In a previous article in this series on Wikipedia’s leftist bias I discussed briefly the friendly treatment the online encyclopedia gave such influential figures as Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann, and Noam Chomsky. These entries featured muted criticism if any at all and little embarrassing “personal life” content (which, as I noted, is the primary way in which bias is conveyed on the site.) Progressives continually receive the benefit of the doubt. Wikipedia does not have to be overtly biased in favor of leftism; it is simply the site’s default option, synonymous with a sophisticated and humane worldview. When considering people on the Left, Wikipedia assumes the best; if there are blemishes on their records, it tends to explain and exculpate, whereas with conservatives what it regards as failings are subjected to unforgiving analysis.

There are three unwritten rules that pervade the treatment of most leftists on Wikipedia:

[1] Quote feeble critics only so they can be rebutted.

Al Gore’s entry is 8984 words, a reasonable length for a Vice President active in politics for more than 30 years. None of Gore’s political decisions or positions receives criticism from opponents, nor does he have a “personal life” section (thus eliminating the need to mention his allegedly forcing himself on a Portland masseuse in 2006—a story that would have likely been included in the entry of a conservative political figure.) The 465 words of criticism in the Gore profile is reserved for Gore the environmental activist and  raises five different objections – including a particularly trivial one from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) — each of which also allows Gore or one of his supporters to get in the last word. For example, in response to critics noting the Gore family’s increased energy usage (multiple homes, private jet trips) an official spokesman claims that the mansions run on more expensive “renewable energy” and philosopher A.C. Grayling claims the whole matter of Gore’s “footprint” is irrelevant and an example of fallacious ad hominem reasoning.

Similarly, comedian Bill Maher has a thorough 3095-word entry with a single inconsequential criticism (51 words from Alabama Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus claiming that Maher’s 2005 comments highlighting the military’s failure to reach its recruiting goals were demeaning) that is included only so Maher can refute it.  Flaunting his supposedly “pro-military” politics, Maher claims that he supported the military and challenges Bachus to fix the problem.

[2] Give the Benefit of the Doubt to the Jew-Haters.

More troubling than the way Wikipedians set up straw men for their leftist heroes to knock over is the way they minimize their bigotry.

The Rev. Al Sharpton has the unique distinction of being the only cable news host to have provoked an anti-Semitic pogrom in New York City. But one will not know this from reading Sharpton’s 3979-word Wikipedia page profile, in spite of its larger-than-usual criticism section.

Sharpton’s career is filled with episodes illustrating his commitment to inflaming racial conflict. In 1987 one of his lowest points came in his support for Tawana Brawley, a black teenager who claimed to have been gang raped by white police officers. (A grand journey would find that these charges were wholly fabricated.) Sharpton furthered these allegations, and was later successfully sued for defamation by one of the prosecutors he claimed participated in the rape. Refusing to pay the $345,000 judgment against him, he relied on his wealthy supporters to pick  up the tab. Even as late as 2007, Sharpton was still on record supporting Brawley’s lies.

At least with the Brawley case, Sharpton’s demagoguery did not result in violence. That was decidedly what happened in 1991 when Sharpton’s most nakedly anti-Semitic actions inspired riots in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. Sharpton’s DiscoverTheNetworks profile gives the story as it should be told:

That same year, anti-Semitic riots erupted in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section after a Hasidic Jewish driver accidentally ran over and killed a 7-year-old black boy. Within three hours, a black mob had hunted down and slain an innocent rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, in retribution. Sharpton declared that it was not merely a car accident that had killed the black child, but rather the “social accident” of “apartheid.” He organized angry demonstrations and challenged local Jews––whom he derisively called “diamond merchants“––to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score. Stirred in part by such rhetoric, hundreds of Crown Heights blacks took violently to the streets for three days and nights of rioting. Sharpton reacted to the chaos by stating, “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

In contrast, this event earns Sharpton only 61 words of criticism at Wikipedia for his use of the “diamond merchants” and “pin their yarmulkes back” slurs. No criticism is presented for Sharpton’s actions, and the Wikipedia entry devoted to the riots similarly omits Sharpton’s role.

While Sharpton can threaten Jews with violence and rely on Wikipedia to sanitize the episode, radio show host Don Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment draws 1273 words from Wikipedia, more than all of Sharpton’s controversies combined. And who appears in Imus’ entry to label his words “abominable”, “racist”, and “sexist” and to demand his termination? Sharpton the anti-Semite.

