warn its readers about the insidious political indoctrination of children – by conservatives.


	CNN’s website recently featured an opinion piece by Nicole Hemmer titled, “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/07/opinions/children-literature-disney-desantis-tuttle-twins-hemmer/index.html">The right-wing children’s entertainment complex is upon us</a>,” which attempts to discredit conservative efforts to counter the leftist brainwashing of children that is widespread throughout America’s schools and the entertainment industry. Hemmer, an associate research scholar at Columbia University with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project and the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, paints such efforts as paranoid, cynical, exploitative, insular, and bigoted, while pretending the culture war being waged on impressionable young minds by the left is nothing more than a right-wing fantasy.


	The essay is couched in phrasing which suggests that conservatives are “hand-wringing” about nothing (“conservatives claim”; “what the right sees as liberal indoctrination”; “supposed liberal indoctrination,” etc.). She never acknowledges that parents have legitimate concerns about identity politics being inculcated in schoolrooms and through children’s entertainment programming. Instead, she implies that the rise of conservative alternatives to such cultural Marxism stems from paranoia and greed.


	As an example, she cites the successful <a href="https://tuttletwins.com/">Tuttle Twins</a> series of libertarian children’s books which, according to its website, “teach students the values of a free society—ideas that support your family values” [emphasis in original] and which “help children develop critical thinking skills about real-world concepts” like the free market. That sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to America’s current scholastic environment, where devout social justice activists masquerading as educators sow racial division and gender confusion among schoolkids as young as kindergartners.


	Hemmer goes on to mention <a href="https://www.axios.com/children-books-focusing-on-conservative-icons-6a945b7f-13b5-495b-8f66-4e96166e705c.html">the "Heroes of Liberty" series</a> for middle-schoolers (biographies of conservative icons like Margaret Thatcher), the Brave Books series authored by prominent conservatives like Dana Loesch, history-for-kids books by the late Rush Limbaugh, and what Hemmer calls “an array of anti-trans books.” (They are not “anti-trans,” but if you oppose the current leftist push to encourage gender confusion in vulnerable young minds and even assist children in mutilating their bodies against parental opposition, you obviously must be a transphobic bigot.)


	Hemmer points to the growing success of this trend as evidence that “many on the right know that it’s not just good for their politics, but their pocketbooks, too.” Nowhere does Hemmer mention that the authors profiting most handsomely from the political indoctrination of children are on the left, such as mega-bestselling race hustler Ibram X. Kendi, author of Anti-Racist Baby, which teaches your baby to be racist. Kendi (whose real name is the much less-exotic Ibram Henry Rogers) rakes in at least $25,000 per speaking engagement to tell white audiences they are racist, especially if they think they aren’t racist. <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/09/exclusive-ibram-x-kendi-raked-in-45k-from-university-of-wisconsin-made-school-delete-lecture/">He was recently paid</a> $45,000 by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to train faculty and students how to be anti-racist – meaning, how to view themselves and literally every aspect of society through a racial lens. It sounds like Kendi’s work is pretty good for his pocketbook too, but Hemmer would have you believe greed is a right-wing phenomenon.


	Hemmer doesn’t address the obvious point that the reason such alternatives are finding success is because there is a massive, under-served audience among parents and children for alternatives to the Left’s divisive indoctrination. She notes instead that these alternatives “coincide with the current right-wing attacks on schools and children's entertainment that conservatives claim are sites of political and sexual indoctrination.” [Emphasis added] In fact, conservatives are not attacking schools or children’s entertainment – we are protesting the “fundamental transformation” (as Barack Obama would put it) of those arenas into indoctrination mills that churn out social justice cultists devoid of critical thinking skills.


	Add to the trend of conservative children’s books the Daily Wire's vow to spend $100 million on conservative children's programming, Hemmer writes, “and you have the emergence of a full-on right-wing children’s entertainment complex. Its sole mission: to fight what the right sees as liberal indoctrination with some indoctrination of its own.”


	As other examples of this burgeoning cultural threat from the Right, she also cites PragerU “as a right-wing alternative to the rest of higher education” and radio host Dan Bongino, who exhorts his listeners to build “a parallel media economy.”


	She doesn’t explain that the reason PragerU has exploded in internet popularity is because what she calls higher education has degenerated over the decades into anti-Western political conformity. Colleges and universities are now safe spaces for the woke where conservative students are demonized and <a href="https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/04/11/go-capture-her-crazed-woke-mob-pursues-buffalo-u-student-who-invited-black-republican-to-speak-1224522/">literally targeted by mobs</a> that rival the Chinese Red Guard in vicious ideological fervor; where conservative viewpoints are shut out by biased professors; and where the West’s extraordinary cultural legacy is trashed as racist oppression. PragerU is one of a rising number of alternatives where young people can hear a viewpoint they will never hear in college classrooms.


	As for Bongino and “a parallel media economy”: Hemmer fails to note that conservatives have to resort to creating their own economic network in order to thrive financially because their channels on platforms such as YouTube are demonetized by woke totalitarians.


	“Right-wing media aimed at children today is… an effort to develop a fully separate and comprehensive entertainment industry,” Hemmer continues. “The goal is to seal conservatives' children off from a broader culture, to protect them from supposed liberal indoctrination by getting a head start on conservative indoctrination.” [Emphasis added]


	Hemmer is right – to a certain extent. The aim of right-wing media today is not so much to isolate children from the broader culture as to cultivate a parallel culture which reflects our own values that honor the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, because the “broader culture” that Progressives have shaped over the last half-century is irredeemably toxic. Neo-Marxist to the core, the broader culture is anti-family, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Constitution, anti-liberty, anti-science, and anti-truth. It surpasses Sodom and Gomorrah in its demonic decadence, and it is headed toward surpassing Stalinist Russia in its determination to eradicate anyone and anything that does not conform to its totalitarian worldview.


	Nicole Hemmer's CNN piece concludes that “we can expect to see more fights over schools and cartoons and board books for toddlers and more invocations of ‘brainwashing’ and ‘grooming’ as well.” She is correct about that as well. Because while we build that thriving, parallel culture, there will be more fights over the Left’s agenda to sexually and ideologically indoctrinate our children. Conservatives have finally had enough. To paraphrase Network's Howard Beale, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRuS3dxKK9U">we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore</a>.

CNN Frets That Children Are Being Brainwashed – by Conservatives

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Hundreds of righteously concerned parents gathered recently

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	What is the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth? About six months.


	Vindicated conservatives have been circulating that meme on the internet in the wake of being proven correct about every single thing the Left has denied over the last couple of years as nutty, right-wing conspiracy theories: from the Wuhan lab origins of the coronavirus, to Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, to the existence of a shadow government known as the Deep State (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States">the Wikipedia entry for the Deep State</a> insists four times in the first four sentences that this notion is a debunked conspiracy theory).


	The Deep State, or “Swamp,” not only exists, but has roots reaching much farther back than just the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outsider status and populist appeal posed an unprecedented threat to the many-tentacled shadow government. That is the subject of the must-read new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dragonslayers-Six-Presidents-Their-Swamp/dp/1637581882/">Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War With the Swamp</a>, by the prolific historian Larry Schweikart. Dr. Schweikart’s previous works include, among others, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Reagan-American-President-Larry-Schweikart/dp/1642930822/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?crid=Q324CBTZBE1Z&amp;keywords=reagan+the+american+president+by+larry+schweikart&amp;qid=1557395247&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=Reagan%3A+The+American+President%2Caps%2C334&amp;sr=8-1-fkmrnull">Reagan: The American President</a> (about which I previously interviewed him <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273728/american-president-mark-tapson">here</a>), <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Lies-About-American-History/dp/1595230564/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=">48 Liberal Lies About American History</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Patriots-History-United-States-Entitlement/dp/1595231153/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QL1GQ49TM8HH&amp;keywords=a+patriots+history+of+the+united+states&amp;qid=1557452939&amp;s=gateway&amp;sprefix=A+Patriot%E2%80%99s+History+of+the+United+States%2Caps%2C256&amp;sr=8-1">A Patriot’s History of the United States</a> (co-written with Michael Allen).


	(That last title, by the way, is a much-needed antidote to the radical propagandist Howard Zinn’s poisonous, subversive People’s History of the United States, which has infected nearly every schoolroom in America for the last four decades. If only Schweikart’s book had been taught as widely since its publication in 2004, then perhaps we wouldn’t be reeling from the violent anti-Americanism of a couple of generations of youth brainwashed to despise our country, its values, and its Constitution.)


	In addition to his numerous books, you can read Dr. Schweikart’s current political commentary at <a href="https://larrys.substack.com/">his Substack account here</a>, and check out his <a href="https://www.wildworldofhistory.com/">Wild World of History site</a> as well – an invaluable resource for teaching the truth about history.


	<img height="2113" width="1400" style="width: 300px; height: 450px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2022/03/dragon_cover.jpg" alt="" />


	Dragonslayers, released today, examines the struggles of half a dozen American Presidents who confronted their particular iterations of the entrenched Deep State. Those six are Abraham Lincoln, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and of course, Trump, who had campaigned on the promise to “drain the Swamp,” by which he originally meant lobbyists. But the Swamp ran layers deeper within the government than he had anticipated.


	In his introduction, Schweikart observes that “for almost 200 years Americans have been at war with one group of elites or another. These groups have embraced positions from supporting slavery to seeking governance by a corporatist network to policy by an agency whose purpose is to remain secret.” By the 21st century this Swamp had “united the law enforcement agencies, the military, and much of corporate America under its control along with media, entertainment, and tech giants.”


	In chapters titled after the various versions of the Swamp with which these men wrestled (“Abraham Lincoln and the Slave Swamp,” “Teddy Roosevelt and the Trust Swamp,” “John F. Kennedy and the CIA Swamp,” etc.), Schweikart explores and evaluates how each president dealt with this faceless challenge.


	Of the six men, Schweikart deems the earlier three – Lincoln, Cleveland, and Roosevelt – to be the most successful in combating the Swamp. Lincoln, Schweikart says, was in fact “the only one of our six presidents to achieve a knockout over a swamp foe,” for “[s]lavery would never again exist in America.” Cleveland was at least “moderately successful” with a “Spoils Swamp” that was “far less bloody, but much more difficult to control and terminate.” The trust-busting Roosevelt was temporarily successful at regulating the Trust Swamp. Cleveland and Roosevelt both “found their enemies more slippery, less easy to attack legally, and well-supported and financed” in comparison to the Swamp Lincoln conquered.


	But the Deep State continued to grow in power and size over time and thus, by contrast with the first three Presidents, the chapters on JFK, Reagan, and Trump are gathered under the heading, “Failures.” When JFK took office, he discovered that he could not control the Central Intelligence Agency, which after World War II had taken on “a life of its own when it came to dictating foreign policy. Using coups, assassinations, and other covert means seldom with the direct approval of a president, the CIA literally changed foreign governments and directed events abroad in ways that a president, such as John Kennedy, could be hemmed into a policy such as the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs.” Kennedy ultimately even found that he needed the agency for his own purposes.


	Reagan came into office with the aim of reducing the size of a massive, unelected government bureaucracy. Indeed, Schweikart notes that it was Reagan’s third-highest priority behind restoring the American economy and rebuilding the military to counter the Soviet threat. But the administrative state had already grown “so large and powerful that it literally wrote its own laws, had its own armed police forces, and stood beyond Congress’s ability to control it... Courts gave these agencies the widest of latitudes, enabling them to wield a power the Founders never intended.” Reagan barely made a dent in the monolith. “The closest thing to eternal life I have seen on the earth is a government agency,” he quipped.


	Trump’s arrival in the Oval Office triggered the Deep State “into full ‘resistance’ mode to stop his every policy. Never in our history had so many unelected despots tried to undo the results of a legitimate election,” Schweikart writes. They failed with the 2016 election but, thanks to “outright election tampering by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites” and the collaboration of an activist news media, they succeeded in 2020.


	Interestingly, Schweikart credits not a President but the late conservative talk radio icon Rush Limbaugh with dealing “the biggest blow to the Deep State, and one that delayed our demise by decades.” By providing a counter to the monolithic, left-leaning establishment media, the fearless Rush – beloved by the right and despised by the left – opened the door to the later launch of Fox News.


	Schweikart concludes the book by demolishing the smear against conservatives that they are merely “paranoid” about a leftist shadow government. But confirming its existence is just the first step; he warns that “[a]ttacking and dismantling the Deep State will take decades of dedicated work,” and the Swamp could still emerge triumphant. “It remains to be seen if Trump merely bought us four years or was the herald of a new, slow burn against the administrative state,” he muses. He finds hope in the recent passage of election integrity legislation and other anti-Deep State laws in many states across the country, but “[t]here is only so much states can do.”


	It’s fitting that Larry Schweikart’s Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War With The Swamp is dedicated to “the imprisoned martyrs of Patriot Day, January 6, 2021” – political prisoners of a Trump-hating Deep State that ruthlessly destroys the lives of anyone and everyone who opposes its lust for power, from the Oval Office occupant to the lowliest MAGA patriot. Dragonslayers is a must-read for comprehending that insidious shadow government: why it came about, why its various versions have been so difficult to defeat, and why it remains such a formidable threat to democracy today.

Deep State Slayers

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	What is the difference between a conspiracy theory and the

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In <a href="https://dhfcblog.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/cravattsjewhatred.pdf">a free new ebook</a> from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, author and regular FrontPage Mag contributor Richard L. Cravatts Ph.D., a Shillman Fellow at the Center, counters the lies and misrepresentations of the pro-Palestinian movement on American campuses, exposing its roots in the ancient animus of Jew hatred and the genocidal threat of Islamic supremacism.


	<a href="https://dhfcblog.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/cravattsjewhatred.pdf">Jew Hatred Rising: The perversities of the campus war against Israel and the Jews</a> can be downloaded as a PDF document or read in full <a href="https://dhfcblog.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/cravattsjewhatred.pdf">at this link</a>. In it, Dr. Cravatts deconstructs, with forceful eloquence, the arguments of pro-Palestinian activists who declare Israel to be illegitimate while championing the nonexistent nation of “Palestine.” He also describes the hostile campus climate that <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/boycott-divestment-sanctions-movement-bds">BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions)</a> activists have created for Jewish students, who are smeared as racists for supporting a Jewish state and denied equal participation in student affairs.


	“The notion of ‘two states living sides by side in peace,’ as the oft-repeated refrain goes, is, and always has been, of complete irrelevance to the Arabs,” Cravatts writes of the rising “new antisemitism.” “The creation of a new Arab state is not the sought-after goal; what&nbsp;is&nbsp;the actual goal is the extirpation of the Jewish one.”


	I posed some questions to Dr. Cravatts about his new book.


	Mark Tapson: Richard, thanks for this timely, important ebook. What is the “new” antisemitism and why is it surging so alarmingly?


	Richard Cravatts: Thanks for inviting me, Mark.


	Anti-Semitism, which scholar Robert Wistrich called “the longest hatred,” has been with us for millennia and has manifested itself as hatred of Jews for their perceived defects and characteristics. While classic forms of anti-Semitism—those evident in right-wing fringe groups such as neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, and other white supremacists—still exist and sometimes, such as in the case of the 2017 Charlottesville rally, expose their dark bigotry, on university campuses, at least, this type of Jew-hatred is largely invisible. Instead, something that you accurately referred to as the “new anti-Semitism” has evolved, a form of Jew-hatred that deflects its true nature by focusing animus not on the Jew as an individual but on the Jew of nations, Israel.


	Mendaciously disguised as mere “criticism of Israel and Zionism,” the new anti-Semitism emerges in ways that have been outlined, for instance, in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism, and particularly the section of the IHRA definition that suggests that “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is anti-Semitic.


	As you are aware, on university campuses now there is an obsession with race and intersectionality, the shared oppression of minority groups. So, the slander that Zionism is racism and that Israel is an apartheid, colonial regime of “white” Jews that oppresses an indigenous “brown” people is a repeating trope we witness on campuses and one that has spread widely as progressives try to position Israel as a racist, illegal entity.


	It may be comforting for virtue-signaling student radicals to show their overriding concern for the Palestinian self-determination, but on American campuses, this demand regularly, and relentlessly, manifests itself in toxic, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, often anti-Semitic activism in which the Jewish state and the Jews who support it are vilified as racists, colonialists, occupiers, and militaristic reincarnations of the Third Reich who brutally trample and oppress the indigenous Palestinians and subjugate them in a system of apartheid.


	This is not, as Jew-haters claim, simply criticism of Israel. It is a targeted, unrelenting campaign to demonize, slander, and weaken the Jewish state, and, by the IHRA definition at least, often manifests itself in what is clearly anti-Semitic expression and behavior.


	MT: How do you counter the kneejerk leftist argument that criticism of Israel is not to be conflated with antisemitism?


	RC: As we have been encouraging universities and other organizations to adopt the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism, unsurprisingly there has been pushback from the very people whose speech and expression are the very examples of anti-Jew bigotry the definition was created to address. Many of these individuals have argued that the definition will suppress their pro-Palestinian advocacy and free speech. They also contend that any definition of anti-Semitism which includes the debate about Israel is disingenuous and, in their erroneous view, falsely conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, something they contend is never true.


	Moreover, critics of the IRHA definition claim that it is an immoral tool being used by supporters of Israel to paint critics of the Jewish state as anti-Semites when, they contend, they are merely criticizing the Jewish state,


	But this counter-argument is fallacious. The IHRA definition specifies that criticism of Israel, if it is expressed in the same way as criticism of any other country, is perfectly acceptable and not anti-Semitic. But when Israel and Israel alone is the repeated target of condemnation, and particularly for offenses occurring elsewhere (and often in more extreme instances), and the criticism and condemnation is way out of bounds and not part of a reasoned and reasonable debate; when Zionism, Jewish self-determination, is painted as immoral and racist when other people’s self-determination is not; and when Israelis and Zionists are likened to Nazis committing a “slow-motion genocide” on an innocent indigenous people and Israel’s military is accused of being brutal, murderous, even Nazi-like in its execution and oppression of the Palestinians; all of those go way beyond what might be considered reasonable “criticism” of Israel and, according to the IHRA’s definition in the context of Israel, are, in fact, anti-Semitic.