Wikipedia cannot even bring itself to use the word “anti-Semite” anywhere within Sharpton’s entry. So of course there is not a quote provided from critics who regard Sharpton as such. More time is spent on a very mild homophobic remark (80 words,) and Sharpton’s anti-Mormon comments with his apology (231 words.)

How did Sharpton’s entry earn such a thorough clean-up? Examining the Al Sharpton “talk” page provides the answers and reveals the page’s leftist protector. Casual Wikipedia users might not notice that at the top of every Wikipedia entry is a secondary page labeled “Discussion.” It’s here where editors are encouraged to discuss significant changes to the articles and try to achieve the Wikipedia utopia of “consensus.” Visit these pages and you’ll find the ideas which are excluded from entries and – occasionally – justifications why.

When one frustrated contributor links several conservatives who describe Sharpton as a “race hustler” and demands to know why such criticism is not permitted, he is mocked by an administrator-level user (a veteran Wikipedia editor with the extra ability to “protect” pages from other editors changing them and also to block specific editors from contributing.) The administrator has the Malcolm X-inspired handle Malik Shabazz and responds sarcastically: “Wow. Four race hustlers accuse Sharpton of being a race hustler. Film at 11.”

A day later another unregistered user (one who has not created a Wikipedia name and instead is identified only by his computer’s IP address) responded to this abuse of authority. Venting his frustration at Shabazz’s dictatorial behavior in securing the page, 96.224.55.81 knows he is one of Wikipedia’s “second class citizens” when he writes:

One does not need to resort to conservative commentators, as the person above does, to see that Al Sharpton has done more to harm race relations in New York City than to help. In fact, in my own attempt to solicit revision to the misleading and inaccurate current narrative describing Al Sharpton’s divisive, destructive, and unjust (prosecute the driver for murder?) “contributions” to the Howard Beach attack and the Bensonhurst attack, I cited two very fair minded, objective, and reliable sources whose credentials are beyond reproach. Yet my request for any editor to make these changes to the semi protected article [ “semi-protected” is the status for all biographies of living people – they require an administrator’s okay before changes go live] has resulted in no result. Apparantly [sic] you, Mr. Malik Shabazz, are “in charge” of the Al Sharpton Wikipedia page, and I concede defeat to you. Anonymous users, however fair minded and however much they follow Wikipedia rules, are impotent when faced with someone dedicated to being guardian of entrenched fluff pieces that hide inconvenient facts. You win. I now see that I have to become a registered user to even hope to have a chance of getting the Wikipedia Al Sharpton entries for Howard Beach and Bensonhurst to reflect the truth…. It seems as though the entire raison detre of the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst Al Sharpton Wikipedia entries is for the single minded purpose of sanitizing the Sharpton role there, and to tar and feather these entire communities. In Howard Beach, who called 911 during the attack, and said please send the police some teens are beating a Black man? Yup, the White residents of Howard Beach, whose houses the mob of thugs passed by. But you wouldn’t know it from Wikipedia. 96.224.55.81 (talk) 02:19, 19 August 2011 (UTC)

Who is Shabazz? His user page tells the whole story in uncomfortable detail. He claims to be a secular, African-American Jew who identifies as a feminist and an anarchist. Strangely, his feminism does not prevent him from boasting on his page that he “enjoys pornography” and that he’s a member of Wikiproject Pornography, the team that creates Wikipedia’s obsessive database of adult film stars.

Wikipedia is currently ranked by internet analysis firm Alexa as the seventh most popular website in the world. Alexa estimates that 14% of global internet users have visited the site in the last three months. The free encyclopedia with more than 19 million articles in hundreds of languages stands with Google, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook as one of the foundational bases for the organization and distribution of information on the internet today. Used by students in term papers and individuals anxious for quick facts, it has acquired the reputation as a source of reliable “general information.” But like so many information-based institutions, Wikipedia has also come under growing criticism from political conservatives who see a leftwing bias, sometimes overt and often subtle, in its entries. Some on the Right take the claim so seriously that in protest they created Conservapedia as an alternative.

Finding examples of Wikipedia’s bias is not difficult. One need only compare the entries of figures who do the same thing but from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Consider Ann Coulter versus Michael Moore. Coulter’s entry (on August 9, 2011) was 9028 words long.* Of this longer-than-usual entry, 3220 words were devoted to “Controversies and criticism” in which a series of incidents involving Coulter and quotes from her are cited with accompanying condemnations, primarily from her opponents on the Left. That’s 35.6 percent of Coulter’s entry devoted to making her look bad. By contrast, Moore’s entry is 2876 words (the more standard length for entries on political commentators), with 130 devoted to “Controversy.” That’s 4.5% of the word count, a fraction of Coulter’s. Does this mean that an “unbiased” commentator would find Coulter eight times as “controversial” as Moore?

The same disproportion can be seen in the former flagship stars of Fox News and MSNBC, Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann. Beck’s entry is 7810 words; instead of featuring a dedicated “controversy” section, as in the case of Coulter, the 1789 words of criticism from leftist opponents are scattered throughout — 23 percent of the profile.

Beck’s page shows other metrics for measuring Wikipedia bias. First, the sources: Of the 206 references, 25-35 could be characterized as leftists critical of Beck, with frequent citations from Salon’s resident Beck antagonist Alexander Zaitchik and his attack book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance. Another telling sign of bias is the fact that 9% of the entry, or 729 words, are comprised of potentially embarrassing details from Beck’s “personal life.” Such information is often more detailed in conservatives’ entries.

In Olbermann’s 3750 word entry 199 words (5 percent) could be characterized as criticism. However it is much more muted than that directed at Beck. Of the 199 critical words 113 are devoted to an incident in which Olbermann went off on a rant against Republican Senator Scott Brown that was so vulgar that Jon Stewart stepped in, eventually causing the MSNBC host to apologize. This is a frequent element in the treatment of leftist figures by Wikipedia. Criticism from those further to the Left (or, like Stewart, higher within progressives’ hierarchy of household gods) may be included which itself “centers” the subject of the profile. Incidents where the figure apologized for his or her transgressions may be featured as a form of exculpation, transforming a failing into a chance to show the subject’s humanity.

In the 111 references for the Olbermann entry, only a single one is from a conservative source, and it is not even used to present critical information. In contrast to Beck, Olbermann’s “personal life” section is 197 words, a mostly complimentary 5% of the entry.

Perhaps more interesting than the bias itself on Wikipedia are the two factors which enabled it, the first present in the project’s founding DNA, and the second in a new policy implemented in 2009.

Wikipedia was originally launched in 2001 as an off-shoot from Nupedia, a similar effort to construct a free online encyclopedia, although in this case written by experts instead of random, anonymous contributors. Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia was an idea whose time had come on an information-driven net whose consumers  couldn’t wait for the slow workings of expertise or the cost of proprietary content: a free encyclopedia written by anonymous users supposedly striving for an “unbiased” perspective.

There was not a single ideological vision driving Wikipedia’s founders and core contributors as they launched the project. Jimmy Wales, who would become the face of the project and its “benevolent dictator,” according to Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution, is a libertarian and Ayn Randian Objectivist. Also important in shaping Wikipedia was the so-called “hacker ethos,” the culture that has developed amongst computer programmers over the last 40 years and been shaped by the Left, the counterculture, popular culture, and anarchist thought.

What binds together these ideologies is a utopian ideal that human beings are more prone to altruism rather than self-interest. In Wikipedia Revolution Wales is quoted as saying, “Generally we find most people out there on the internet are good… It’s one of the wonderful humanitarian discoveries in Wikipeda, that most people only want to help us and build this free nonprofit, charitable resource.” Ward Cunningham was the programmer who created the wiki concept and software. According to Lih, he believed in the Wiki because “People are generally good.”

Lih explains how this philosophy is embedded within Wikipedia’s rules:

A core idea Wikipedia embraced.. was to assume good faith when interacting with others. The guideline promoted optimistic production rather than pessimistic nay-saying, and reads, “Unless there is strong evidence to the contrary, assume that people who work on the project are trying to help it, not hurt it; avoid accusing others of harmful motives without particularly strong evidence.

But as it worked out, Wikipedia in practice has strayed from these utopian ideas because of the ease with which political and social bias trumps altruism.

After almost a decade of rapid growth and free-wheeling experimentation the situation at the site by the Summer of 2009 was chaos. Political operatives would sabotage one another in electoral contests by vandalizing pages. More malicious misinformation filtered in freely, with living historical figures accused of involvement in conspiratorial plots.