	Pro-Palestinian activists feel that the mere fact that they stand in solidarity with an oppressed people means that any behavior—including terrorism--is justified. They also believe that the attacks on every aspect of Israel’s existence should be permitted and are reasonable because Israel is perceived as the oppressor and the Palestinians, at least in their view, are the ever-oppressed victims of a colonial settler state.


	They may reject the IHRA definition; they may claim they are not anti-Semites; they may not wish to put their radical activism in check; but anti-Semites do not get to decide whether or not they are anti-Semitic.


	It is obvious why anti-Semites, and those who apologize for or are complicit in this bigotry, would seek to ignore a definition of anti-Semitism that exposes them for their anti-Semitism, exactly why the radical anti-Israel groups and individuals have ignored or rejected the IHRA tool.


	MT: Thanks largely to the seemingly ubiquitous campus group Students for Justice in Palestine, which explicitly links Zionism to white supremacy, the atmosphere on college campuses today is intolerant and hostile to Jewish college students. Can you expound a bit on what pressures and threats pro-Israel students face?


	RC: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), with chapters on more than 200 campuses, has a pattern of radicalism, misbehavior, toxic speech, and regular instances of overtly anti-Semitic behavior. That radicalism has been problematic, particularly since reports by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism at universities, “indicate a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment, discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.” In fact, the reports revealed that SJP’s very presence on a campus resulted in a 70% increase in incidents of Israel-related anti-Semitic harassment.&nbsp;


	SJP is the chief sponsor of the annual campus hate-fests known as Israeli Apartheid Week during which Israel is demonized, accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and is depicted as an illegal, immoral regime trampling on the rights of the ever-aggrieved Palestinians. Other anti-Israel groups’ behavior borders on being cruel and anti-Semitic, such as when University of Toronto student activists tried to deprive Jewish students of kosher food on that campus because the suppliers supposedly supported Israel.


	Anti-Israel radicals regularly sponsor BDS resolutions that they try to push through student governments, alienating Jewish students and other supporters of Israel by accusing them of being racist oppressors. Pro-Israel speakers, if they are even allowed on campus after being accused of being Islamophobic by merely defending Israel, are frequently heckled, shouted down, or their speeches canceled by disruptions by SJP members. Jewish pro-Israel students have been excluded from student government positions and their objectivity questioned. Radicals have demonstrated, as they did, for example, at CUNY, while screaming for Zionists to be thrown off the campus, for another intifada, an armed uprising of terror, to be launched against Israelis, and, as is often heard at anti-Israel rallies, for “Palestine” to be liberated “from the River to the Sea” – in other words, for Israel to be destroyed.


	Even when the collective conscience of the whole world joined forces to end apartheid in South Africa, no one at that time called for South Africa itself, the entire country, to be extirpated for its perceived sins. It is only the Jewish state and only its supporters who are accused of such malignancy that Israel’s complete elimination is considered as a viable option.


	Jewish and non-Jewish students who happen to be liberals have found themselves regularly excluded from progressive causes simply because of their support for Zionism and Israel. While progressives fastidiously protect the rights of perceived minority groups on campus—blacks, the LGBTQ community, Hispanics, Muslims—Jews are now considered to enjoy “white privilege,” to be essentially white, and, if they support Israel, it is claimed, they are endorsing a form of white supremacy in the form of the racist oppression of the “brown” Palestinians by “white” Jewish Israelis. Sadly, then, leftists have made it impossible for a student to be progressive while also supporting the Jewish state.


	MT: In the essay titled, “What Being Pro-Palestinian Really Means,” you state that it has never actually been about Palestinian statehood. Can you elaborate on that?


	RC: As I mentioned in that essay, based on their actions over decades of debate and negotiation, it seems very clear that the long sought-after two-state solution is something the Palestinians can neither conceive of nor even appear to want. And the notion of “two states living sides by side in peace,” as the oft-repeated refrain goes, is, and always has been, of complete irrelevance to the Arabs. The creation of a new Arab state is not the sought-after goal; what&nbsp;is&nbsp;the actual goal is the extirpation of the Jewish one.


	How do we know this? Because, as history tells us, the Arabs were offered statehood in 1937, in 1947, in 1967, in 2000, in 2005, and on other occasions, and in each instance their leaders walked away from the negotiating table and rejected all the terms offered them, no matter how generous.


	Remember, too, that from 1948 until 1967, during which time Jordan had illegally annexed Judea and Samaria (what is referred to now as the West Bank) the Arabs could, at any time during those 19 years, have established a Palestinian state, But they did not and that helps reveal that they actual ambition for Arab Palestinians is not statehood at all, but the replacement of the Jewish state with a Muslim entity.


	In fact, previous offers of statehood were rejected precisely because the creation of an Arab state beside Israel would involve recognition of the Jewish one next door—something that Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas would never do. And Hamas has little or no interest in the creation of a new Arab state; instead, they have ambitions to create a Muslim caliphate in all of historic Palestine, including modern-day Israel.


	And even if the creation of a new Palestinian state involved the expulsion and slaughter of Jews anywhere in the Holy Land, that is perfectly acceptable, given that the language of the Hamas Charter specifically calls for the murder of Jews and the liberation of Palestine.


	On university campuses, of course, where the true intention of anti-Israel activists is couched in the language of social justice, it is less obvious that much of the Palestinianism that has infected college campuses—not to mention the UN, NGOs, and other institutions worldwide—has as its primary objective, not the creation of a new Arab state, but the debasing, weakening, and, ultimately, the elimination of Israel.


	A Jewish sovereignty in territory that is thought to be Islamic land forever is abhorrent to Muslims, so its existence is also a wound on the honor of the Muslim world, and the end of the Jewish state is more critical than the creation of another Arab one.


	MT: In the final essay in your collection, you address some “lies in the cognitive war” against Israel. Could you discuss a couple of those lies?


	RC: The ongoing cognitive war against Israel has resulted in a pernicious narrative having been created, one in which, as I mentioned, Israel is a colonial, racist oppressor and the Palestinians are an innocent, oppressed, indigenous people whose land was stolen by white Jews who appeared in the Holy Land—with no previous connection to the land—from Europe in the ashes of the Holocaust. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	That mendacious narrative gave birth to a subsequent tissue of lies in which the basest and most immoral qualities were ascribed to Israel with the intention of making it a pariah among the world’s nations.


	Former Canadian MP Irwin Cotler once observed that the worst accusation that could be made against an individual is that they are a racist. And Cotler noted that in the 20th Century the most egregious examples of racism were embodied in apartheid and Nazism. And isn’t it interesting that those very examples of racism are regularly, although falsely, lobbed at Israel, so that Israel is accused of being a racist, apartheid state and that Israelis are the new Nazis, that Gaza is equivalent to the Warsaw Ghetto, and that the grisly manner in which Israel is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians, coupled with ethnic cleansing, is eerily familiar to the behavior and murderous depravity of the Nazis. &nbsp;&nbsp;


	Of course, these accusations are grotesque and false, and, in fact, are examples of Holocaust inversion and Holocaust minimization (both forms of anti-Semitism) but these tropes have become part and parcel of the anti-Israel campaign manifested in Israeli Apartheid Weeks, mock apartheid walls, swastikas scrawled on the Israeli flag, and the pseudo-scholarship of such morally imbecilic professors as Rutgers University’s Jasbir Puar who claims, for instance, that Israel deliberately maims and mutilates Arab bodies for the purpose of keeping the Arab population subjugated.


	Even when Israel defends itself from thousands of lethal rockets fired at its citizens by Hamas from Gaza, its response is denounced as being disproportionate, and its military actions are criticized as being murderous, genocidal, and cruel in targeting and killing civilians, including children.


	This narrative is based on falsehoods, a misreading of history and fact, a lack of context, and gross exaggerations which invariably assign all blame to Israel, but it has been effective in helping to shape world opinion against Israel. The cognitive war against the Jewish state is at once grotesque and lethal.

Campus Jew Hatred Rising

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In a free new ebook from the David Horowitz Freedom Center,

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	The Nazis have always been Hollywood’s go-to villains, the bad guys every American who isn’t an antisemite or eugenicist can agree are the epitome of evil. They also serve as a convenient substitute when Hollywood doesn’t want to address America’s real-world enemies; in 2001, for example, when filmmakers were adapting Tom Clancy’s thriller The Sum of All Fears for the big screen, they changed the antagonists from Arab terrorists to European neo-Nazis. But Hollywood’s neo-Nazis of today are – you guessed it – American patriots.


	Case in point: <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80231903">In the Shadow of the Moon</a>, a late 2019 addition to Netflix’s repertoire which is unlikely to have been seen by the vast and growing numbers of conservatives who have cancelled their subscription to the left-leaning streaming giant, the home of production deals with such radicals as Barack and Michelle Obama and anthem-protesting Colin Kaepernick. For that matter, the movie is unlikely to have been seen by very many people of any political stripe, because it’s not worth watching; its audience rating at the Rotten Tomatoes movie review site is a blah 40, and the <a href="https://www.metacritic.com/movie/in-the-shadow-of-the-moon-2019">rating at Metacritics</a> isn’t much higher (I watch these things so you don’t have to). But the film is notable as a reminder that the entertainment industry is the left’s most powerful weapon for fashioning and disseminating the narrative that American patriots are actually white supremacist domestic terrorists threatening to push the country into a hot civil war.


	Mild spoilers follow.


	The story of In the Shadow of the Moon opens in 1988 in Philadelphia – the birthplace of American independence and home of the Liberty Bell (the location’s patriotic associations are significant). It is the scene of the simultaneous, mysterious murders of three seemingly random individuals, including a bus driver whose prominently-featured reading material is a biography of Thomas Jefferson. Officer Thomas Lockhart, a patrol car cop and aspiring detective, is the first to discover a bizarre link to the three deaths, beating his detective brother-in-law (played by the only “name” actor in the film: Michael C. Hall, Showtime’s Dexter) to the punch: the victims have been injected with something that rapidly corrodes their brains and causes massive hemorrhaging. The suspect is a young mixed-race woman in a hoodie. Lockhart confronts her and, strangely, she seems to know personal details about his life. But she is accidentally killed by a train while trying to escape, and without her or a motive, the case is closed.


	Fast forward nine years. Lockhart is now a detective and single father (his wife died in childbirth) struggling to make ends meet. He is investigating murders that seem to be copycats of those from nine years earlier. Again Lockhart’s doggedness leads him to a confrontation with the suspect – and it is the same woman, alive and no older than before. But she escapes, and again the murders languish unsolved.


	Fast forward another nine years to 2006. Lockhart is a private detective now, off the police force, and so obsessed with the bizarre mystery that he no longer has time to shower or to trim his tangled mess of overgrown hair and beard (because that’s Hollywood’s visual shorthand for obsessed people). He believes the murder suspect is from the future, traveling back in time to target her victims. His weirdness has alienated his now high school-graduating daughter, because it is a given in Hollywood thrillers that the male protagonists are neglectful, workaholic dads whose kids can barely conceal their disappointment and impatience with them. And his brother-in-law is tired of pretending Lockhart isn’t unhinged.


	But Lockhart is right, and his obsessive digging has unearthed a clue: that many of the victims were linked through a mailing list belonging to one of them, now deceased: a Confederate flag-owning, white supremacist gun nut who ranted in newsletters about “globalist elites” and who sparked a movement called Real America Patriots. They are what Lockhart calls “a fringe militia group who want to take the country back for the true patriots. Homemade fertilizer bombs. You know the type.”


	Yes, we know the type – at least, the stereotype: white, Second Amendment-supporting, anti-Big Government, Fox News-watching conservatives who revere the Founding Fathers and the Constitution and who have legitimate concerns about those globalist elites and who do want to take the country back – at the ballot box – for true patriots. The left has labeled these new Nazis “white nationalists” (leftists never acknowledge that there are patriots of all races) whose “white rage,” as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/24/top-u-s-military-officers-defense-of-critical-race-theory-to-understand-white-rage-stokes-controversy/">put it to Congress</a>, leftists claim is the defining characteristic of former President Donald Trump and his supporters.


	These are the true patriots which In the Shadow of the Moon, and today’s Democrat party, explicitly link to domestic terrorism.


	Anyway, the secretive Real America Patriot newsletters are distributed to its subscribers concealed in books about American presidents: the aforementioned Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, George Washington. Because people who read biographies about such figures instead of tearing down the monuments to them obviously must be racist insurrectionists.


	It isn’t necessary or relevant to dwell any further on the movie’s plot details, since it’s not worth it. As even the Hollywood industry rag <a href="https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/in-the-shadow-of-the-moon-review-1203346082/">Variety acknowledges</a>, In the Shadow of the Moon is a woke movie, “but one that will put you to sleep.” <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/in-the-shadow-of-the-moon-movie-review-2019">A reviewer at RogerEbert.com complains</a> that the film “isn’t effective as sci-fi, action, noir, mystery, or even social commentary, even though it has elements of all of the above.” It is laden with tedious, overlong chase scenes, Lockhart is a charisma-free hero, and the time-travel element is more plot-muddling than mind-bending.


	The salient point is that the evil at the heart of this self-serious thriller is violent white nationalism, which is equated with love of country, gun ownership, flag-waving, and admiration for the Founding Fathers. Released in 2019, In the Shadow of the Moon pre-dates the January 6, 2021 Capitol protest that Democrats insist on labeling an “insurrection” and an even more egregious threat to democracy than the 9/11 attacks, but the movie fits right in with that false narrative.


	The filmmakers don’t seem to have any moral issue with the fact that the hoodied woman is traveling back in time (every nine years when a time-traveling window presents itself) to murder people for crimes they haven’t even conspired to commit yet. She tells Lockhart that she came back to erase an idea before the “fear and anger” it engendered could lead to violent civil war. “Some thoughts are meant to be buried,” she intones as the camera focuses on the cover of a book titled George Washington: Founding Father for All Time, “some before they even begin.” What a perfect metaphor for the radical left’s yearning to eradicate their political opponents’ ideas and thoughts, rather than engage them in debate; to eliminate their rights and freedoms; and indeed, to assassinate them brutally and pre-emptively.


	Imagine if the filmmakers had made a less predictable and stereotyped choice, and made the villains in the movie thinly-veiled versions of Black Lives Matter revolutionaries or Antifa anarchists or Islamic terrorists – you know, real-world threats to American democracy. Of course, this would be unthinkable in the left-dominated entertainment industry today; such a politically verboten project wouldn’t get out of the starting gate. The movie could only be made independently, and even then would face distribution roadblocks and/or be savaged (or completely ignored) by movie critics, who almost all lean left.


	But demonizing true patriots apparently will get any screenplay green-lit at Netflix, even one as mediocre as In the Shadow of the Moon.

Netflix: American Patriots = Neo-Nazis

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	The Nazis have always been Hollywood’s go-to villains, the

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	As if the presidency of decrepit Joe Biden weren’t already in a catastrophic free-fall, now comes <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/why-joe-biden-is-bleeding-black-support.html">the news that he is hemorrhaging support</a> from black Americans. That’s got to be unsettling for a President who <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/26/joe-biden-falsely-claims-he-got-started-out-of-a-historically-black-university/">claimed he got his start at an historically black university</a>, who <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/11/watch-joe-biden-suggests-to-black-students-he-was-arrested-during-civil-rights-struggle/">claimed that he was once arrested during a civil rights march</a>, and who <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2020/05/22/joe-biden-you-aint-black-if-you-dont-back-me-over-trump/">declared that if you voted for Trump over him then “you ain’t black</a>.” But the bitter truth progressives must concede is that blacks are abandoning the Democrat plantation because their lives were measurably better under former President Donald Trump, a man the Left spent four years demonizing as Literally Hitler™.


	The evidence for black success under Trump has been impressively marshaled in a short new book by Wall Street Journal columnist and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Jason L. Riley. The author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Please-Stop-Helping-Us-Liberals/dp/1594038414/">Please Stop Helping Us</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/False-Black-Power-Threats-Freedom/dp/1599475189/">False Black Power?</a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Biography-Thomas-Jason-Riley/dp/1541619684/">Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell</a> has just released <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599475898/">The Black Boom</a> from Templeton Press, whose central argument – one guaranteed to spark progressive rage, particularly because Riley is black – is that American “blacks saw economic progress under Trump that the Obama administration didn’t come close to matching.”


	Bear in mind that Riley is no fan of Trump and did not vote for him in either election, but he has the intellectual integrity to acknowledge that “racial inequality improved on Trump’s watch, and much of the media were too busy agitating against him to take note or give credit where it was due. Reporters suspended any professional and ethical standards in a concerted effort to take down a president they didn’t like.”


	Riley begins by noting that, historically, racial and ethnic minority groups in America that have risen fastest from poverty into the middle class did so not through consolidating political power but “rather on developing the human capital – the education, skills, work habits, and attitudes – that facilitates upward mobility.” Irish immigrants of the mid-19th century, for example, quickly established political machines in cities from Boston to San Francisco, but economically, they trailed other immigrant groups who completely lacked such political influence. An Irish middle class emerged only after those political machines declined in power.


	So too with blacks, who achieved significant economic progress not through “greater political representation nor with massive welfare-state interventions,” but when they had greater access to labor markets. Blacks do better when America’s economy does better, Riley states: “What’s needed more than political saviors, racial preferences, and wealth distribution schemes, is economic growth and opportunity.”


	<img height="2450" width="1750" style="height: 350px; width: 250px; float: left;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2022/02/black-boom.jpg" alt="" />In his chapter contrasting Trump’s and Obama’s effect on black America, Riley points out the rise in black support for Trump during his tenure in office: “Trump’s 4-point increase among blacks in 2020 – which included a remarkable 6-point increase among black men – got the GOP back to its traditional share of the black vote in recent decades, even while the president was regularly portrayed as a racist in the press.” Riley calls Trump’s success with the Hispanic vote even more impressive. “To insist that [minority voters] were confused or tricked ignores a far simpler and more likely explanation: Many of these voters found themselves better off economically under Donald Trump than under his predecessor.”


	Precisely how much of the credit for the economic boom for blacks goes to Trump, who fulfilled his campaign promise to lower taxes and lighten regulations to spur economic growth, and how much to Obama is “probably unknowable,” Riley writes, but nonetheless, prior to the 2020 pandemic, “the economic fortunes of blacks improved under Trump to an extent that was not only unseen under Obama but unseen going back several generations.” [emphasis added] Riley finishes the chapter by emphasizing that a “president who understands and appreciates the ingredients for overall economic growth is far more useful to blacks than one who just happens to share their racial classification.”


	In a chapter called “The Immigration Distraction,” Riley reassures readers that he believes there are “many reasons to reduce illegal immigration as much as possible,” and that “calling for better border enforcement is not tantamount to racism, which was the claim of many on the left during the Trump presidency. We are a nation of laws, and illegal immigration undermines the rule of law.” Nevertheless, he argues that mass immigration has little negative impact on minority workers, and that “the Trump administration’s concerns about foreign workers displacing and depressing wages were largely off base.” This statement would not sit well with former Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Executive Director Frank Morris Sr., who wrote in <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-black-white-wealth-gap-immigration-20220110-57mzthc535asllo65kgtmxheka-story.html">an op-ed last month for the Chicago Tribune</a> that high immigration levels have been devastating for black American wealth and have driven “staggering inequality.”


	As with an earlier book of Riley’s, False Black Power?, The Black Boom contains a section with a pair of dissenting views, in this instance from Fox News political analyst Juan Williams and Kentucky State University political science professor Wilfred Reilly. Prof. Reilly, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Crime-Hoax-Lefts-Campaign/dp/1621577783/">Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War</a>, disputes what he calls Jason Riley’s “sizable soft spot for mass immigration and even illegal immigration.”


	The always-predictably race-mongering Juan Williams begins his rebuttal by smearing Trump as a racist before martialing stats and figures to counter Jason Riley’s thesis that Trump was better for blacks and other minorities than Barack Obama was: “Keep in mind that polls show Trump is regarded as racist by most black Americans… as well as by Americans of all colors…”


	Williams argues that “the lion’s share of black economic progress” took place under Obama’s reign. Asserting that “racial barriers” throughout American history “might as well be called affirmative action for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,” he claims that any racial progress made in the Trump years happened in spite of, not because of, the former President.


	In response, Riley refutes Williams’ “disingenuous” essay by noting that Trump took an Obama economy that was “cooling off” and boosted it far beyond the expectations of all the so-called experts – “and the benefits redounded as never before to minorities.” Once again Trump proved himself to be a complete failure as a racist.


	Riley concludes the book by summarizing his central argument:


	Social and economic inequality historically has had many causes, but in the twenty-first century it is driven primarily by the underdevelopment of human capital within a group. Tempting though it may be to find excuses (racism) or scapegoats (immigrants) to explain why some groups lag and others excel, it’s not at all clear that focusing on such matters, as opposed to prioritizing self-development, is the most effective way of helping people advance.


	On that point, Riley believes that he and his fellow contributors agree.


	Economist Arthur Laffer correctly states that The Black Book “is nonpartisan, sharply reasoned, and deserving of serious attention.” The editors of Reason too are on target when they praise the slim book’s “persuasive, provocative, and counterintuitive analysis.” In the face of the tired old progressive narrative that they are the champions of black America, Jason L. Riley demonstrates that – as always, and as black Americans under Biden are realizing – it is the Democrat Party that keeps blacks down.

The Black Boom

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	As if the presidency of decrepit Joe Biden weren’t already

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It is no secret that America’s education system has been failing our children and our country for over a half-century now, ever since the radical left realized that subverting American institutions from within was more effective than outright domestic terrorism. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and remote-learning mandates, parents have gotten a glimpse of just how insidious and shocking the dumbing-down and ideological indoctrination are. Parental outrage has led to confrontations with bullying teachers unions, hostile school boards, and tone-deaf political leaders who declare openly that parents shouldn’t have a say in their children’s education.


	A recent book from Regnery Press addresses this hot-button topic and laments a whole generation or more of American youth whose brains as well as souls have been “hollowed out” by ideological brainwashing, technological distraction, the disintegration of families, and the collapse of moral and civic virtues. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hollowed-Out-Warning-Americas-Generation/dp/1684511984/">Hollowed Out: A Warning about America's Next Generation</a>, by Jeremy S. Adams, explores the different facets of this disheartening crisis, but also concludes with a rallying cry for action from a California teacher writing from within the very belly of the beast.


	A graduate of Washington &amp; Lee University&nbsp;and CSU Bakersfield, Jeremy Adams was the first classroom teacher inducted into the California State&nbsp;University, Bakersfield, Hall of Fame. He has written on politics and education for the Los Angeles&nbsp;Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, and many other outlets. Our mutual friend Evan Sayet, conservative political commentator and himself the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/WOKE-SUPREMACY-Anti-Socialist-Manifesto-ebook/dp/B08FPP4S91/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=evan+sayet&amp;qid=1641965251&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=evan+sa%2Cstripbooks%2C153&amp;sr=1-3">The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/KinderGarden-Eden-Modern-Liberal-Thinks/dp/1480010421/">KinderGarden Of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks</a>, put me in touch with Adams to talk a bit about Hollowed Out.


	Mark Tapson:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Jeremy, thanks for the insightful dissection of the state of our culture you’ve put forth in this book. Lamenting the divide that partisan politics has created in our country, you write, “Our democracy is hollowed out because the habits, the relationships, the institutions, and the values that allow us to become thoughtful, compassionate, magnanimous, and informed citizens no longer shape and define us in the ways they once did.” Can you give us a couple of key examples?


	Jeremy Adams:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I wish I could go back and add the word “content” or “fulfilled” or “joyful” to that list because every day the evidence is mounting about just how miserable—uniquely miserable, in fact—our young people have become. As to their civic deficiencies, the basic problem is a profound lack of knowledge and awareness of what went in to creating the institutions of our civilization. Almost everything they see is a consequence, they believe, of malevolent power being exercised against innocent bystanders in society.


	A few examples: we have commercial institutions that create wealth and prosperity and yet what young people often see in economic activity is exploitation. I had a student recently try to tell me that capitalism cannot survive without a permanent underclass. And yet when we peeled back the layers, what was really being said was that there will always be a need for low-skilled workers which, everyone knows, is actually good news for anybody trying to enter the labor market for the first time. And what never gets said, of course, is that people who work hard, get educated, and are diligent don’t stay in a low-skilled job for long. They see political power almost always as an oppressive force and never as a tool for working for justice, which also requires significant political will. They don’t know anything about LBJ and Civil Rights. They don’t know anything about Daniel Webster and the Compromise of 1850.


	And then this obsession with power gets carried into private life--families are seen as inherently patriarchal, organized religion is full of negative judgement, all institutions are seen as corrupt and unworthy of veneration. It’s a dark and dyspeptic worldview that most people don’t fully understand.


	<img height="2113" width="1400" style="width: 300px; height: 400px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2022/01/hollow.jpg" alt="" />


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In the book you identify some of the social, cultural, and political fault lines between older and younger generations of Americans, fault lines that seem to be dangerously widening, like the collapse of the traditional family and declining religious belief. How do we begin to repair those gaps?


	JA:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well, it needs to be said that the adults have got to start adulting again. There are no quick fixes, no clever institutional or relational patches. The hollowing out of our children has been a gradual process perpetuated by a culture of radical individualism, an obsession with devices and the pivot away from in-person life, a fixation with the frivolity of consumerism, amusement, and the cult of celebrity. It will take time and it will be hard.


	But it isn’t rocket science. Limit device time. Eat together as a family. Stop teaching that the United States was conceived as one ambitious project of oppression in perpetuity. Expose children to religion anew. Stop the gospel of ease—and by that I mean acknowledge that the most meaningful elements in life are almost always difficult. There are no trophies for sleeping. You can’t lose weight without eating and exercising. You can’t have a libertine view of sex and hope for enduring and loving commitments. Building wealth requires a lot of time and in most cases a tremendous work ethic. Mastering anything—a language, a skill, whatever—requires profound sacrifice. Greatness isn’t a chance, it’s a choice, a choice fewer and fewer young people seem willing to make. The studies are clear that this is a generation that wants the wealth without the arduousness of hard work.


	But at the end of the day what we are talking about is an ancient concept—virtue. Virtue can’t be inherited or bestowed. It always must be earned. This is why the ancients said, “character is destiny.” In The Apology Socrates famously says, “Wealth does not bring excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for me.”


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What is the danger in inculcating high school and college kids, as many intellectuals and educators do today, with the “modified fatalism” which teaches them that “the American dream is unavailable to them, that social injustices doom&nbsp;them to failure, that systemic, ‘structural’ forces will deprive them of opportunity”?


	JA:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If I am being charitable, I think many of us who read the social science research are sympathetic, deeply sympathetic, in fact, to the high hurdles placed in front of students through no fault of their own—poverty, failing schools, a lack of adult role models, socialization through iPads and cell phones, the omniscience of drug abuse and violence. All of these variables in the life of a young person are real, they are deep, and they doom too many young people to lives that are not being maximized.


	But the worst thing we can tell young people is they cannot help but perpetuate social pathologies. We can understand bad behavior but that is different than excusing it. We can sympathize with students’ difficult circumstances but that does not mean the adults who know better shouldn’t insist on habits and behaviors that are a ticket towards a better and more fruitful life. Every single one of us has a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Much of what we do goes towards fulfilling the story we tell. I tell myself I am a good father so I play with my son even if I’d rather watch TV. I tell myself I am a good teacher so I go the extra mile in class rather than show a movie. If we tell young people they are victims and have no agency then they will respond accordingly. The great achievement of a teacher or mentor is not teaching curriculum, it is getting students to reframe how they think of themselves and their own lives.


	It is hard for me to be a fatalist when I witness so many young people achieve great things despite the hurdles they face. They all have one thing in common: they believed they could do it. Somewhere along the way they conceived of themselves as agents of choice rather than pawns of fatalism. And that makes all the difference.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; From what you have experienced with your own students, what has been the impact of social media on their worldview, their grasp of history and socio-political issues, even their perception of truth?


	JA:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This cannot be said often or loud enough: we are losing an entire generation. Their brains, their attention spans, their worldviews, their relationships or lack thereof, their sense of a moral hierarchy—all of it has been generationally corrupted by their monomaniacal obsession with devices and online minutiae. Think of all the things that have been crowded out by the devotion and insistence on 8-10 hours a day of staring at a screen. Reading has vanished. Dating is in decline. Kids don’t go to movies or football games like they used to. The most recent research suggests teen attention spans are roughly 65 seconds before they get fidgety and their concentration starts to wane.


	It’s not just that they are being exposed to pornography at a young age or that so many of the videos they watch require no thought or reflection. It is the method of communication that worries me most. Online life is snarky. It peddles in cynicism and the fetishization of constant aggrievement. It is sarcastic. It is ironic. Recently, I re-watched one of my favorite all-time movies, Dead Poets Society. I loved the John Keating character played by Robin Williams and yet if young people were to watch that movie today his earnestness, his genuine vulnerability, his unvarnished romanticism about the classroom would come off like a fool. He’d be mocked. The students would want to know the dirt on the poets he was teaching. They’d want to know how this applies to getting a job someday. It’s demoralizing.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You close the book with an impassioned clarion call for educators to fill in the “hollow” in younger generations and remind students of “our country’s history, its extraordinary achievements, its still bountiful promise and&nbsp;potential.” Do you foresee a grassroots revival of that kind of spirit happening as a reaction to the kind of nihilism and anti-Americanism being taught in Critical Race Theory programs and the 1619 Project? 


	JA:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I think a grand and noble correction of our cultural excesses is on its way. Before Hollowed Out, my previous books were all professional development projects that didn’t incur the ire of anyone, much less the types of verbal arrows and random hostile e-mails I’ve received the past few months.


	And yet, the headlines from the past few months confirm everything I was trying to warn about in Hollowed Out. The pandemic that is most lethal to young Americans is the mental health crisis seen with spikes in suicide, self-harm, and debilitating levels of anxiety. Marriage and birth rates are in free fall. The broader social trends include more murder, more opioid deaths, more instability in schools which have traditionally been citadels of constancy. David Brooks at the New York Times is writing columns entitled, “America Is Falling Apart at the Seams” to which I want to reply, “Well, yeah David, we teachers have been seeing this for a while. I just wrote a book about it.”


	You have school board meetings with parents saying, “stop worrying so much about social emotional learning and focus on content, skills, and socialization. Stop using schools as meccas for chic racial training and teach the history of the country, both the good and the bad.” So, yes, I think we are starting to recognize just how deep our problems are which, of course, is the first step in finding solutions.

A Hollowed-Out Democracy

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	It is no secret that America’s education system has been

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In recent years many professional athletes have come to be as well-known for their (invariably leftwing) political stances as for their sporting achievements. Take former NFL quarterback <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/colin-kaepernick">Colin Kaepernick</a>, for example, cop-hating <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/black-lives-matter-blm">Black Lives Matter</a> icon; or women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe, anti-American LGBT advocate; or NBA star <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/lebron-james">LeBron James</a>, enthusiast for the communist regime in China. Celebrities now are expected to be social justice activists; political neutrality is not an option for anyone who wants to be applauded for demonstrating that he or she is on “the right side of history.”


	So it’s refreshing when a pro athlete like Green Bay Packer quarterback Aaron Rodgers <a href="https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/11/09/aaron-rodgers-avoiding-politics-athlete-not-activist">unabashedly states</a>, “I’m an athlete. I’m not an activist.” Rodgers, a Super Bowl winner, three-time Most Valuable Player in the National Football League, and nine-time Pro Bowl selectee, is generally considered one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. He has also become a polarizing, controversial figure and a target of the totalitarian left precisely because he doesn’t conform to the woke expectations of our heavily-politicized culture.


	Last November, Rodgers triggered the left-dominated media after making statements that did not align with the acceptable narrative about COVID-19 and the Biden administration’s (mis)handling of it, such as suggesting – horrors! – that the low-cost, readily available ivermectin was beneficial for people suffering with the virus. Propaganda outlets from the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/11/05/aaron-rodgers-fact-check/">Washington Post</a> to <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/packers/2021/11/05/aaron-rodgers-green-bay-packers-vaccine-pat-mcafee/6301654001/">USA Today</a> to <a href="https://www.si.com/nfl/2021/11/05/the-problem-is-aaron-rodgers-thinks-he-has-all-the-answers">Sports Illustrated</a> were quick to slam Rodgers for “mistruths and half-truths,” and for “lying” about his vaccination status (he stated only that he had been “immunized,” which was true).


	Rodgers subsequently explained that he had an allergy to two of the available mRNA vaccines, which left him with only the option of the Johnson &amp; Johnson version. But in light of all the adverse reactions reported in the media about the J&amp;J shot, Rodgers decided to forgo it.


	“So then my options became, ‘Okay, what can I do to protect myself and my teammates if there’s not one of the big three options for me in my own body?’” he said. “And so I looked into and talked, again, to a lot of medical individuals and professionals and found that there was an immunization protocol that I could go to, to best protect myself and my teammates. And it was a long term protocol that involved multiple months. I’m very proud of the research that went into that and the individuals that I met with and we felt like it was what was best for me.”


	He added, “I believe strongly in bodily autonomy and the ability to make choices for your body, not to have to acquiesce to some woke culture or crazed group of individuals who say you have to do something. Health is not a one-size-fits-all for everybody.”


	This wasn’t enough for the totalitarian left, who do not allow deviations from the collective. Aging talk show blowhard Howard Stern, for example, declared, “If there was decency in this world, I would throw this guy out of the football league so fast.” Stern fancies himself a rebel but is as conformist as they come. He despises athletes who do not fall in line with the left’s vaccination obsession. He demanded that unvaxxed tennis star Novak Djokovic be banned from the sport, for instance, and absolutely <a href="https://www.newsmax.com/us/howardstern-aaronrodgers-coronavirus/2021/11/08/id/1043783/">lost his mind publicly</a> over Rodgers’ choice not to get vaccinated.


	Like Stern, NFL Most Valuable Player Award voter Hub Arkush too was triggered by Rodgers’ decision. One of the 50 people the Associated Press allows to vote for the league’s MVP, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/05/aaron-rodgers-mvp-voter-hub-arkush-jerk-bad-guy/">Arkush announced</a> that he wouldn’t be casting his vote for Rodgers, regardless of whether the quarterback earned it: “I don’t think you can be the biggest jerk in the league and punish your team, and your organization and your fan base the way he did and be the Most Valuable Player. Has he been the most valuable on the field? Yeah, you could make that argument.”


	Not only could you make that argument -- Rodgers is currently considered a shoo-in for the award -- but that argument should be the only criterion for MVP. But Arkush thinks “that the way he’s carried himself is inappropriate. I think he’s a bad guy, and I don’t think a bad guy can be the most valuable guy at the same time.”


	Rodgers pushed back, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2022/01/05/hes-bum-aaron-rodgers-blasts-mvp-voter-snub-vaccine-status/">responding</a> publicly about Arkush: “His problem isn’t with me being a ‘bad guy’ or ‘the biggest jerk in the league’ — because he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything about me. I’ve never met him. I’ve never had lunch with him. I’ve never had an interview with him. His problem is I’m not vaccinated. So if he wants to go on a crusade and collude and come up with an extra letter to put on the award just for this season and make it the ‘Most Valuable Vaccinated Player,’ then he should do that. But he’s a bum. And I’m not going to waste any time worrying about that stuff.”


	<a href="https://thefreethoughtproject.com/aaron-rodgers-uncancelable/">In an interview with popular sports analyst Pat McAfee</a>, Rodgers acknowledged that he was “in the crosshairs of the woke mob right now”:


	So before my final nail gets put in my cancel culture casket, I think I’d like to set the record straight on so many of the blatant lies that are out there about myself right now. And I appreciate the opportunity to tell my side of the story on here. First of all, I didn’t lie in the initial press conference. During that time, it was a very witch hunt that was going on across the league, where everybody in the media was so concerned about who was vaccinated and who wasn’t and what that meant and who was being selfish and who would talk about it and what it meant if they said it’s a personal decision, they shouldn’t have to disclose their own medical information and whatnot.