Ira Matetsky, known by his Wikipedia handle as newyorkbrad, is a lawyer and veteran Wikipedian, both an administrator on the site and part of the Arbitration Committee, the council of editors who sort out disputes between editors. In a series of articles at the libertarian group blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Matetsky discussed some of these incidents and described the power of Wikipedia to affect people’s lives:

In the intervening years, though, it’s become more and more clear that malicious or simply thoughtless content added to Wikipedia BLP’s (“Biographies of Living Persons”) can be very damaging. A series of serious and widely reported incidents have brought the problem to public attention. Among these: the [[Siegenthaler incident]], in which an article was vandalized to accuse a completely innocent person of suspected complicity in an assassination, and no one caught the problem for four months; the incident in 2007 in which a Turkish academic was detained for several hours by immigration officials in Canada, reportedly based on an inaccurate allegation in his Wikipedia article that he was a terrorist; the lawsuit brought by a prominent golfer against the person who added defamatory content to his article; the blatant attack page created against a well-known California attorney, allegedly as part of a negative public relations campaign launched on behalf of one of the companies he was suing.

“See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you’re gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don’t do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f***in education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”

– Good Will Hunting

Oscar-winning actor and Howard Zinn disciple Matt Damon has demonstrated once again that he’s not actually the Boston boy genius Will Hunting in real life. The star of the “Bourne Identity” and “Ocean’s Eleven” series made an appearance at the July 30 “Save Our Schools” rally at the White House to repeat the teachers union party line and support a broken educational system.

ThinkProgress featured a video of Damon at the event joking about summers in the Hamptons and on a yacht from the supposedly lavish teacher salary his mother earned when he was a child:

Reason TV interviewed Damon and other activists, including Nation-contributor Jonathan Kozol:

The subject Damon was confronted with by Reason TV’s Michelle Fields is especially important. Fields challenged Damon with the fact that union-negotiated K-12 teacher contracts make it very difficult to fire poor teachers once they have attained tenure:

Fields: In acting there isn’t job security, right? There is an incentive to work hard and be a better actor because you want to have a job. So why isn’t it like that for teachers?

Damon:  You think job insecurity is what makes me work hard?

Fields: Well you have an incentive to work harder.

Damon: [Shakes head] I want to be an actor, that’s not an incentive. That’s the thing. See you take this MBA-style thinking, right? It’s the problem with ed policy right now. It’s this intrinsically paternalistic view of problems that are much more complex than that. It’s like saying a teacher is going to get lazy when they have tenure. A teacher wants to teach. I mean why else would you take a shitty salary and really long hours and do that job unless you really love to do it?

Cameraman:  Ten percent of teachers are bad… Ten percent of people in any profession maybe should think of something else.

Damon: Well, OK, maybe you’re a shitty cameraman, I don’t know.

Damon was unprepared to deal with one of the least controversial, obvious, and devastating problems in education today. While he’s correct that the challenges to the educational system are complex, this specific one is very simple – which is why both conservatives and some leftists agree on it.

Making it easier to fire bad teachers is one of the self-evident solutions to the country’s educational shortcomings. The concept of tenure originally was meant solely for the college level. It was there so there could be something real to support the concept of academic freedom. Professors would not have to worry about controversial research and the threat of being fired for exploring unpopular ideas. Tenure usually was only awarded after more than a decade in which a Ph.D.-credentialed scholar proved his devotion to academia. This is out of place in the K-12 environment and certainly does not work when tenure can be achieved in just a few years by those with only a bachelor of arts degree. The only people who benefit are unions who are able to collect dues from the bottom 10% of teachers who should have been fired long ago.

This article is Part III of an ongoing series exploring the books of author Thomas Sowell. For Part I, see Compassion Vs. Guilt. For Part II see Basic Economics.

Thomas Sowell is most well known for his writings and research on economics, race, culture, and the history of ideas. Over a long career his books profoundly influenced the ideas of political and cultural figures ranging from future Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the 1970s, to a rising talk radio talent named Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s, to just recently the conservative convert and playwright David Mamet. The scope of his achievements has perhaps obscured one of the most underrated qualities of Sowell’s work: his unique sense of humor. It’s this quiet, confident wit that makes Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Odyssey, such an engaging read, offsetting the tension of the challenges the author had to overcome on his journey to becoming one of America’s most important public intellectuals.

The book has numerous laugh-out-loud moments, as Sowell uses his intellect to triumph in often hostile environments. From a damaging home life that he had to flee during his teen years, to a young adulthood struggling with unemployment, through years as a Marine during the Korean War, and on to the tough climb into the academic world, Sowell continually relied on his wits and gifted analytical mind to overcome obstacles.