	Rodgers said, “The non-vaxxed right is gonna champion me and the left is gonna cancel me. And the whole time, I don’t give a sh*t about either of them… Politics is a total sham. I’m not gonna go on FOX News just like I wouldn’t go on CNN. I have no desire to do that. The only desire I have is for people to take autonomy over their body in all forms and facets.”


	“You have a right to make a decision about your body,” he continued. “That should be an unalienable right for all people to make an educated decision based on what they think is best for them.”


	As if that individualistic stance weren’t enough to put him in the Cancel Culture crosshairs, as he put it, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/04/aaron-rodgers-atlas-shrugged-ayn-rand-twitter-reaction-packers/">Rodgers half-jokingly revealed</a> during a recent appearance on Monday Night Football that he has – horrors! – the late libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand’s influential novel Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf. This revelation triggered leftist trolls everywhere, who took to social media – as they habitually do – to express their disgust. “People don’t read Atlas Shrugged, they just point to it on their shelf to excuse being an asshole,” one Twitter user snarked. “"Atlas Shrugged" has never been an inaccurate red flag,” tweeted another. “Aaron Rodgers just bragged that he has Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on his bookshelf. Explains all his lying about being vaccinated and such. He's one of those "screw everyone else before they can screw you" wackos. People like this are always a danger to others,” warned a third.


	Probably zero of these social media complainers cares anything about sports or even knew who Rodgers was before they got wind of the unacceptable reading material he admitted to owning. In any case, if they expected a shamed Rodgers to cower before the Cancel Culture mob, they were frustrated, because unlike many celebrities, who are by nature desperate for public approval and apologize at the drop of a tweet, Rodgers doesn’t care about your feelings.


	“It really comes down to, and pardon my French, giving less f**ks,” he asserted bluntly during <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/05/aaron-rodgers-pat-mcafee-interview-give-less-fks/">a recent interview with McAfee</a>. “I think it’s a majority that comes from aging, making mistakes, from failing, to being too sensitive at times… There’s a lot of joy in being unapologetically yourself.”


	Indeed there is, but that is a joy the leftist mob wants to deny everyone who is insufficiently submissive to the woke mindset. As Rodgers put it: “I hope we can take a step back and quit lying, quit with the witch hunt and the canceling and realize this is a conversation&nbsp;to be had, not a&nbsp;controversy.&nbsp;Let’s move this forward with some love and connection, that’s what we need in this world. Let’s communicate instead of canceling someone or silencing someone. That gets us nowhere.”

Quarterback Cancels Cancel Culture

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In recent years many professional athletes have come to be

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Books on America’s racial divide – primarily from the woke, purportedly “anti-racist” left – are all the rage today, making bestselling millionaires out of race hustlers like <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/ibram-x-kendi">Ibram X. Kendi</a> and <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/robin-diangelo">Robin DiAngelo</a>. Generally speaking, they promote the false narrative that America’s very founding is grounded in slavery, not liberty; that Americans are racist in our very DNA, as Barack Obama once put it; and that we are still in thrall today to an irredeemably systemic racism.


	Philosopher, author, and DePaul University professor Jason D. Hill, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and one of the boldest, most original thinkers on race, has written a powerful new counter-narrative titled, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/What-White-Americans-Black-People/dp/1642937940/">What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression</a>. Hill, himself of mixed-race, Jamaican descent, laments that too many blacks today are being sold an identity rooted in “resignation, nihilism, Afro-pessimism, entitlement, separatism, victimology, misanthropy, and hatred of the United States.” His book urges them to practice “radical forgiveness” and “radical individualism,” and to embrace the freedom of a “transracial future.” It is a controversial message that offers black Americans an opportunity which threatens the victim narrative of divisive exploiters like Kendi and DiAngelo.


	I posed some questions to the author about his book, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?


	Mark Tapson:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dr. Hill, congratulations on a brilliant, provocative book. So many questions, so little time and space. Let me begin with a question about a subtle but significant point: Associated Press guidelines now call for capitalizing the word “black” – but not “white” – when used in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense, purportedly to honor blacks’ shared experience and sense of identity. That capitalization swiftly become widespread practice. I noticed you didn’t use that in your book. I assume that was a conscious choice on your part?


	Jason D. Hill:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thanks for the kind words, Mark. They mean much to me. Yes: I’m orthodox when it comes to the mechanics of language. I won’t make an exception in the case of capitalizing the word “black” for the sake of sheer political expediency. Semantic exactitude trumps identity politics in this case.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You begin by asserting that, while slavery was of course an “egregious evil,” culpability for it is complex and that the argument for reparations to the descendants of slaves is “morally incoherent.” Can you elaborate on that?


	JH:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Let me deal with culpability as far as Sub-Saharan Africans did facilitate the slave trade. Ninety percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans. The tragic truth is that without the complex business collusions among African elites and European and Arab traders, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible. Africans sold themselves into slavery.


	They also lacked the technological and political means to protect themselves against European explorers. Their primitive, animist philosophy rendered them indistinguishable from brute nature; they were unable to abstract themselves from nature and therefore unable to enter the historical process. They lacked a Manifest Destiny. Europe had one: to conquer and rule more than a third of the entire globe. With their animistic world view, and their inability to see nature as a phenomenon which one othered, harnessed and exploited to suit one’s needs—the Africans were as helpless as the animals they left behind, and ripe for the taking.&nbsp;


	How do we parse through the culpability claims? That’s problematic. Also, how do we really determine which of the disparities between the races are due to the residual effects of slavery, and if they are, then why should whites today, who had nothing to do with the construction of slavery, pay reparations to blacks? A morally coherent case for reparations would show how, despite the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that there are discriminatory cases that do not belong in courts of law but, rather, in the form of reparative claims.


	<img height="2069" width="1400" style="height: 443px; width: 300px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/12/what-do-white-americans-owe-black-people-9781642937947_hr.jpg" alt="" />


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Who are the “new racial narcissists” and what do they really mean by calling for the “abolition of whiteness”?


	JH:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The new racial narcissists are people like Ta-Nehisi Cotes, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Calvin Warren, Frank B. Wilderson III, sundry faculty in White Studies programs, Critical Race Theory, Black Studies, and Gender Studies.


	The “abolition of whiteness” is a non-concept. Whiteness as a concept has not been properly given a definitional status. It really is a euphemistic code-word for the total and complete annihilation of white people in America. You know I call it as it is. That’s it. In these folks’ eyes, black freedom is dependent on white annihilation. One can make the process sound less ominous by talk of abolishing the “whiteness inside oneself.” These racial narcissists, however, are racial essentialists. They believe race is constitutive of your entire identity. For whites to abolish their “whiteness” comes the understanding that they will self-annihilate. This can be done by criminalizing whiteness as a toxic property that automatically “others” strangers and makes the Other into an existential problem that cannot be solved. A lot of progressive whites believe this malarkey about themselves and, out of some perverse masochistic guilt, are complicit in the calls for their own annihilation.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You dive into the history of the Founding Fathers and their conflicted position on slavery. How would you respond to the argument of today’s left, crystallized in the discredited but influential 1619 Project, that America’s founding was grounded not in freedom but in slavery and that racism is in our nation’s very DNA, as Barack Obama put it?


	JH:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The founding of our republic was ethically contradictory and messy. America was forged in the crucibles of freedom and institutional oppression. At its inception it did not apply the inalienability clause that all men are created equal by their Creator to blacks who were slaves. Yet, as I show in detail in my book, there were two concurrent societies playing against each other since the inception of the country: those who fought for the freedom and rights of blacks, and those who assumed a different perspective. The very fact that men were free to create the republic with other men possessing the freedom to question its full moral legitimacy given the existence of slavery is an exercise of radical freedom itself.


	Several of the founders owned slaves. Many like Jefferson, as I describe in the book, felt deep moral shame over their investiture in an institution they felt politically at odds with. Their judgment that their slaves, if freed, would face greater danger in a society not ready to accept them as equals, than they would in slavery, is food for moral analysis. Such appraisals by the founders are to be taken seriously. We may do this while still regarding slavery as intrinsically wrong.


	I do not believe racism is necessarily in our DNA. If it were, Obama himself would never have achieved the Presidency, and the moral progress we’ve made in racial terms—unprecedented against the backdrop of history—would never have taken place. Americans have free will, and they have the capacity for deep moral reflection. In allowing blacks to be part of the domain of the ethical and full-fledged members of human community, we have seen that human beings do evolve and do make moral progress.&nbsp;


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Can you briefly explain what you call “the radical third founding of America”?


	JH:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the third great founding of this country. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and the Civil War I identify as the second founding. In both cases, the United States is in a process of trying to bring to a full circle the conviction evinced in the Declaration of Independence: cement the moral meaning of America by recognizing the inalienability of rights possessed by all human beings; and the idea that freedom and liberty are the natural and necessary conditions for human beings to matriculate within.


	The 1964 Civil Rights ended legal oppression for blacks in this country. It illegalized racism, and it recognized blacks as persons fully equal before the law. It put an end to the creation of laws that penalized persons based solely on racial identity. It officially ended any form of official White Supremacy that lingered in the republic, and it functioned as a moral eugenics program in that it attempted to re-socialize the sensibilities of whites. It attempted to make non-racists out of whites by telling them how they could use and dispose of their private property. They could not use it as a site for racial discrimination. Private property became more contextualized. Your property was not just an extension of your living room.


	This constituted a new founding of America: bringing blacks fully into the historical process by ushering in a post-oppressive age. A new era had emerged—no one was, in the United States, outside the domain of the human community.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; You state that “blacks have internalized an identity that was created for them,” and that it is time for them “to kill that racial ascriptive identity.” This would be considered blasphemy in today’s hyper-racialized culture, in which the left pressures minorities to embrace an identity of racial victimhood. What does it mean to be an “heroic race traitor”?


	JH:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To be a “heroic race traitor” is perhaps not for everyone. It is for those for whom racial identity is a mere geographic marker—and just that. One feels an affinity for one’s compatriot, and one feels a sense of belonging and custodianship of the earth in general. But really, I meant that “blackness” today is so suffused with crippled agency, victimization, helplessness, nihilism, irrationality, and sentimental tribalism—that it is better for heroic blacks to be traitors to all that psychological junk which will turn them into ignoble social ballast. I don’t care how offensive this sounds. For once in their lives black people don’t need “blackness” around their shoulders or around their necks. They’ve been burdened by it for centuries. Time to throw it off and just wear what’s vital for a flourishing and rational person to exist: freedom, individualism, self-ownership, love, and forgiveness.

What Do White Americans Owe Black People?

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Books on America’s racial divide – primarily from the woke,

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Thanks to the political and cultural dominance of the neo-Marxist left, outright war is being waged on American law enforcement today. Democrat leaders have made defunding police departments, which they smear as irredeemably racist, a prominent plank of their party’s platform. Anti-cop rhetoric from politicians and leaders of radical movements like Black Lives Matter, disseminated by the complicit news media, has created a lethal environment on the streets, where police officers are literally targeted for assassination. Cop-hating communists like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who calls for the abolition of police and has been known to wear socks on the football field depicting officers as pigs, is elevated into a cultural icon, offered lucrative sponsorships and his own show on Netflix.


	Enter longtime comic book writer and artist <a href="https://bloodyredbaron.com/">Mike Baron</a>, winner of two Eisner Awards (the comic industry equivalent of the Oscars) among others. Along with police officer&nbsp;Joseph Arnold&nbsp;(on pencils and layouts) and illustrator Jeff Slemons, Baron has created Thin Blue Line, a counter-cultural, police-positive graphic novel which&nbsp;follows officer Valeria Baca and her partner Bob Mack as they fight for their community and their own survival amid rioting in the streets. “Mobs burn down city hall, forcing the officers to improvise on the run, relying only on their training and wits as the mayor’s protestations and eagerness to placate the rioters prove fruitless,” reads the description at the project’s <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/thin-blue-line-the-graphic-novel-by-mike-baron#/">crowdfunding page</a>.


	Baron opted to crowdfund the project after the concept was rejected by major publishers, who were repulsed by a story line that presented cops as heroes rather than villains. As of this writing, Thin Blue Line has earned nearly three times its goal on its Indiegogo page; all the 56 pages for the book are completely penciled and inked, and some are fully colored. Only the remaining colors and letters are left to complete the book and send it to the printer.


	Baron hastens to note on the crowdfunding page that Thin Blue Line is not “a police recruitment pamphlet.” The characters are flawed and the story is never preachy. “It's just entertaining and exciting and very&nbsp;simply demonstrates that not all heroes are perfect, and not all heroes wear capes.” But they do very often wear blue, despite what the propagandists of the left would have you believe.


	It is a testament to the creators’ respect for law enforcement that a&nbsp;portion of every&nbsp;contribution to the crowdfunding page will be donated to one or more of the following police assistance programs:&nbsp;

<ul>
	<li>
		<a href="https://adoptacopbjj.org" target="_blank">Adopt A Cop BJJ</a> (trains officers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu)</li>
	<li>
		<a href="https://nleomf.org/" target="_blank">National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund</a>&nbsp;(improves officer safety &amp; honors the fallen)</li>
	<li>
		<a href="https://www.nationalfof.org/" target="_blank">The National Fallen Officer Foundation</a>&nbsp;(helps families of officers slain in the line of duty)</li>
</ul>


	&nbsp;


	I asked Mike Baron some questions about Thin Blue Line.


	Mark Tapson:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Comics aren’t just for kids anymore like they were when I was a boy. Who exactly is the audience for comics today, and why is this an important arena in the culture war?


	Mike Baron: The audiences are as disparate and fractured as our country. The audience for Marvel and DC are people who don't read comics, but fervently believe in the official narrative. The audience for independent comics are people who want to become lost in a good story.


	My first goal is to entertain. The vast bulk of corporate comics make no attempt to engage, amuse or intrigue the reader, because those writers are not interested in entertainment, leaving comic fans adrift, at least to the point where they are abandoning established publishers and embracing independent comics.


	The audience is out there. If your product is outstanding, and by that I mean a story that grabs you on the first page and doesn't let go, the audience will embrace it. Comics are a visual medium, so it helps to have good art.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Working in the belly of the beast, as it were, of the comics industry, how would you describe how the biz has changed in recent years in terms of the kinds of storytelling and messaging it puts forth?


	MB:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; I have no complaints about working for DC or Marvel. I can't recall a single incident of editorial interference, but that may be because my first goal is to entertain. Editors like Archie Goodwin and Denny O'Neil worked their way up through the ranks and were engaging writers themselves. They had experience.


	I have not been conversant with the inner workings of the majors in many years. When I do drop in from time to time, as I did with Captain America and Master of Kung Fu, I find no entertainment value. The stories are amorphous, confused, propagandistic. It's not the writers' fault. It's the editors who hired them.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Tell us about the concept and genesis of Thin Blue Line, and about your partners on the project, officer&nbsp;Joseph Arnold&nbsp;and illustrator&nbsp;Jeff Slemons. And what kind of response are you getting, if any, about the idea from anyone in law enforcement?


	MB:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thin Blue Line is about two police officers trying to survive the night in a riot-torn city. I have always ripped stories from the headlines, as Punisher and Nexus readers can attest. The reason police, lawyer, and doctor shows have dominated popular entertainment is because those professions deal with life and death, which is the stuff of drama. There are no speeches or lectures in Thin Blue Line. It's pure entertainment. It does have a point of view. Most police join to serve their communities. They put their money where their mouths are, by doing good instead of talking about it. This is the second rule of comics: show, don't tell.


	The response has been overwhelming. Law enforcement officers have reached out to me from all over the country. Some are accomplished artists and we are including their work in the book. One officer brought his family over for dinner. He said his entire department was thrilled and grateful for popular entertainment that did not condemn them as murderers and racists. Everyone contributed to a bundle which he presented to me containing a flag signed by every member of the department, ride-along coins, patches, and other items.


	I have known Joe Arnold since long before he became a cop. Joe was always drawing and we'd talked about working together. When I conceived this project, I thought of Joe first. Inked by Jeff Slemons, himself a great artist, the results will knock you out. Take a look: <a href="http://www.jeffslemons.com">www.jeffslemons.com</a>.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Surely there is an under-served audience out there hungry for stories about the traditional good guys – the men and women in blue – and surely publishers would be open to catering to that audience. Or would they? What happened when you approached major publishers about the idea for Thin Blue Line?


	MB:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As I mentioned above, the major publishers are not interested in entertainment. They are interested in indoctrination and “the narrative.” We all know what “the narrative” means. You see it every night on CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, et al. If you deviate from the narrative, no soup for you!


	We submitted TBL to every major publisher. No one was interested. Some of the responses were vicious and obscene.


	<img height="1046" width="695" style="height: 452px; width: 300px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/11/tbl_1.jpg" alt="" />


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is there any avenue in this field for conservative-minded content creators to get their work out to a wide audience, or do the woke major publishers have it locked up? &nbsp;


	MB:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Crowdfunding. A group of disgusted professionals, many of whom worked for the Big Two, broke away. They did not name themselves Comicsgate – Comicsgate was thrust on them in derision by the sniggering upholders of the narrative. Comicsgate people seek to entertain. Their projects are taking off like rockets.


	Ethan Van Sciver hosts a Comicsgate get-together on Youtube every Monday night featuring many of these creators. Graham Nolan, who created the Batman villain Bane, along with writer Chuck Dixon. Art Thibert, Aaron LoPresti, Andy Smith, and many others. Gabe Eltaeb, the colorist who famously quit DC in protest of their bastardization of Superman. Gabe was a member of our little comic group that would meet at my house once a week. So was Joe.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What can FrontPage Mag readers do in terms of helping this project get off the ground, and to support, more generally, the kinds of projects a conservative readership wants to see instead of simply ceding the whole field of comics to wokeness?


	MB:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Take a look at <a href="https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thinbluelinecomics.com%2F&amp;data=04%7C01%7C%7Cd4ac6f286f8f4d3629a608d9ae8965e3%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637732727412199291%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&amp;sdata=1ns%2F1a4%2BQBRLgiN72bHdOpWXFjHnW9LLw2hKFxzWwDw%3D&amp;reserved=0">www.thinbluelinecomics.com</a>. Support independent books. There are a number of small publishers still dedicated to entertainment, including Advent, Allegiance Arts (who distribute through Walmart), Aftershock, and Dark Horse. Dark Horse isn't so small, but they have been my Nexus publisher for decades and will continue to do so. Google “Nexus comic” for more info.


	MT:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mike, thanks for pushing to make Thin Blue Line happen. Keep up the good work.


	Let me add that for those readers who can’t contribute financially to the crowdfunding campaign, you can still help by getting the word out on social media and, as Mike Baron reminds us, by thanking a police officer or first responder for his or her service. #BackTheBlue.

Holding the Thin Blue Line

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Thanks to the political and cultural dominance of the neo-

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our liberty, infiltrating and influencing Western values and democracy,” writes Canadian author and blogger <a href="https://dianebederman.com/">Diane Bederman</a> in her brand new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/IslamophobiaIndustry-Insidious-Infiltration-Islam-into-ebook/dp/B09LMC2JSW/">The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West</a>. As the memory of the 9/11 attacks on American soil a generation ago recedes for many, this courageous short new work serves as an essential wakeup call to a Western world that, in the name of tolerance and inclusion, is allowing our rights and freedoms to be eroded as the value system of Islam grows in influence and power.


	FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/serpent-and-red-thread-mark-tapson/">here</a> about her previous book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1927618134/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Serpent+and+the+Red+Thread%3A+The+Definitive+Biography+of+Evil.&amp;qid=1574814968&amp;sr=8-1">The Serpent and the Red Thread</a>, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Back-Ethic-Reclaiming-Western-Values/dp/1927618053">Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values</a>, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag <a href="https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/back-ethic-mark-tapson/">here</a>.


	I posed some questions to Ms. Bederman about The Islamophobia Industry.


	Mark Tapson: To paraphrase a question you pose in the preface to your new book, why did you decide to write a book about Islam at a time when saying anything critical of it is immediately denounced as bigotry?


	Diane Bederman: It says 365 times in the Bible: Do Not Fear.


	Fear is debilitating. We often run away rather than confront.


	I am of an age and in a place where being called an Islamophobe does not worry me. I cannot be canceled! I worry more about my children and grandchildren. We have to teach our children the importance of protecting democracy and freedom. Ducking and hiding will only lead to a loss of that freedom. The ethic that underpins our freedom, the Judeo/Christian ethic, is 3500 years old. We cannot let it perish out of fear of being called a name or even under threat of death. Without freedom, there is no life.


	MT: What is the Islamophobia industry?


	DB: There are two #Islamophobia Industries. One is run by Muslims to fight Islamophobia – what they refer to as the irrational fear of Islam. I would suggest that for many, fear of Islam is rational.


	The other is the one about which I write: the Industry set out to silence anyone who criticizes or questions Islam. This Industry has managed to turn Islam, a religion and political ideology, into a race. By doing that they can legally stop any criticism because race is immutable; one, obviously, cannot change one’s race, so attacking race is forbidden.


	MT: American parents have had their eyes opened about the relatively recent, insidious promotion of Critical Race Theory in schools, but a pro-Islam agenda has been infiltrating our K-12 classrooms for some time now too, hasn’t it?


	DB: Billions of dollars have been spent by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to promote Islam in our schools. In America, Canada and Europe.&nbsp;This has been going on for about 20 years. CAIR, the Council on American–Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, launched a program in 2015 with the aim of providing up to sixteen thousand public and school libraries across the country with books and writings that it had selected on Islam and the Middle East.


	CAIR founder Omar Ahmad had stated how CAIR could eventually gain influence in Congress: “This can be achieved by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers,” going on to suggest how this would give them an entry point that would allow them to pressure U.S. policymakers.


	This is how you get followers. Indoctrination through education. I suggest that our fear of being seen as intolerant pushes us to accept the intolerable in the name of diversity, inclusion and equity – DIE.


	<img height="459" width="640" style="width: 500px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/11/bederman.jpg" alt="" />


	MT: You correctly note that few people in the West know what a “Sharia-compliant economy” is. Why is it important that we understand and resist it?


	DB: Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir told a banking conference in Kuala Lumpur in November 2002, “A universal Islamic banking system is a jihad worth pursuing.”&nbsp;It is projected that the Muslim world will be doing 50% of their banking needs with Islamic institutions by 2020.


	Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, President of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, states: “Sharia-compliant finance only empowers Muslim Sharia Law leaders whose real long-term vision is to impose Sharia Law on the world and recreate an Islamic Empire. These leaders want to overpower capital free markets and create their version of an Islamic economy. Bankers and business leaders are being duped.”


	The Sharia Compliant economy also appears to discriminate against any product that is associated with a Jew or Israel. Discrimination is not allowed in the West. While Muslims fight against any perceived discrimination against them, this Muslim economy discriminates against others. I think more importantly, a tax, Zakat, is placed on purchases of shares and this tax goes to funding Muslim charities. Unfortunately, some of these charities support Muslim terrorist organizations.


	I think, too, there is something not right about a separate “economy” in the West. My Supervisor in Clinical Pastoral Education talked to us about an “ooh” factor. Something in us tells us that here is something unethical but we haven’t quite put our finger on it. To me, there is something unethical about a parallel economy here.


	MT: You also note something else few people might have thought of, which is how China and India factor into the Islamophobia industry. Can you elaborate on that a little?


	DB: Our media has extensively exposed the infiltration of China into our world: in our media, education and government. There is no shyness, no hesitation to talk about the negative impact of China in our lives. Gordon Chang writes a great deal about this and the Epoch Times always reports. There is no “blowback” of racism; this despite the fact that the Chinese are a race. There is no such thing as Chinaphobia.


	We also have no problem calling out the caste system in India. We talk about the “untouchables” and how they are treated as less than human. Yet, we have allowed ourselves to be silenced about Islam.


	MT: You argue that by tolerating and even embracing Islam, the West is committing civilizational suicide. Do you see any signs of hope that we can recover a pride in our own civilization, commit to a defense of it, and reverse this trend?


	DB: Democracy is fragile. Freedom takes great courage to defend. Islam does not promote free will or freedom of thought. Islam, as clearly stated by the Islamic Circle of North America, is not in any way compatible with the West, yet we in our desire to be open and inclusive, have welcomed this ideology.


	Just as we welcomed this ideology we can stand up to it and say no. We are witnessing the rise of parents in America fighting against Critical Race Theory. When we have facts we can push back against the lies. But it does take courage. The same type of courage it took to push back against Nazism or communism or fascism or any other “ism.”


	Islam has done a remarkable job of silencing us. We must now do a remarkable job of freeing ourselves from its grip. We must not let fear control us. Fear breeds submission. We must speak up. Silence is Collusion.

The Islamophobia Industry

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	“There is an industry at work today, taking advantage of our

[Order David Horowitz's new book -- I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America: <a href="https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/frontpage/products/i-cant-breathe-how-a-racial-hoax-is-killing-america">HERE</a>.]


	Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	After a few years of the widespread tearing-down of statues honoring American heroes such as the Great Emancipator <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/portland-protesters-pull-down-statues-teddy-roosevelt-abraham-lincoln/">Abraham Lincoln</a>, Founding Father <a href="https://time.com/5856329/washington-statue-toppled-portland/">George Washington</a>, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/06/887618102/frederick-douglass-statue-vandalized-on-anniversary-of-famous-speech">anti-slavery giant Frederick Douglass</a>, recently a few new statues went up for a change. Massive golden busts of the late, far-left Congressman John Lewis and <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/black-lives-matter-blm">Black Lives Matter</a> icons George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were <a href="https://news.yahoo.com/statues-george-floyd-breonna-taylor-190127755.html">erected in Manhattan's Union Square</a>.


	Lewis arguably achieved something in his life – albeit <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/john-lewis">in the service of communism</a>. Floyd and Taylor, however, are being venerated not because of any extraordinary accomplishments, but because their deaths in police-involved incidents were successfully exploited by the Marxist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter to inflame racial rage and demonize police officers all across the country as genocidal bigots, even though there is zero evidence that racism was a factor in either death. Floyd, now an international symbol of racist police brutality, was an inveterate criminal and drug addict who died of a fentanyl overdose while being restrained by police for resisting arrest. Breonna Taylor died when police who were entering her darkened apartment with a search warrant returned fire after her drug-dealing boyfriend began shooting at them.


	<img height="500" width="331" style="width: 264px; height: 398px; float: left;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/10/ivb.jpg" alt="" />


	This is where America is in 2021: monuments honoring Frederick Douglass, a black man who rose from slavery to become a statesman, orator, writer, and noted abolitionist, are now destroyed by the woke mob, but blacks whose unintended deaths can be weaponized against America are lionized in the public square as martyrs.


	Floyd and Taylor are only two of the police victims elevated to household names by the powerful Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. The self-proclaimed trained Marxists who founded that subversive movement exploited, and continue to exploit, those victims in order to incite a civil war in America by hyping a false narrative of the <a href="https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/">systematic targeting</a> of blacks by law enforcement. That is the subject of <a href="https://horowitzfreedomcenterstore.org/collections/frontpage/products/i-cant-breathe-how-a-racial-hoax-is-killing-america">I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America</a>, the newest book by Freedom Center founder, conservative warrior, and bestselling author David Horowitz.


	Horowitz’s aim with the book is to puncture BLM’s grotesque narrative, which is supported by the Democrat Party and amplified by its media enablers. He begins the book with a summary of our current racial divide, which was exacerbated by deadly, nationwide BLM rioting – “a summer of insurrections” – in 2020 that constituted “the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history.” The siege of Portland by violent leftist activists, the Democrat movement to defund police departments and the subsequent crime waves that swept the nation, the anti-American messaging, the 2016 massacre of five white cops in Dallas at the hands of a BLM-inspired black extremist – Horowitz weaves all these ugly threads and more to create a dark tapestry of the devastation that Black Lives Matter’s myth-making has wrought:


	The casualties of the scorched-earth war unleashed by Black Lives Matter dwarf the total casualties of all the alleged racial injustices the organization has protested. The atrocities instigated and inspired by BLM encompass scores of innocent wounded and dead, both black and white… Surveying these disasters, one could reasonably conclude that, thanks to Black Lives Matter campaigns to abolish police departments, advances in both race relations and protections for urban black communities have been set back fifty years.


	Horowitz compiles the names of 26 black victims BLM claims were murdered or maimed by the police since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked the launch of the movement. They include the aforementioned Martin, Floyd and Taylor, as well as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Race, and Freddie Gray, to name some of the most well-known. Then – in chapters on how the BLM movement began, grew, and went national and then international – Horowitz goes on to dissect all 26 incidents according to the facts, backed up by over 70 pages of endnotes. He demonstrates how BLM has lied about every single one in its quest to aggravate racial tensions and rip America apart at the seams.


	His examinations show “that while some of the Black Lives Matter cases reveal tragic errors of judgment, almost all involve resistance by known and armed criminals to warranted arrests. In the vast majority of cases, Horowitz concludes, “the deceased would still be alive if they had simply obeyed police commands, and the Black Lives Matter charges are reckless inventions unsupported by the facts.”


	But of course, inconvenient facts and statistics are irrelevant to the racist power-mongers of BLM, “whose motives and goals have nothing to do with black lives mattering,” Horowitz notes. “Black Lives Matter is not a civil rights organization. It is a revolutionary criminal movement whose goals are openly Marxist and communist.” What matters to them, he adds, is not black lives but “the anti-American revolution they are advancing and the fantasy world they think they will achieve by destroying the most equitable, inclusive, tolerant, and free society that has ever existed.”


	Horowitz correctly points out that “Never in the history of nations has a previously oppressed minority like black Americans been so integrated into the dominant culture of a nation.” In addition, there is not a single crime statistic to support “the harsh claims of a hunting season on blacks by police.” On the contrary, I Can’t Breathe marshals irrefutable evidence that the truth about crime and race in this country is exactly the opposite of BLM’s “malicious racial fiction.”


	Horowitz answers the question he poses in one chapter heading – “What Kind of Movement is This?” – with an exposé of BLM’s proud links to cop-killers and domestic terrorists such as <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/assata-shakur">Assata Shakur</a> and <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/susan-rosenberg">Susan Rosenberg</a> (who now sits on the board of Thousand Currents, a nonprofit that has funneled millions of dollars into BLM coffers); to black racists and anti-Semites like <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/al-sharpton">Al Sharpton</a> and <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/louis-farrakhan">Louis Farrakhan</a>; to a coalition of radical groups like the street thugs of <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/antifa">Antifa</a> and the Labor/Community Strategy Center (headed by former <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/weather-underground-organization-wu">Weather Underground</a> terrorist Eric Mann, the ideological mentor of BLM founder <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/patrisse-cullors">Patrisse Cullors</a>); and to major funders like far-left billionaire financier <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/george-soros">George Soros</a> and the <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/ford-foundation">Ford</a> and <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/organizations/w-k-kellogg-foundation">Kellogg</a> Foundations.


	Horowitz also addresses BLM’s indoctrination of schoolkids, its takeover of the culture, its anti-family agenda (the declaration of which was scrubbed from the organization’s website when it began to attract too much outraged attention), and its perpetuation of destructive, anti-American myths such as “systemic racism.”


	In his concluding chapter, “Whose Future?”, Horowitz links the BLM movement’s aims to the broader agenda of the Democrat Party under decrepit puppet President Joe Biden, who himself publicly promotes the shameful lie that blacks in America are oppressed by a “systemic racism” which demonstrably does not exist.


	Whose future, indeed? If we are to repel Black Lives Matter’s full-on assault on our values, institutions, and character, it will only be if all American patriots summon the kind of courageous, truth-telling resistance David Horowitz displays in his indispensable book I Can’t Breathe to expose and condemn the corrosive racial hoaxes perpetrated by BLM and the Democrat Party.

I Can't Breathe

[Order David Horowitz's new book -- I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America: HERE.]


	Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our current cold civil war is that civility, mutual if grudging respect, and rational if testy debate in our political discourse have all been replaced by a hair-trigger performative outrage, the scorched-earth warfare of cancel culture, and even occasional violence. It’s difficult to remember that there was a time when even acerbic antagonists like William Buckley and Gore Vidal could trade barbs onstage without hurling chairs at each other and inciting nationwide rioting. What has happened to us? How did we come to this point? And is this state of rage destined to be a permanent feature of our cultural and political landscape?


	Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential <a href="https://www.amazon.com/1620-True-Beginning-American-Republic/dp/1641771240/">1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project</a>, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-America-Peter-W-Wood/dp/1641772190/">Wrath: America Enraged</a>. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.


	Mark Tapson: Mr. Wood, what is the “new anger,” and what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context? 


	Peter Wood: "New anger" is show-off anger, the display of someone who expects to be admired for the performance or to boast about it afterwards: anger mixed with self-delight.&nbsp; New anger contrasts to the older ethic of trying to master your anger and not to let it master you.&nbsp; Through much of American history, giving free vent to anger was regarded as a sign of weakness and immaturity.&nbsp; We admired the man or woman who, when provoked, found ways to handle the situation without descending into rage.&nbsp; Of course, that kind of self-control often failed, at which point brawls erupted.&nbsp; Those who brawled in public or in private, however, were not regarded as good people.&nbsp; Those who turned to anger too quickly or too often were shamed.


	"New anger" became a recognizable force in American life in the 1950s, though it was at first a trend&nbsp;confined to avant garde parts of society:&nbsp; the beat generation, early adepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and people reading French existentialist&nbsp;novels. From these seeds grew the counterculture of the sixties, and then the disillusioned anger of the Big Chill 1970s.&nbsp; I am collapsing a lot of history into a few sentences.&nbsp; The breakdown of the older ideals of emotional self-control and their replacement by a new ethic of emotional expressiveness didn't happen overnight or all at once or equally&nbsp;in all sectors of society.&nbsp; Fifteen years ago I spent a whole book (A Bee in the&nbsp;Mouth: Anger in America Now) to describe the slow progression of new anger into the position it now has of cultural dominance.&nbsp; I'm mindful that whole generations have grown up for whom there is nothing "new" about "new anger."&nbsp; It is all they have ever experienced unless they have been immersed in the world of Turner Classic Movies, where you can glimpse a world ruled by different emotional norms.


	But you ask me "what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?"&nbsp; The political left, going all the way back to the 1950s and even earlier upheld the view that American society is so unjust that people should indeed feel righteous indignation and anger at our institutions.&nbsp; The form of this leftist anger, of course, shifted with other changes in the national temperament.&nbsp; A Woody Guthrie protest song of the Dust Bowl years expressed leftist anger in a vivid way but it was meant to rally people and it had a good-humored element to it.&nbsp; As new anger emerged in the 1950s, leftist anger began to take on a darker tone.&nbsp; The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in 1956 titled "America," in which he told the country, "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb."&nbsp; The shock of a line like that has dissipated over the years as vulgarity has become common, but it was a pretty big step at the time, and it opened a rhetorical arms race on the left.&nbsp; Finding ever newer and more offensive&nbsp;ways to express anger became a competition among leftist artists, intellectuals, and self-styled rebels.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	I won't recite that long chain of developments either, but it eventually landed us in the 24-hour sneerfest of Facebook and Twitter, and the perverse joy of Antifa and BLM rioters.&nbsp; Anger for the left is not a response to provocation. It is rather a settled way of life, a lifestyle in which emotional satisfaction comes from vituperation and sometimes naked aggression and vandalism.&nbsp; Anger does indeed make people feel powerful, at least for a while, and the left has developed ways of excusing the perpetrators of it as people driven to violence because of the oppression they suffer.&nbsp;&nbsp;


	Both the anger and the excuses for it are a distinct characteristic of the political left.&nbsp; The political right has its own long history of anger too, but it is anger of a very different character.&nbsp; It might be called reluctant anger because it is anger always at odds with other values which block it or complicate it.&nbsp; William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951) was an angry book at some level, but on the surface it is cool and restrained. There were episodes in the ensuing&nbsp;decades such as the "hardhat&nbsp;riot" on Wall Street&nbsp;in May 1970.&nbsp; But it took the rise of talk radio in the 1980s for American conservatives to discover a more expressive angry style of their own, and it was generally one of mockery and disdain for the left.&nbsp; Donald Trump ultimately became the master of this style.&nbsp; But that doesn't get us all the way to "wrath."