As Sowell progressed through his adolescence his relationship with his mother (actually biologically his aunt) deteriorated to the point that he hoped to leave home as soon as he was legally able to do so. His mother would regularly make up stories about his supposed bad behavior and get the police involved. Here’s one example with Sowell’s witty response:

One day I received a summons, ordering me to appear in court down on the lower east side of Manhattan, to answer charges of disorderly conduct. I could not imagine what story she had concocted to get this summons issued, but I did know that the burden of proof was on the prosecution.

To me, the court was a place where I might put an end to these farcical attempts at intimidation, and where I might find out whether Mom had any legal right to stop me from leaving. I was in sufficiently upbeat mood to get into a long conversation with a receptionist at the court. When I was finally called into the magistrate’s chambers, however, I found that Mom had completely won him over to her side, and that he saw his job as being to lean on me to bring me back into line.

“This is a very serious charge, young man,” he said grimly.

“Yes, I know,” I said, “and I’ll be very interested to see how anybody can prove it.”

No one could prove the charge, so it was downgraded to Sowell being a “wayward minor” and the magistrate backed his mother’s refusal to let him leave the house. So Sowell declared that he would play their power game. He asserted that from now on he would do nothing that he was not legally required to do – including driving his aunt back to their apartment in Harlem from the hearing. It was not long before his mother relented and allowed Sowell to leave home and get a full-time job.

² When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. ³ This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. ⁴ For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. ⁵ Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

⁶ When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. ⁷ He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” ⁸ For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”

⁹ Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.”

-Mark 5:2-9

Ann Coulter begins her newest polemic with this quotation from the Gospel of Mark, immediately capturing the reader’s attention and setting the tone for her most elegant, sophisticated, and literary work to date. Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America is Coulter’s exorcism of the dark spirits hidden within the political Left. The bestselling author combines insights in mob psychology, the history of the French Revolution, and the theology of evil to illuminate the political challenges of the day. Even those who have studied the Left in depth will be startled by the clarity and originality of the argument she methodically demonstrates over 300 packed pages.

Coulter uses Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind as the foundation of her analysis. She notes as evidence of the book’s accuracy that both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used the text not to understand mobs but to incite them. Throughout Demonic she returns to the influential text and applies its analysis to the union mobs of Ohio, the Obamacare mobs, the progressive conspiracy mobs, and the Bush Derangement mobs. World War II’s totalitarian dictators aren’t the only ones reading from Le Bon’s playbook to harness the power of a mob to push forward an intolerable political agenda.

Editor’s note: This article is Part II of an ongoing FrontPage series exploring the ideas of author Thomas Sowell. For Part I, see Compassion Vs. Guilt.

Economist Thomas Sowell drew from his years of teaching the subject at some of the nation’s most prestigious ivy league schools and gave himself a challenge: to create a book on economics for the lay reader without using technical language or visual aids. His book was a success, and is now in its fourth edition. Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy is a straightforward and readable guide to economics’ core concepts.

It’s difficult to count the number of economic myths Sowell debunks. More challenging is to determine which are the most important. Political ideologies can be a bit like dominos – just disrupting a single idea can be the beginning of a chain reaction that will eventually result in a changed mind. These three insights are perhaps some of the most important talking points to keep in mind when stumbling into political discussions with those less informed on basic economic principles.

3. We do not have enough resources to meet everyone’s desires.

The very definition of Economics already begins to challenge any utopian scheme. Sowell cites the British economist Lionel Robbins:

Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.

Using resources to do one thing requires us to take resources away from somewhere else. And “resources” does not always refer to money or raw materials either. Time, manpower, talent, and knowledge are all resources too that individuals, businesses, governments, and families have to figure out how to use in the most effective way. And these resources can be used in any number of combinations, some much more effective than others.

With this point Sowell demonstrates that economics really isn’t about money or becoming rich:

It is about the material well-being of society as a whole. It shows the cause and effect relationships involving prices, industry and commerce, work and pay, or the international balance of trade—all from the standpoint of how this affects the allocation of scarce resources in a way that raises or lowers the material standard of living of the population as a whole.

In other words, Sowell and other economists are going to study what the real results are when certain policies are put into place, instead of focusing on the high-minded hopes and expectations of those who dreamed the into existence. It’s this approach that he brings to analyzing such misunderstood concepts as prices and profits.

2. Businesses cannot survive if they arbitrarily set high prices because their owners are “greedy.”

One of the most persistent memes to embed itself within the popular consciousness is the idea that those participating in capitalism are “greedy.” It’s all too easy to look at rising gas prices and rising oil company profits only to assume that it’s because of “greedy” oil executives just adjusting the price in their favor.

“My mother is very ideologically based, and her ideology is much more important in many ways than her personal relationships.” – Rebecca Walker.

In the 1960s, The Color Purple novelist and activist Alice Walker married a Jewish man and gave birth to a biracial baby, Rebecca. Now more than 40 years later, the couple is long-divorced, the mother and half-Jewish daughter are estranged, and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Alice is the celebrity sponsor of a movement committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. How could Alice make such a profound shift from joining a Jewish family to aiding in the Jewish people’s annihilation? Perhaps it is not that Alice changed. Rather, the political religion that served as her anchor suffered a radical devolution since the colorblind dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1967, Alice was an aspiring novelist, poet, and political activist who married Mel Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney whose parents fled the Holocaust. The couple chose to relocate from New York City to Jackson, Mississippi, a provocative act given that miscegenation laws had just recently been overturned in Loving vs Virginia. Leventhal spent many nights awake with a shotgun should the Klan choose to come after them. In November of 1969, Rebecca was born, and she notes in her 2001 memoir, Black White and Jewish, that it was “seventeen months after Dr. King was shot.”

The union of Alice and Mel was not to last. In 1976 the couple divorced. The seeds of the failed marriage can be seen in the ideological shifts of the period. The 1970s saw both of Alice’s movements take much harder, Marxist turns. The Civil Rights cause under King’s leadership was one of interracial unity. By 1976 Black Power was the dominant message and a white, Jewish husband was viewed with suspicion. The Feminist movement had also grown more radical, influencing Alice to resent her role as wife and mother. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2008, Rebecca described a traumatic discovery:

I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me  -  a ‘delightful distraction’, but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting.

This left-inspired rejection of motherhood pervaded Rebecca’s rocky adolescence moving forward. Her parents came up with an unusual arrangement that only exacerbated the feelings of isolation she already had as a biracial child. From elementary through high school Rebecca went back and forth between the Bohemian artist world of her San Francisco-based mother and the more stable middle class Jewish life of her father in New York. She would spend two years building herself and her identity only to have to leap back across the country to reinvent herself.

Black White and Jewish depicts such a life not just in its story but in its tone and style as well. The book is more than 300 pages of fragmentary childhood and adolescent recollections. The average chapter is only a few pages long and the voice maintained throughout is one of a scared child unable to piece together a coherent narrative of the life forced upon her by “movement” parents. It’s not until the last 30 pages that Rebecca finally starts to provide some insights into the chaotic life her parents provided.

Alice putting her leftist ideology before her parental responsibilities had very real consequences. Since her parents rarely set any boundaries for her, Rebecca experimented with drugs and sex early on. At 14, Rebecca had an abortion, an event she describes as something that traumatized her:

Although I believe that an abortion was the right decision for me then, the aftermath haunted me for decades. It ate away at my self-confidence and, until I had Tenzin, I was terrified that I’d never be able to have a baby because of what I had done to the child I had destroyed. For feminists to say that abortion carries no consequences is simply wrong.

It was the birth of Rebecca’s first child, Tenzin, in 2004 that would finally collapse the already-shaky relationship between a Pulitzer-prize-winning mother and her “calamity” of a daughter. Just as Alice saw her own marriage and Rebecca’s birth primarily as political acts, she also brought this same approach to Tenzin, her grandchild. Rebecca’s choice of parenthood over more time for writing and political activism is a rejection of her mother’s ideology.

Surely at some point in his long-admired writing career Thomas Sowell has grown frustrated. What to do when the same issues arise over and over again in the national debate and he’s already addressed them many times only to continue to be ignored by a political Left unwilling to deal with inconvenient facts? Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays is the first collection of Sowell’s newspaper columns and features his selections from 1982 through 1986. Most of the pieces are as fresh and relevant today as when they were first published.

Sowell articulates the central theme that binds these essays together in the title essay. When looking at all the suffering around the world it’s natural for Americans to have a sense of guilt since they were born into more prosperous circumstances by chance. The attempts to alleviate these feelings have often been efforts to show compassion for the less fortunate. Sowell warns,

Many of our attempts to share our good fortune with others, at home and abroad, have undermined the very efforts, standards and values that make that good fortune possible. Trying to ease our own guilt feelings is very different from trying to advance those less fortunate.

Just because a policy is put in place with the compassionate goal of trying to help those less fortunate does not mean that the less fortunate will be helped. This has been one of the central themes of Sowell’s work in fields ranging from race relations to economics.