	I'm using the word to capture that moment of emotional impasse in which the person has been angered beyond endurance and sees no way ahead.&nbsp; All the exits have been blocked and the places where emotional expression could be channeled into political or legal action seem to be out of reach. Wrath is collective despair suddenly torn free of all (or at least most) restraints because the other side has chosen to rule by foce and intimidation, not by the consent of the governed.


	<img height="499" width="338" style="height: 443px; width: 300px; float: left;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/10/wrath_1.jpg" alt="" />MT: How has anger become such a dominant factor in American politics?


	PW: My long answer above covers most of this, but I'll add that politics by its nature involves opposition, and opposition always has the potential to summon anger. The elaborate codes of diplomacy and protocol that are (or were) part of Constitutional government are meant to keep the underlying anger in check. They have generally worked pretty well, though history provides plenty&nbsp;of examples where they failed. American politics was not the place where "new anger" first found its home in our national life. In fact it was among the last places to be conquered, probably&nbsp;because it has so many built-in safeguards. We had angry songs, angry movies, angry sports, and angry feminists long before we had truly angry politics. The political scene first became seriously angry with during the presidency of George W. Bush, which featured incessant&nbsp;attacks from the "angry left." Anger became the dominant factor in our politics because once it is introduced, it naturally crowds out other emotional tones. Flamboyant&nbsp;expressions of hatred for the other side set in motion a dynamic in which that hatred will be returned. And it spirals into reprisals on both sides, people discover its excitements. Anger, rightly understood, is a pleasurable experience. People get addicted to it, and it becomes a way of motivating your side to give money, to attend rallies, to vote, and--unfortunately--to cut corners and to cheat, the discovery of which breeds still more anger.


	MT: You argue that some wrath is justified, especially that of the populists with whom you identify and sympathize, and who are being marginalized by the Progressive elites. How has the media contributed to stoking their anger?


	PW: Every time the media dismisses statements about irregularities in the 2020 election as "lies," or "disproven," or "groundless," it stokes the anger of many millions of Americans who see plenty of evidence of such irregularities and who have been frustrated by the unwillingness of legal authorities&nbsp;and the courts to take action. The absence of "proof," of course, follows from the unwillingness to examine the evidence that does exist and the determination of authorities to prevent the gathering of more and perhaps determinative evidence. Every time the press refers to the events of January&nbsp;6 as an "insurrection," millions of Americans grow angrier at what they see is gross exaggeration of what happened. When the press amplifies the idea that the non-vaxed&nbsp;pose a mortal anger to their neighbors, still more people grow angry. When the press continues to downplay as "mostly peaceful protest"&nbsp; the 2020 riots which killed two dozen people and resulted in billions of dollars in property damage, it incenses ordinary Americans. When the press veers away from covering the travesty of our retreat from Afghanistan to focus instead on COVID, Americans grew angier still.&nbsp; The press's failure&nbsp;to treat seriously our crisis on the Mexican border follows suit. And the shamelessness of the press in overlooking the dementia of President Biden and our being ruled by a de facto&nbsp;regime of unnamed puppet masters seals the anger as deep contempt both for those who currently hold power and for the lapdog press that assists them.


	MT: You assert that the dynamics of anger in America right now include an “asymmetrical racial division.” Can you elaborate on that?


	PW: We are faced with a situation in which an openly racist black power movement seeks to use its self-described victim status as a tool to intimidate&nbsp;and shame other Americans. The asymmetry is that no one else is attempting to use race to claim privileges and immunities, or to intimidate or to seize power.&nbsp;


	MT: In the preface to Wrath, you state that you hope to teach readers “how to put some righteous anger to good use in the effort to save our country and our civilization from an approaching barbarism.” How can our anger be directed strategically – and peacefully – to push back?


	PW: The simplest answer is a spontaneous decision by the majority not to cooperate with manifestly unjust and arbitrary rules. The agencies of some of the key powers of the government have discredited themselves&nbsp;by extending their power far beyond their legal warrant. The best answer to such usurpation is to decline to go along with it. That doesn't work if it is pursued by only a handful, but it is tremendously&nbsp;effective if it is pursued by the many. This is a form of civil disobedience. It has costs. Our thuggish government will unjustly imprison, harass, or find other ways to torment some of us. We'll have to expect that. But a collective "No!" to the FBI when it shows up at a school board meeting to arrest citizens who are exercising their Constitutional right to speak out will soon put that compromised agency back on its heels.


	MT: Is there any hope that we can recover the virtues of self-restraint and civility in our cultural and political discourse, or is performative anger here to stay?


	PW: I have hope but not for a quick cure. Emotional temperament is set in childhood, most importantly by parents who have a clear idea that they want their children to have the benefits of emotional self-control. Right now we have schools across the country that are colonizing the new area of "social and emotional learning," meaning that they want to displace the role of parents in setting the emotional temper of children and take that role for teachers. The teachers, of course, are generally trained in leftist teacher colleges and fully buy into the expressivist, "liberating" view of&nbsp;education. Any long-term hope of changing our emotional dynamics for the better depends on restoring the authority of the family. That is further complicated by the American epidemic of fatherlessness. A child raised without a father is in peril of some degree of emotional deprivation. We all know this, though it is very hard to talk about for fear of offending people who did not choose this fate. The fatherless child is a child who is destined to have problems with anger. But that's another topic.

America Enraged

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In a 1998 interview in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden <a href="https://www.meforum.org/435/usama-bin-ladin-american-soldiers-are-paper-tigers">told ABC News’ John Miller</a> that then-President Bill Clinton’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia after the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu proved the American soldier is a “paper tiger” – a toothless threat. Muslim youth are no longer intimidated by Western superpowers, bin Laden warned.


	Barely three years later, Bin Laden and his cohorts showed the world just how unintimidated they were, launching the 9/11 terrorist attacks. America then took the fight to Afghanistan to root out bin Laden and prevent that desolate country from ever again serving as a base for terrorism. But twenty years later, thanks to a catastrophic mishandling by the Biden administration, the country known as the Graveyard of Empires is back under the control of fundamentalist savages – only now they have been empowered not only by Biden’s gift of approximately $85 billion worth of military hardware, but also by a victory that has galvanized jihadists everywhere – and our other enemies, as well – who feel confirmed in their perception that America and her allies are a paper tiger.


	And in truth, what do they have to fear from us? America’s military is being undermined by a top-down subversion led by traitorous SecDef Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, both of them Critical Race Theory enthusiasts who have shifted the military’s focus from foreign threats to combating purported “white supremacy” here at home and mythical “climate change” abroad. Their push for “racial equity” is corroding cohesion in the ranks, inculcating racial resentment, and eroding patriotism in our troops.


	Across “the pond,” our European allies are more concerned about squelching wrongthink at home than crushing external enemies. In this recent, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhJNtFoU_vU">jaw-dropping interview</a> of the British Chief of Defence Staff, General Nick Carter told Sky News as Afghanistan collapsed that the British military was “collaborating” with the Taliban to get British citizens out of the country. Asked how he felt about “collaborating” with an enemy that has committed atrocities against British military personnel over the years, Carter responded, “I think you have to be very careful using the word ‘enemy.’ I think people need to understand who the Taliban actually are.”


	Those of us not blinded by political careerism and multicultural brainwashing understand very well who the Taliban are, and if you can’t use the word “enemy” to describe fanatics who celebrate the beheadings of infidels, then what meaning does the word have? One could argue that the General was trying to be cautious and diplomatic under circumstances in which British citizens were still in danger, but seriously: what must every British soldier who survived serving in Afghanistan, and the families of those who didn’t, think about the most senior military officer in the United Kingdom refusing to use the word “enemy” to describe the Taliban? It’s hard to see it as anything but a grotesque betrayal and a white flag of surrender for all the world to see.


	Meanwhile, Britain’s hugely disappointing Prime Minister Boris Johnson <a href="https://www.itv.com/news/2021-08-17/pm-taliban-government-could-be-recognised-if-they-protect-afghans-human-rights">was quoted</a>, laughably, saying that the “legitimacy of any future Taliban government will be subject to them upholding internationally-agreed standards on human rights and inclusivity.” By inclusivity, he means, of course, the gender diversity Western countries idolize so fervently that we fly the LGBT rainbow flag right alongside our national flags at embassies worldwide.


	Our insistence on imposing a woke gender ideology on other cultures is part of the reason we never pulled Afghanistan into the Western orbit (and a major reason we are losing African nations to Chinese influence, too). Spectator columnist Cockburn reported recently on America’s attempt to, as <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/marcel-duchamp-toilet-afghanistan-conceptual-art/">blogger and author Rod Dreher put it</a>, “turn a nation of medieval goat herders and Islamic hillbillies into penis-possessors and vulva-havers suitable for campus life at some of America’s more elite colleges.” According to government records, U.S. taxpayers wasted $787 million on gender programs launched in Afghanistan, including a “<a href="https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1367155009419243520/photo/2" target="_blank">National Masculinity Alliance</a>,” so that Afghan men could talk about their “gender roles” and “examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.” How delusional must our leaders be to believe that a few group therapy sessions among Islamic fundamentalists in the mountains of Afghanistan, where a true Handmaid’s Tale patriarchy exists, will cause them to reject their hyper-masculinized worldview, become <a href="https://goodmenproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/male-feminist.jpg">proud male feminists</a>, and start throwing gay pride parades?


	Only the Western world embraces the rampant gender lunacy that cultural Marxism has weaponized to subvert traditional families and demonize masculinity. Only the West openly denigrates traditional manhood while chanting “the future is female.” Only the West has elevated drag queens and trans celebrities into cultural heroes. We need to wake up to the fact that our enemies around the world see no value in condemning masculinity as “toxic” or erasing gender distinctions altogether; they correctly see that as civilizational weakness.


	Let’s do a little cultural comparison. The U.S. military released a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIYGFSONKbk">cartoon recruitment video</a> earlier this year that centers on the personal aspirations of a young, female social justice activist identified as Emma. She repeatedly mentions how inspired by and proud she is of the “two moms” who raised her with a political consciousness. After some dorm room chats with sister feminists, she decides to enlist in the military to “find her own inner strength and shatter some stereotypes along the way.” There is not a word in the video about service to her country, defending freedom, or bonding with her fellow soldiers. There is not a weapon in sight, apart from the smoky trail of a missile which isn’t shown actually hitting anything. The boot camp Emma breezes through looks less rigorous than a corporate team-building weekend in Cabo.


	In sharp contrast, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOWRembdPS8&amp;t=24s">Chinese army recruitment video</a> from a couple of years ago brims with fierce, male warrior energy and more explosions than a Michael Bay movie. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_qr-4AKM18">Another one</a> emphasizes traditional family, sacrifice, discipline, service – and more high-tech weaponry than a Michael Bay movie. The men in it are shown training for war to protect the homes and the women they’ve left behind. There are no lesbian moms or cartoon characters. After watching these videos, I was this close to moving to Beijing to enlist.


	In even starker contrast, this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqek78JXckw">Russian army recruitment video</a> bursting with testosterone looks like a remake of the Spartan movie 300. It depicts a laser-focused brotherhood of pumped warriors training to fight, to kill, to win. They get their boots dusty running obstacle courses in the desert. They parachute out of troop transports into snowy tundra. They fire sniper rifles. It is unclear whether or not they might have been inspired by lesbian moms, because the video does not feature any.


	Jihadist movements like the Islamic State and al Qaeda have their own special brand of recruitment videos, of course, designed to stoke the bloodlust of radicalized Muslims living in weak, secular, decadent Western societies, and to strike terror in the hearts of infidels. Needless to say, there is a great deal of legitimately toxic masculinity on display in the videos – and no lesbian moms.


	It is no secret that, in nearly every metric from plunging testosterone levels to rising fatherlessness at home, the West is suffering a dangerous decline of masculinity. It doesn’t help that an increasingly feminized Western world today is ruled largely by either women or “men without chests,” to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase. America is presided over by a decrepit, lifelong bureaucrat who will soon be supplanted by his VP, a woman everyone knows is hopelessly out of her depth. Apart from the rare example like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the rest of the Western world has ceded its leadership to soft, baby-faced multiculturalists like Canada’s Justin Trudeau, or to women who are not Iron Ladies like the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but globalist elites like Germany’s Angela Merkel and New Zealand’s gun-grabbing Jacinda Ardern.


	Unlike us, our enemies are not actively “deconstructing” masculinity. Islamists do not agonize over their “toxic” manhood. Vladimir Putin’s own shrewdly-<a href="https://i.pinimg.com/474x/14/85/33/148533fff179a74ff74b451baab5f79c--putin-shirtless-vladimir-putin.jpg">constructed personal image</a> of heterosexual virility has led a <a href="https://neweasterneurope.eu/2016/10/12/masculinity-politics-in-putin-s-russia/">Russian resurgence of masculinity</a>. The Chinese are actually wrestling with a masculinity crisis, but they rightly recognize that it is a serious cultural and national security concern, and they’re addressing it. Earlier this month <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/09/02/male-girlie-behavior-banned-china-crackdown-kicks-sissy-men-off-tv/">the state-run media there demanded</a> that broadcasters stop featuring “sissy men,” “vulgar internet celebrities,” and other abnormal esthetics” that are not encouraging young Chinese men to be masculine enough. Back in January, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-proposes-teaching-masculinity-boys-state-alarmed-changing-gender-roles-n1258939">China's Education </a><a href="http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/xxgk_jyta/jyta_jiaoshisi/202101/t20210128_511584.html">Ministry</a> <a href="http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/xxgk_jyta/jyta_jiaoshisi/202101/t20210128_511584.html">published plans</a> to “cultivate masculinity” in boys from kindergarten through high school. “Chinese boys have been spoiled by housewives and female teachers,” one of China’s top political advisers said. They would soon become “delicate, timid and effeminate” unless action was taken, he added, noting that the “feminization” of Chinese boys “threatens China's survival and development.”


	As the old Arab saying goes: a falling camel attracts many knives. Our enemies smell blood in the water, if I may mix my metaphors. I’m not suggesting that we adopt any sort of state coercion as in China, or promote a false manhood based on easily-punctured, empty bluster. But if, as a civilization, we don’t acknowledge our masculinity crisis and reject the narcissistic gender confusion that has infected our culture; if we don’t start cultivating a warrior pride and a moral masculinity grounded in the love of faith, family, and nation; if we don’t start electing real leaders of men like a George Washington or a Winston Churchill; then our enemies will move in for the kill. We need them to know that if they come for us, or when we come for them, they will be facing not a paper tiger, but righteous lions.

Men Without Chests

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In a 1998 interview in the mountains of southern Afghanistan

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In the wake of the Biden administration’s catastrophic exit from Afghanistan, which has left a militarily-empowered Taliban in control of that graveyard of empires, Islamic terrorism is set to become resurgent all across the Western world. The fact that we are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks lends the threat a grim symbolism. &nbsp;


	Coincidentally, a new thriller novel is now available that addresses the subversive Islamist threat that already exists in America – not a fictional one, but the very real and insidious presence here of the Muslim Brotherhood.


	Before turning to full-time writing, the book’s author, <a href="https://jeffreyjameshiggins.com/">Jeffrey James Higgins</a>, had a varied and extraordinary career in counterterrorism and international drug law enforcement, as you will read in our interview below. His first novel, <a href="https://jeffreyjameshiggins.com/furious/">Furious: Sailing into Terror</a>, is a cinematic page-turner in which a traumatized woman is trapped aboard a sailboat in shark-infested seas, at the mercy of a singularly horrifying predator onboard with her. Now Higgins has released a new novel from Black Rose Writing, called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unseen-Evil-Lurks-Among-Us/dp/1684338697/">Unseen: Evil Lurks Among Us</a>. In it, a rookie detective on the trail of a serial killer in Washington D.C. has his eyes opened about an even greater danger – Islamist infiltration in the nation’s capitol.


	I reached out to Higgins with a few questions about the book and his work.


	Mark Tapson:&nbsp; Jeffrey, tell us first a bit about your counter-terrorism career and what led you into it. Are there any lessons learned from it that you think the average citizen needs to be aware of?


	Jeffrey James Higgins:&nbsp; I took a strange path into counterterrorism. I wanted to be a writer since I was five years old, and after college I worked as a journalist to pay the bills. When I was between reporter positions, I took a job as a private investigator, thinking it would help my detective fiction. I became enthralled with the excitement and nobility of police work, and I joined a sheriff’s office, then DEA. That led to a twenty-five-year career in law enforcement. 
	 
	Ironically, I’m libertarian and believe in legalizing most drugs, so during my career with DEA, I focused on violent offenders. I started in NYC and investigated transnational criminal groups who were killing and abducting people—then 9/11 changed everything. I was in the first group of people to arrive at the collapsed north tower of the World Trade Center, where I carried bodies out of the rubble. Standing in the remains of those glorious monuments to capitalism, I swore I’d hunt down the monsters behind the attacks. 
	 
	I assisted the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force with the PENTBOMB investigation of the al-Qaeda attacks, and when my partner and I identified a man who allegedly conspired with the hijackers, I knew DEA’s drug enforcement tactics were effective against terror cells. As a DEA liaison to Department of Homeland Security Operations Center, I advocated for DEA’s inclusion in counterterrorism operation, despite pushback from bureaucrats who wanted to keep DEA as a single-mission agency. 
	 
	I volunteered for DEA’s nascent office in Kabul, Afghanistan, and there, I battled bureaucrats to go after the people I’d vowed to hunt on 9/11. I wrestled a suicide bomber, accompanied the military on a terrorist raid, and fought a Taliban operative. Our office trained the Afghan Counter Narcotics Police and led them on their first mission out of Kabul, where we arrested Taliban drug traffickers and freed a sex slave. As the first DEA undercover in Afghanistan since before the Russian invasion, I negotiated with a Pakistan drug trafficker for the delivery of 500 kilograms of heroin to NYC. I clashed with the military, intelligence community, and diplomats who refused to acknowledge the nexus between drugs and terrorism. Even DEA tried to stop me from investigating terrorism, but I persisted. 
	 