Sowell urges a “There, but for the grace of God, go I” mentality – an approach far removed from the Obama administration’s visions of helping the uninsured with new government regulations that will have unintended consequences. For example, surveys of business-owners recently showed that come 2014, when the law’s provisions kick in, 30% of employers plan on dropping health coverage.

The common refrain from the President’s supporters when conservatives point out these unintended consequences is one Sowell anticipated decades ago: well what’s your solution?

The Chicago-based Zakat Foundation of America, a 501©3 non-profit, was founded in 2001, and presents itself in a benevolent light:

Zakat Foundation of America (ZF) is an international charity organization that helps generous and caring people reach out to those in need. Our goal is to address immediate needs and ensure the self-reliance of the poorest people around the world with Zakat and Sadaqa [acts of worship] dollars of privileged Muslims and the support of other generous donors.

Does the Zakat Foundation of America merely help, in an innocent charitable way, “the poorest people” or is it a front for jihad? Part of the answer comes in the identity of the Muslim thinkers the foundation promotes. Chief among them is Yusuf al-Qardawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who in 2009 declared his hope that before his death, even if he was wheelchair-bound, he would be able to “shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.”

Another answer comes in the organizations with which the charity is associated. A number of organizations in the United States have already been identified as Muslim Brotherhood front groups by the FBI. The Zakat Foundation of America works with at least two of the 29 groups the bureau has specified as falling into this category—the Islamic Center of North America (ISNA) endorsed the Zakat Foundation as an organization with “a strong history of immediate and effective responses to national and international disasters” and featured in several of the Zakat Foundation promotional videos. The other Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group the Zakat Foundation collaborates with is the Muslim Students Association (MSA), having designed printed material guiding MSA activists on “How to start a successful halaqa group in your Masjid,” “How to Help Neighbors in Need,” and “Starting a Food Pantry.”

“Cultures of Resistance,” a documentary directed by Iara Lee, began its festival tour this year. The film profiles over a dozen different radical activist groups around the world, many of which have received grants from the two nonprofit foundations created by Lee and her billionaire husband (the film’s producer) George Gund III. This scatter-shot approach results in an intellectual incoherence as Lee, who claims to embrace absolute pacifism, gives a platform to some of the most pro-war, revolutionary voices on the Left.

For an activist who claims to support nonviolence, Lee relishes military metaphors when describing her film:

Does each gesture really make a difference? Can music and dance be weapons of peace? In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, director Iara Lee embarked on a journey to better understand a world increasingly embroiled in conflict and, as she saw it, heading for self-destruction. After several years, traveling over five continents, Iara encountered growing numbers of people who committed their lives to promoting change. This is their story. From IRAN, where graffiti and rap became tools in fighting government repression, to BURMA, where monks acting in the tradition of Gandhi take on a dictatorship, moving on to BRAZIL, where musicians reach out to slum kids and transform guns into guitars, and ending in PALESTINIAN refugee camps in LEBANON, where photography, music, and film have given a voice to those rarely heard, CULTURES OF RESISTANCE explores how art and creativity can be ammunition in the battle for peace and justice.

Like many leftists eager to achieve the cultural deification of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Lee claims to support nonviolence. She released a statement to accompany the film in which she stated that nonviolence was “the only way to break the cycles of militarism and oppression.”

Problems with Lee’s supposed pacifism emerge when researching the people and groups actually profiled in “Cultures of Resistance.” Many certainly are as Lee describes – artists and activists who are largely benign. However, other groups Lee showcases have a peculiar disposition toward “peace.”

For example, Katibe 5 is a Beirut-based rap group Lee describes as carrying on “a tradition of socially conscious rap.” Three of the five MCs in the group have chosen terrorist-themed names: C-4, Molotov, and “the Butcher.” Such a fetish for violence is understandable given the group’s idolizing of Marxists like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Molo, the leader of the team stated his revolutionary politics openly: “Peace means politics, politics means negotiations, negotiations are meant to sustain negotiations and not bring a solution. So I say, fuck negotiations, fuck politics and fuck peace.”

While Katibe 5 may only be fanning the flames of destruction, others in Lee and Gund’s agitprop are actually doing real damage. Breaking with her theme of political artists, Lee devotes one of the segments of “Cultures of Resistance” to Jeff Halper, the Israel-based spokesman for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM.) Halper has called for the obliteration of Israel, declaring, “The ‘two-state’ solution envisioned by all Israeli governments since 1967 … is simply unacceptable.” Halper instead advocates for a “one-state” solution. Since 2008, Halper has also been an organizer with the Free Gaza Movement (FGM.) Both the ISM and the FGM have received grants from Lee and Gund’s Caipirinha Foundation, totaling $25,000 through 2009.