	I joined DEA’s new FAST team, a foreign-deployed tactical team, and returned to Afghanistan. Finally, in 2006, congress passed 21 USC 960 (a), the narco-terrorism law, and I made the first arrest and conviction under that law and cemented DEA’s involvement in counterterrorism. I also investigated Haji Bagcho, a Taliban supporter and drug trafficker responsible for at least 19.7% of the world’s heroin supply. When I transferred to DEA’s Narco-Terrorism Group, I took Haji Bagcho to trial, and he became the most prolific heroin trafficker ever convicted in the United States. 
	 
	I also investigated many other interesting cases, including the arrest and conviction of an Iranian operative who tried to purchase surface-to-air-missiles. I was extremely fortunate to serve my country, travel the world, and conduct historic investigations. 
	 
	The most important lesson I learned from my years investigating narco-terrorism is simple—evil people exist in the world. They do not use Western epistemology or share American values or desire peace. Radical Islamists seek a global caliphate and death is not a deterrent to them; it’s an honor. They seek death—yours and theirs. To quote Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “Death is [an] art, a truly beautiful art.”


	MT:&nbsp; Even though truth is often stranger than fiction, storytelling can be a more powerful, effective method of taking your message to people than nonfiction. Is that why you made the shift to writing short stories and novels?


	JJH:&nbsp; Nonfiction and fiction can both be powerful tools. I’ve published a half dozen nonfiction stories and written a nonfiction book about terrorism titled Blood and Powder. It’s a first-person account of my journey from the World Trade Center through the first narco-terrorism arrest. I have a sequel to Blood and Powder outlined, titled The Mountain Poet, which is about the conviction of Haji Bagcho and a Taliban commander’s plot to attack the United States. Much of my nonfiction read like thrillers, but they also convey important information. 
	 
	I made the jump to fiction because I’m a storyteller, and when my imagination runs wild, I must share the stories. Every few days I read a news story or hear about an incident, and I think, what if . . . and that turns into another idea for a novel or short story. Writing fiction also allows me to explore controversial ideas and share ideas readers may not be open to receive in nonfiction. People are tribalistic, and when information comes from the other side of the aisle, they raise their defenses. But when the ideas are delivered through fiction, readers are more likely to pay attention. Sharing ideas through fiction is a way to influence the culture. 
	 
	Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream from culture,” and I agree. The Left has been propagandizing Americans for generations, and they manipulate the prevailing narrative. They have infected most American institutions, including Hollywood, academia, and social media. I’m astonished by the amount of propaganda and disinformation in everything from beer commercials to children’s television. Entire academic programs convey the Left’s “woke” platform. It’s been happening for a century, but the mask is finally off and their ideology, strategy, and tactics are in plain view. I think we are rapidly approaching an inflection point. 
	 
	People read books, watch television, and see movies to be entertained, but that’s where they consume subliminal Leftist messaging. I wrote&nbsp;Unseen to make people aware of Islamic infiltration. Educating the public about the dangers of radical Islam is difficult, but I can educate people through entertainment. The Left has been fighting the culture war for years, and&nbsp;Unseen&nbsp;is my attempt to fight back.


	MT:&nbsp; Your novel’s protagonist Malachi begins under the assumption that the serial killer he’s pursuing might be motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry. Was it part of your intent in this novel to enlighten the reader about the very real, subversive threat of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, just like Malachi himself has his naivete challenged?


	JJH:&nbsp; My primary goal was to deliver an action-packed thriller to entertain readers, because that’s my job as a novelist, but a secondary and more culturally important aim was to warn people about the insidious threat lurking among them.


	Malachi Wolf is a new detective trying to solve his first homicide, and he’s not political. Like many people, he has accepted the Left’s narrative about Islamophobia and not done his own research to discover the truth. He’s been dealing with personal issues and trying to live his life. When the specter of radical Islam appears, his limited knowledge of terrorism forces him to study the topic. Malachi is a former economist with a rational, objective mind, so when he contacts Zahra Mansour, a Fellow at a think tank, he slowly realizes facts do not support common beliefs. I wanted readers to take that journey with him. 
	 
	Some readers may not want to experience cognitive dissonance from hearing facts that contradict with beliefs they have accepted, but everything I wrote about the Brotherhood’s strategy of infiltration is true. Readers can decide if they want to hide behind the comfort of popular but false notions or see reality. I hope they choose the latter.


	MT:&nbsp; Contrary to complaints from the left and purported civil rights groups like CAIR about Muslim stereotypes, stories in which Islamists are the bad guys are actually uncommon because, even post-9/11 (in fact, especially post-9/11), no one wants to be smeared as a so-called “Islamophobe.” Were and are you concerned about any backlash you and the book might receive from politically correct scolds in our current “cancel culture”?


	JJH:&nbsp; That’s a great question. Before I answer it, let’s be clear that the Council on American-Islamic Relations claims to be a civil rights organization, but it’s a front group created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas, a State-Department-designated terrorist organization. The United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country, has labeled CAIR a terrorist entity. The Muslim Brotherhood uses front groups and terrorist groups operating under different banners to conduct Civilization Jihad. 
	 
	You’re correct about social blowback against anyone who disagrees with the radical Left’s narrative, whether you’re talking about radical Islam, socialism, or any other evil ideology. Cancel culture is an instrument the Left uses to stifle dissent. The problem is people can’t remain silent while Leftists and Islamists destroy the West. Self-censorship is even worse than governmental or social prohibitions, because when you restrict your own speech, it damages your soul. You can’t repeat a lie or stay quiet in the face of prevarications and falsities without destroying your self-esteem. 
	 
	I generally try to keep politics out of my fiction, because I want readers from across the political spectrum to enjoy my stories. Movies and books should be a place where all Americans can come together and around common human emotions and experience, but even that has become polarized. 
	 
	I discussed the politics of radical Islam in Unseen because Islamists have infiltrated the United States and targeted it for destruction. That’s not just me saying that—it’s Muslim Brotherhood leaders. We have a serious problem when Islamists like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are elected, the Democratic Party spreads antisemitism, and members of CAIR and other Brotherhood front groups lobby Congress. 
	 
	Am I worried about being branded as an Islamophobe? No. I don’t criticize Muslims, just radical Islamists who use violence to enforce their totalitarian supremacist ideology, and everything I explain about the Muslim Brotherhood is factually accurate and provable. I should not be branded as an Islamophobe—but I expect it. Ad hominem attacks are what Leftists and Islamists use when they can’t refute an argument with data and facts. Despite that possibility, I won’t stay silent while my country is under attack.


	MT:&nbsp; Speaking of the Muslim Brotherhood, your wife is scholar Cynthia Farahat, Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, who is notable in her own right for her research into the Brotherhood. How has her work influenced yours, and what does she think about your shift from being in the field to writing fiction?


	JJH:&nbsp; My wife, Cynthia was thrilled when I retired. I think anyone would breathe a sigh of relief when their spouse removed themselves from harm’s way. 
	 
	Cynthia is the most courageous woman I have ever met. She fought against tyranny in Egypt with only her wits and cunning for protection. In contrast, I had the power of the US government behind me when I fought terrorism. As a young girl in Egypt, Cynthia just wanted to become a sculptor, but the combination of Egypt’s socialist government and the force of Sharia law prevented her from studying art. She shifted her focus and studied enough Islamic jurisprudence to become a mufti if she was Muslim. Cynthia co-founded the first secular political party in the history of Egypt and advocated freedom of speech, capitalism, and individual rights. She defended minorities, including moderate Muslims, who are still her biggest fan base. She has helped transform Egyptian society. 
	 
	I could not have written Unseen without my wife. I’m an expert in narco-terrorism, and I spent many years in Afghanistan and investigating terrorism, but Cynthia’s expertise in the Muslim Brotherhood is unparalleled. Her upcoming nonfiction book, The Secret Apparatus, will expose the Brotherhood as the font of all Islamic terrorism. The plot and characters in Unseen are pure fiction, but the underlying conspiracy by the Muslim Brotherhood is real.


	MT:&nbsp; What is your next writing project? I hope you’re planning more terrorism-related thrillers.


	JJH:&nbsp; Writing about federal criminal investigations of terrorists and transnational criminals is certainly my wheelhouse, and I can write about law enforcement with authenticity. If my readers enjoy Unseen, I will make it a series. I have a outlines for two more books in the series, both of which involve terrorism. 
	 
	I mentioned my nonfiction book, Blood and Powder, which my agent has submitted to publishers. I’m hoping it finds a suitable home soon. The logline is, “Battling bureaucrats and terrorists, a special agent pushes DEA into war and makes the first narco-terrorism arrest—forever changing how terrorists are prosecuted.” It’s Blackhawk Down meets The Good Soldiers. 
	 
	I grew up in the small New England town of Harvard, Massachusetts, and I set another murder mystery there. Battling bipolar disorder, Emily Miller lands her dream job as a reporter and returns to her New England hometown, but when her brother becomes a suspect in a gruesome murder, she must identify the killer to save her family, her job, and her life. It’s&nbsp;Sharp Objects&nbsp;meets&nbsp;The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. Shaking is out to publishers, so fingers crossed.


	I’m editing a techno-thriller, The Forever Game, and I hope to have it finished by the end of the year. All my books are thrillers, but each is in a separate sub-genre, which makes it more difficult to acquire readers. I’d like to write more about terrorism, intelligence, and federal law enforcement, but I have dozens of ideas for novels. I spent so many years not writing, I’m compelled to get my stories on paper, regardless of genre. 
	 
	The response I’ve received from readers has overwhelmed me. Knowing people are enjoying my novels fills me with joy. If people are interested in reading my novels, nonfiction, short stories, and essays, they can find links at <a href="https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fjeffreyjameshiggins.com%2F&amp;data=04%7C01%7C%7Cd74ed7864eab4f4b668608d9721ed839%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637666299221861986%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&amp;sdata=040Sm2MXMhQ6a8ARKb6m8nT6Il%2BtnnP3io1NTIXFMZk%3D&amp;reserved=0">https://JeffreyJamesHiggins.com</a>. If they sign up for my newsletter, it will notify them whenever I publish. 
	 
	MT:&nbsp; Jeffrey Higgins, thanks for a fascinating interview, and keep up the good work.

'Unseen' Terror

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	In the wake of the Biden administration’s catastrophic exit

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Recent polls have revealed that a growing majority of young Americans view socialism (or at least, their rose-colored conception of it) favorably and capitalism unfavorably. We assume that these young people must be brainwashed Democrats, star-struck by celebrity activists like anthem protester Colin Kaepernick and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – and the great majority are. But shockingly, a new <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/young-americans-increasingly-prefer-socialism-heres-how-to-change-their-minds/">Axios/Momentive poll</a> shows that, even among Republicans, the number of 18- to 34-year-olds who hold a positive view of capitalism has plummeted from 81% in 2019 to 66% today.


	How did America get to the point where a passion for socialist revolution is spreading like wildfire among our youth? A brand new documentary addresses this disturbing trend and makes an airtight case that socialism inevitably (and swiftly) leads to widespread economic misery and loss of personal freedoms, while the free market leads inevitably to widespread prosperity. <a href="https://www.teapartypatriots.org/foundation/surviving-socialism/">Surviving Socialism</a>, produced by the Tea Party Patriot Foundation and Ground Floor Video, directed by Luke Livingston, and written by Jake Tower, <a href="https://anthemfilmfestival.com/agenda/">premieres at the Anthem Film Festival</a> in Rapid City, South Dakota on Friday, July 23. It will be shown alongside such projects as the Shelby Steele film What Killed Michael Brown?, the documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, and a sneak-peek presentation of the long-awaited Ronald Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid.


	The poster for the film was designed by the anti-Progressive gadfly Sabo, the conservative street artist behind such brilliant campaigns as mock advertisements skewering race hoaxer Jussie Smollett, and billboards slamming Hollywood for shielding pedophiles within its ranks:


	<img height="1585" width="1170" style="height: 542px; width: 400px;" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="2" src="https://cms.frontpagemag.com/sites/default/files/uploads/2021/07/poster.jpg" alt="" />


	The 62-minute Surviving Socialism largely features attractive and articulate young patriots like Morgan Zegers, founder and CEO of Young Americans Against Socialism; star commentator Candace Owens; and Scott Presler, the gay conservative activist who took the initiative to lead volunteer cleanups in Democrat-led urban centers across America, to the tune of over 105 tons of trash. The documentary also features distinguished thinkers and courageous journalists like Antifa target Andy Ngo, as well as actual survivors of socialism who can attest from grim personal experience that socialism does not alleviate suffering but imposes it.


	Zegers points out that left-wing young people today are fond of using distortions of the language, like the pleasant-sounding term “democratic socialism,” to convince themselves and others that their brand of communism-lite is not like the kind that has left as many as 100 million dead and countless more in utter misery, just in the last century. Idealistic young people who are attracted to the idea of creating a utopian society (and to the idea of lots of free stuff magically provided by a caring, beneficent government) think that this time socialism will lead to a world of perfect harmony and freedom from want.


	In fact, as one victim of the failed socialist state of Venezuela puts it in the film, “We were promised the fair and just distribution of wealth, but at the end of the day what we got was the fair and just distribution of poverty.” As two other socialism survivors point out later in the film, socialism always ends the same way: in misery, food lines, and concentration camps.


	“Democratic socialism views the wealthy and corporations as evil because they prey on the rest of the country… and the solution is higher taxes, higher regulations, and a bigger welfare state,” Prof. David Azerrod from Hillsdale College says in the film. Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs adds that young people too often don’t realize that “when you start talking about socialism, it’s regulation of virtually every aspect of every human life. That’s an authoritarian government.”


	Lee Edwards, Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, notes that under socialism, “There is no private sector, no private property… no place for the free market.” He also explains, in response to the frequent argument that true democratic socialism has never really been tried, that it “has been tried, in three quite different democracies”: in the kibbutzes of Israel, in newly-independent India under Nehru, and in Labor Party rule in the United Kingdom after World War II. At the end of thirty years of collectivism, Israel abandoned the experiment and had to borrow $1.5 billion from the U.S. to pay its debt. At the end of its three-decade embrace of socialism in India, half the population was living in poverty. After thirty years of socialist policies in the UK, Britain had earned a dubious reputation as “the sick man of Europe.” But in a mere five years after conservative Margaret Thatcher took power there and privatized industry, Britain was one of the wealthiest countries in the world.


	Surviving Socialism addresses how the left indoctrinates schoolchildren with a sense of fear and urgency about saving the planet from evil capitalism, and exploits kids to agitate for socialist change. Candace Owens, mincing no words, calls this tactic “pedo-politics.” But under actual socialism, kids aren’t saving the world, but are reduced – as was Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, who grew up in Communist Cuba – to serving as lookouts while their parents illegally exchange goods on the black market. “Everyone in a Communist regime understands they’re being oppressed,” Gonzalez states in the documentary.


	The film then shifts to a discussion of how the left uses identity politics to divide and conquer, creating social tensions that lead to increased demands for the redistribution of wealth – like the racial agitation of the Marxist revolutionaries of Black Lives Matter. Journalists such as FrontPage Mag contributor Matthew Vadum and Andy Ngo appear in the film to discuss how the street thuggery of Antifa functions in this attempt to overthrow capitalism. And Prof. Azerrod identifies the intellectual influence of cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse, whose 1965 essay on “repressive tolerance” provides today’s left with a justification for censorship of, and political violence against, the right.


	Particularly powerful testimony against socialism is presented in the film by ex-Venezuelan Oskar Arreaza and his wife, who describe poignantly how swiftly their prosperous country collapsed under the late authoritarian monster Hugo Chavez – and how Americans shouldn’t think it could never happen here. “You realize that your country, your democracy, is starting to disappear, because you don’t have any right to fight for your freedom, for your values,” Mrs. Arreaza says. The couple fled to America while they still could. When people like this warn Americans about our future if the radicalism of leaders like Ocasio-Cortez and lifelong communist Bernie Sanders isn’t curbed, we need to sit up and take careful note -- and action.


	Packed with dynamic footage of America under siege by socialist revolutionaries, Surviving Socialism delivers an alarming message, but the film does end on an inspirational note, with footage of its young conservative commentators inspiring crowds about how the American Dream still lives for all who are willing to work hard for it, and for all who cherish their freedom. Activists like Zeger, Owens, and Presler, and films like this one, send young Americans the hopeful message they won’t hear anywhere else in our Progressive-dominated culture: that socialism is a corrosive lie, that free markets and private property are essential to personal freedom and prosperity, and that America is still the true land of opportunity.


	Check out the film's trailer below:

<div class="media_embed" height="315px" width="560px">
	<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k-L0Ixka9SU" title="YouTube video player" width="560px" height="315px" frameborder="0"></iframe></div>

Surviving Socialism

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Recent polls have revealed that a growing majority of young

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	After a few short seasons of athletes ruining sports from high school games to the professional leagues to the Olympics with performative wokeness, fans are rightfully fed up with having anti-American political statements and “black national anthems” shoved in their faces. Some of the most privileged, celebrated people in America, like petulant blowhard LeBron James and cop-hating communist Colin Kaepernick, have turned events that once united Americans into yet another divisive political battleground in the culture. The result is record-low ratings in every affected sport.


	But there is one sport that hasn’t been sabotaged (yet) by social justice activism, and likely won’t be: mixed martial arts (MMA), perhaps because it’s difficult to lecture your opponent about racial equity when you’re <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlw6AQH4oI0">losing consciousness in a triangle choke</a>.


	After the lightweight bout at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 262 in Houston on May 15, for example, in which 32-year-old <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lD9Oq0HPOQ">Beneil Dariush destroyed former champ Tony Ferguson</a>, Dariush took the mic to deliver an unusual victory speech to the crowd.


	“I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that’s number one,” the <a href="https://americanupdate.com/sports/ufc-fighter-dedicates-win-to-the-millions-harmed-by-marxism-rs-mf/">Iranian-born Dariush began</a>. Calling for calm from the crowd, he continued: “Number two, I want to dedicate this fight to all the people who’ve been hurt by Marxist ideologies. There are millions of you. I know it’s just a fight. I know it’s not much, but I want you to know that I love you. I understand the pain.”


	Last week, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZqzbXMxw_8">he appeared on Candace Owens’ show</a> to explain that the catalyst for making his statement was UFC fighter Rose Namajunas. “She fought Weili Zhang and she came out and said, ‘Better dead than red.’ And her family, I believe, was Lithuanian,” said Dariush. “And that was their slogan, ‘Better dead than red.’ And she got a terrible backlash.”


	Dariush was referring to UFC strawweight Namajunas, <a href="https://mydailyfreedom.com/tv/video/better-dead-than-red-mma-fighter-criticized-for-slamming-communism-15017.html">who said before her bout</a> against Zhang Weili, the UFC’s first champion from China, that her philosophy is, “Better dead than red,” an anti-communist expression coined during the Cold War. Namajunas said her motivation to take on Zhang was because her family is from Lithuania, where people understand just how devastating communism is. She added that Zhang is “red, that’s what she represents. It’s nothing personal against her, but that’s a huge motivating factor of why I fight and I fight for freedom and I’ve got the Christ consciousness, I’ve got Lithuanian blood and I’ve got the American dream and all of those things I’m taking with me into this fight.”


	Another source of inspiration for Namajunas was the documentary The Other Dream Team, about the 1992 Lithuanian men’s national basketball team, which entered the Barcelona Olympics as an independent country after leaving the Soviet Union.


	“If you’re confused about any of my opinions, you can watch the documentary, and you could get a good idea as to what my family had to go through, the reason I’m in the United States today, the reason that I do mixed martial arts, all of that stuff,” Namajunas said Wednesday on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show. “I’d probably have a really different life if it wasn’t for everything in that documentary, how Lithuanians had to struggle with communism oppression.”


	Predictably, Namajunas was attacked for taking a shot at the left’s cherished collectivism. Media outlets such as the South China Morning Post even <a href="https://society-reviews.com/2021/04/12/ufcs-rose-namajunas-upsets-progressives-with-anti-communist-remarks/">tried to link her</a> to Lithuania’s past with Nazis, <a href="https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2021/4/15/22386114/better-dead-than-red-political-narratives-fuel-ufc-fight-promotion-rose-namajunas-mma-feature">as did this contributor</a> to far-left outlets The Guardian and Open Democracy, who smeared her and other pro-freedom MMA fighters as Nazis and dreaded “nationalists.” One social media hater wrote to Namajunas, “I hope Zhang will destroy you” and blasted Namajunas for speaking “stereotypical nonsense about communism.”


	“And I just couldn’t understand it,” Dariush told Candace Owens. “She’s not saying anything crazy. You don’t want communism. You don’t want this socialism. This is what destroys countries and lives.”


	By pointing this out, Dariush displayed exactly what the woke corporate-media complex unjustifiably lauds Kaepernick for: courageous truth-telling. Dariush then described how the left-wing media spun Namajunas’ story:


	I saw how the media played it, they turn it, and they say “communism … it’s not even an issue in America,” things like that. And they kind of put a lot of pressure on her. And I actually felt bad for her.


	She should be able to say that as much as she wants and pretty much everybody should. So with that being said, I said I was going to actually just say the same thing she said, but the issue is, it’s the way they [the media] play with words.


	So you say communism, they say “We’re not really talking about communism. We’re talking about socialism.” And you say socialism, they say, “Well, it’s not that kind of socialism, it’s this.”


	“So I just said ‘Marxism’ [in his victory speech]. It covers it all. The only difference between these is one of them is a slower poison that is going to kill you later on. And the other one kills you faster,” he concluded. “So, I think we’ve got to make sure we start calling it just Marxism. It’s all one. It’s all the same thing.”


	Dariush went on to note that his Vietnamese wife’s family was among the boat people who fled the communist country after the war. He added that in his own country, Iran, the ayatollahs “made the government God… and it’s no different, it’s the same, it’s Marxist ideology. You make government number one, and people give up their rights.” He added astutely that the situation here is more insidious because in countries like China, communism is forced upon the people, while in America, “the ideology is seeping into every part of our lives.”


	Dariush and Namajunas aren’t the only politically red-pilled UFC fighters. <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2021/07/18/ufcs-jorge-masvidal-slams-coward-colin-kaepernick-for-wearing-fidel-castro-t-short/">In a video</a> attached to a July 12 tweet, Cuban-American fighter Jorge Masvidal said, “My father escaped Cuba when he was 14 years old. And I’ve only heard the horror stories, since I could process thoughts, of how shitty this communist regime, killing machine, is. So I just want to shed some light on Cuba — big SOS signal for them.


	“This oppression has been going on for 61 years,” continued Masvidal, who even <a href="https://humanevents.com/2021/04/16/better-dead-than-red-ufc-fighter-stands-strong-on-anti-communist-viewpoint/">went on a four-city bus tour</a> called “Fighters Against Socialism” with Donald Trump Jr. during former President Trump’s 2020 campaign. “This is not just because of the pandemic, or it’s not just because they ran out of medicine — they’ve been out of medicine and they’ve been out of resources and food because of the corrupt government and the extreme corruption over there where only a few at the top eat and everyone has to suffer. Those days have to end.”


	In a later Instagram post, Masvidal blasted Kaepernick for his hypocrisy for wearing a t-shirt praising Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, noting that “cowards” like the GQ cover model Kaepernick should be sent to live in Cuba to experience real oppression.


	It is a dispiriting sign of the left’s successful brainwashing of America that it takes foreign-born citizens to understand and testify openly to the horrors of Marxist ideologies, as Dariush put it. Meanwhile, useful idiots like LeBron James, a man with a nearly half-billion-dollar net worth, whines about systemic racism in America but defends China’s communist regime. If sports are going to be politicized, at least it’s refreshing to get pro-freedom, pro-capitalism statements from American patriots who know the truth and aren’t afraid to declare it.

UFC Fighters Take Down 'Marxist Ideologies'

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	After a few short seasons of athletes ruining sports from

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Nothing triggers Democrats quite like non-compliance with their collectivist agenda, because for all their blustery blather about saving democracy from fascist Trump supporters, and beneath their micro-thin veneer of “tolerance and inclusiveness,” Progressives are totalitarians. The slightest resistance to their transformative, utopian vision elicits authoritarian rage. Case in point: the left has run out of patience with Americans who are resisting the COVID-19 vaccination.


	At the end of June, the propaganda rag The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/opinion/covid-vaccine-mandate.html">published an opinion piece</a> whose title signaled the left’s growing frustration with the vaccine skeptics: “Vaccine Mandates Are Coming. Good.” Last weekend, The St. Louis Dispatch <a href="https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/mailbag/letter-enough-already-punish-those-who-refuse-the-vaccine/article_7444c909-e323-5e41-bc11-89d8936c5ac3.html">posted a letter</a> that captured the mood of the totalitarians even more honestly. It was titled, “Enough already. Punish those who refuse the vaccine.”


	Last Saturday on CNN, Leana Wen, former president of Planned Parenthood, <a href="https://www.thecollegefix.com/make-life-hard-for-unvaccinated-people-george-washington-university-public-health-professor-says/">tried to make the coercive case</a> that life should be made difficult for those deplorable holdouts who still haven’t caved in to the increasing social and governmental pressure to receive a vaccine shot. “It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated,” Wen stated baldly. “Right now, it’s kind of the opposite. Basically, we need to make getting vaccinated the easy choice.”


	You would think that someone who ran an organization whose mantra was “my body, my choice” would be more supportive of Americans who are justifiably reluctant to accept an emergency-authorized-but-not-FDA-approved vaccine to combat a virus for which the survival rate hovers around 99%. But no. The left is determined to decide what choice you get to make, and when.


	“It’s time for Biden to make the case for vaccine requirements,” Wen wrote on July 6 at the radical&nbsp;Washington Post, where she is an opinion contributor. She went on to lament that the White House’s Fourth of July celebration “could have been a chance to show that vaccination isn’t just an individual decision, but one that affects the health of others — including those already vaccinated.” That’s odd: shouldn’t the already-vaccinated be unaffected by the health of others?


	The entertainment-media complex demonizes holdouts as too stupid to see the wisdom of unquestioningly accepting the government’s free-and-easy vaccine. Moronic Joy Behar, hateful co-host of the long-running, daytime gab-fest The View, <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/07/13/behar-teens-should-be-allowed-to-get-vaccinated-without-ignorant-parents-consent/">opined</a> recently that teenagers should be allowed to get vaccinated without the consent of their unwoke, “ignorant parents.” Funny how the left is always trying to drive a wedge between impressionable children and their un-Progressive parents, like offering them birth control or hormone therapy to get them started transitioning to a different sex.


	<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/07/13/sebelius-unvaccinated-americans-should-not-be-allowed-to-work-have-access-to-children/" target="_blank">Tuesday on CNN’s OutFront</a>, former Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary <a href="https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/kathleen-sebelius" target="_blank">Kathleen Sebelius</a> said that Americans who have not received their “Fauci ouchie” should not be allowed to go to work or be around children, and should be restricted in their movements.


	“We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying, ‘I won’t do it,'”&nbsp;Sebelius complained. She didn’t mention the reason folks “won’t do it”: the vaccine which the government and media are colluding to force Americans to accept has caused multiple serious health issues and <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-how-many-americans-have-died-after-taking-the-covid-vaccine">thousands of deaths</a>, and the long-term complications are a complete unknown as well. Nearly a quarter (23%) of those who have been vaccinated say they have experienced “negative reactions,” <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/14/vaccinated-experienced-negative-reactions-vaccine/">according to a poll from&nbsp;The Economist/YouGov</a>.


	Sebelius and her fellow totalitarians don’t understand that freedom-loving Americans have a kneejerk resistance to being pressured and threatened by the government, particularly when that government has demonstrated lethal incompetence in handling the pandemic, and when its medical “experts” have a political agenda and regularly contradict and/or refuse to abide by their own recommendations.


	“I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated,” Sebelius continued, with a demeanor reminiscent of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched. “You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy, where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position.”


	If, after examining all the evidence and considering your personal medical condition, you choose to decline the vaccine and take your chances with the virus, the collectivist left wants you punished for the good of the society-at-large, because they don’t approve of individual freedom. Sebelius, Wen, Behar, and their fellow totalitarians want you to be unable to make a living, restricted in where you can go, and barred from contact with children – likely even your own.


	Sebelius added, “I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say, ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated.’” If the vaccine is so “wildly effective,” as she claims, why must the vaccinated continue to be masked and live in such fear of contracting the virus? Why must they live in total isolation from the unvaccinated? Questions like this don’t give vaccine skeptics much confidence.


	The fact is, the COVID-19 pandemic is about government control of the populace, and has been from the very beginning when it was seized upon by the left as a strategy to torpedo Donald Trump’s 2020 election chances. Now that the Democrats hold the reins of political power, they continue to use it to manipulate Americans to live in fear and to accept greater and greater government control over every aspect of their lives. The totalitarian left needs to exaggerate and perpetuate the threat of this virus. It empowers them.


	And it enables them to demonize, identify, and target their political opponents. In a not-so-veiled threat, the Biden administration wants to send Brownshirts – er, local community representatives – door-to-door across America like Jehovah’s Witnesses, purportedly to make sure everyone is informed about how easy it is to get vaccinated (“Did we mention it’s free?”). The real reason is to get literally in the faces of the non-compliant. <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/14/nolte-most-voters-reject-bidens-door-to-door-vaccination-push/">According to a new poll</a>, only 57% of Biden’s own party approves of this blatantly invasive plan (but only 31% disapprove). Non-affiliated voters disapprove 56% to 33%, and Republicans disapprove by a 74-to-20% margin (that 20% is disappointingly high).


	This is certainly not to deny or even diminish the actual seriousness of contracting COVID-19. Individuals should make careful, apolitical decisions about the vaccine in relation to their own health condition – and that decision should and must be respected. The issue is that the disease has been so politicized by the left that the reality of it has been almost impossible to discern amid the panic-mongering, bullying, and media disinformation thickly surrounding it. One thing is certain, though: it is not the second coming of the Black Plague.


	The overarching danger is not COVID-19 but the left’s weaponization, first of the virus itself, and now of the vaccine for it.

Get Vaccinated - or Else

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Nothing triggers Democrats quite like non-compliance with

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


	Last week The Washington Post, one of the most prominent news outlets in the world, the newspaper whose self-important motto “Democracy dies in darkness” belies its own undemocratic propaganda, saw fit to promote an opinion piece calling for the increased exposure of small children to sexual deviance.


	In the article titled, “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/29/pride-month-kink-consent/">Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it</a>,” freelance writer Lauren Rowello declared her support for the presence of “kinksters” – practitioners of sexual fetishes – in parades during so-called “Pride Month,” the thirty days a year officially devoted to the compulsory celebration of LGBT narcissism. More specifically, she called for it in order to expose children as young as toddlers to “the scope and vitality of queer life.”


	Rowello, a self-described “gendervague”&nbsp;person&nbsp;who is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/10/09/parents-come-out/">married to a transgender woman</a>, described how the couple attended a Pride parade in Philadelphia five years ago. (The term gendervague, in case you’re overcome by curiosity, <a href="https://www.aane.org/gendervague-intersection-autistic-trans-experiences/">refers</a> “to a specifically neurodivergent experience of trans/gender identity.” You’re welcome.) At one point during the parade, Rowello wrote, “our elementary-schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a bare-chested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong. The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. ‘What are they doing?’ my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on.”


	Her toddler cheered them on. In a saner time, parents wouldn’t allow adults “playfully” engaged in sado-masochism within a hundred miles of their toddlers, but today a generation or two of fanatically woke parents intentionally expose their children to such a repellent display in order to inculcate, as young as possible, a sexual awareness that kids aren’t equipped to process.


	“The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes,” Rowello continued. What kind of mother thinks it is appropriate to expose her children to human beings degrading each other with leashes? “At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth,” Rowello explained. “That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.”


	Here’s something else she could have told her children: all human beings are children of God, deserving of dignity, and literally parading them around like animals for sexual kicks is morally reprehensible. Maybe that’s too much “nuance” for Rowello.


	Rowello did acknowledge that even among the LGBT crowd, there is debate about whether “kinksters” belong in Pride parades at all, at least partly because of the presence of children. But she argued that “kink visibility is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement. We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.”


	Read that last sentence again, and ask yourself what kind of parent is in a hurry to push his or her child to fulfill carnal needs. The answer is that there are only two kinds: pedophiles and neo-Marxist ideologues who are targeting impressionable minds and vulnerable souls, with the intention of weaponizing them against the “cis-normative” status quo.


	“If we’re afraid to talk about kink with our children, we prioritize the status quo — sanitizing and censoring their access to information about appropriate and normal self-expression,” Rowello pleaded. Sorry, but “kink” is by definition abnormal self-expression, and it is absolutely not appropriate for children to witness. Sanitizing and censoring what children are exposed to until they are psychologically developed enough to absorb that information is called good parenting.


	Rowello’s intentionally provocative article predictably sparked outrage on social media from people who have an actual moral compass and a justifiable revulsion toward the idea of parents grooming their own grade-schoolers into a pathetic subculture of fetishists. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, for example, <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/30/washington-post-ben-shapiro-gay-pride/">tweeted</a> to Rowello, “You should be in prison.”


	Walsh also shared on social media a tweet from Rowello that included a recent picture of her 8-year-old son, whom Rowello referred to as “they,” wearing makeup. “My 8YO explored makeup for the first time tonight,” she tweeted in May. “They tried an eyeshadow tutorial to make clouds, some flowers (not shown), and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of eyeliner stamps. They shrugged, Maybe I’ll go on [the drag queen show Drag Race] when I’m older.”


	No 8-year-old, or adult for that matter, should ever even know that such an infantile program as Drag Race exists, much less yearn to appear on it. But the bullying LGBT lobby has turned transgenderism and drag culture into the tip of the spear of its objective to smash the heteronormative “oppression” of the nuclear family. Drag queens are now everywhere children can be found: targeting them in library story time, <a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/lefts-urgent-mission-sexualize-kids-mark-tapson/">indoctrinating them in children’s TV programming</a>, and even <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/drag-kids-are-slaying-runway-one-fierce-look-time-n918211">steering them into becoming underage drag performers themselves</a>.


	Here is the undeniable truth that LGBT groomers like Rowello ignore in their ideological push to normalize perversion and to sexualize kids, even their own: children are quite simply not mature enough to process the mystery and power of adult sexuality – neither its spiritual transcendence nor its dark compulsions. You should no more expose children to a parade full of “kinksters” spanking each other than you should expose them to heterosexual pornography. Either one is guaranteed to warp their understanding of the purpose and proper sphere of human sexuality. This used to be commonsense; today, propaganda outlets like The Washington Post spread the message that what was once commonsense is now intolerant and bigoted.


	Children are not emotionally or morally prepared to exert any mastery over their own bodies (for that matter, neither are many adults). They should not be taught that indulgence in “carnal needs that delight and captivate us” is either a personal or societal good. They should most definitely not be led to believe that their sexuality is the most authentic part of one's self. If your sexuality – hetero-, homo-, or otherwise – defines who you are, then you are a tragically shallow person.


	That may not be a very “welcoming” or “inclusive” take on the subject, but if your favorite personal expression is dressing up like a demonic, clown parody of a woman and normalizing it for children, or allowing yourself to be led around on a leash in public by a man in a leather thong, then you need to do some serious soul-searching and get professional help. This is not something to be celebrated but psychoanalyzed and prayed over. That is the truth Rowello didn’t tell her children.


	And speaking of “Pride”: if your proudest moment as a parent is when you successfully groom your child into the same sort of sexual dysfunction that you and your partner have turned into virtue-signaling badges of noncomformity, then you need to seek help immediately and re-prioritize your life to deconstruct the damage you have done to him or her (not “they”).


	In response to Rowello’s WaPo article, I’m Right host Jesse Kelly <a href="https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1410281738580942848">tweeted</a>, in part, “Nations do not remain stable, healthy nations with this behavior becoming acceptable.” He is exactly right. No culture that finds its authenticity in an idolatry of the flesh and the degradation of the human spirit can survive. A civilization that raises its children to revel in spiritual emptiness and sexual decadence is a doomed one.


	If Americans do not summon the moral courage to turn back the tide of the neo-Marxist predation of our children – in schools, in library story time, in our TV shows, in our very streets – then we will have deserved our doom.

WaPo Promotes the Sexual Grooming of Children

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.


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