For more than 40 years Beatles member John Lennon towered above all others as the Left’s most powerful artistic icon. His anthem “Imagine” dreamed of a unified world that transcended the divides of nation-states and religious strife. It was an inspiration to generations of utopians. Now a new documentary reveals a startling fact: in his final years before his murder, the songwriter abandoned his famous progressive faith, enjoyed arguing with radicals, and supported Ronald Reagan.

The Toronto Sun reported Tuesday night on one of the interviews from a new documentary called “Beatles Stories.” Director Seth Swirsky spent five years collecting anecdotes from those who knew members of the band. One of the people Swirsky talked with was Fred Seaman who worked as Lennon’s personal assistant in 1979 and 1980.

According to Seaman,

John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event… Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that… He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

“I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who’s an old-time communist… He enjoyed really provoking my uncle… Maybe he was being provocative… but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.

“He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”

How will the Left respond to these revelations? If the first reaction at The Los Angeles Times is any indication, the attempt might be to damage the credibility of the witness. Tony Pierce does not even bother commenting on the claims and instead noted that Seaman plead guilty in 1983 to stealing photos, journals, and letters from Lennon.

Jon Wiener at The Nation also jumped on this strategy to defend the icon he wrote a whole book promoting. Wiener went further though, trying to pass off a bland written statement in support of a group of striking workers and an ambiguous comment that the 1960s “gave us a glimpse of the possibility” of a better world as evidence that Lennon died a progressive. (At Salon Justin Elliott regurgitates this weak tea response.) Wiener ends with another ad hominem against Seaman, noting the former personal assistant also tried to “cash in” on his Lennon connection before with a book. Wiener fails to explain what financial stake Seaman could possibly have today in telling lies about Lennon’s politics.

It’s worth remembering that The Nation was the publication with the longest track record of defending the innocence of the Rosenbergs — regardless of every new piece of evidence to emerge over the last 30 years.

The problem with this kill-the-messenger strategy is that it labors under the mistaken impression that Seaman’s anecdotes are the only proof of Lennon’s Second Thoughts. As soon as one starts looking at Lennon circa 1980 as a Reagan conservative, more and more long-available evidence comes into focus. Old, familiar statements suddenly make sense in a new way. Some writers had even already theorized of Lennon’s political shift.

The phenomenon of leftist billionaires funding anti-capitalist activism seems on the surface to be a contradiction.  How could those who should understand the way individual freedom and initiative creates wealth with the power to do good seek the destruction of the system that produces this wealth? The answer is a complex one, although for those who inherited wealth, rather than making their own fortune, guilt clearly plays a role. This seems to be the case with billionaire former sports mogul George Gund III.  He used to own the San Jose Sharks and Cleveland Cavaliers. Today he’s the co-founder of two foundations which provide hundreds of thousands of dollars to dozens of radical causes.

In a rare public interview, Gund has commented on his admiration for those who led lives that challenged the established cultural order, like Zen artists. This affinity for the “outsider” has driven Gund to bankroll the films and activism of Iara Lee, his Korean-Brazilian wife 27 years his junior. Since 2003, Lee has globe-hopped throughout the Middle East, filming sequences for a documentary she and Gund released this spring as “Cultures of Resistance.” Last year she rose to prominence after releasing footage she shot on the Mavi Marmara during a clash between jihadist IHH activists and Israeli commandos during the “flotilla” confrontation.

In spite of their supposed sympathy for outsiders, the couple chooses to focus most of their activist money against the most tolerant Middle Eastern state. Israel is their primary target. The couple is completely  indifferent to the reality that the rights of gays, women and religious minorities are protected more diligently in this supposedly “apartheid” state than in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Thus, the Iara Lee and George Gund III Foundation (ILGGF) (founded 2004) and the Caipirinha Foundation (founded 2006) have funneled more than half a million dollars to activist groups committed to demonizing Israel and supporting Hamas.

The most troubling of Lee and Gund’s anti-Israel donations has been the Caipirinha Foundation’s grant to the The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) which sponsors flotillas that seek to disrupt Israel’s military blockade of Gaza. The IHH also has ties to Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a fact which prevented the IHH from participating in the next flotilla scheduled for the end of this month. Lee has defended the IHH in a video and blog post at The Huffington Post.

The dollar amount of Caipirinha’s grant is not yet available. The donation was likely made in 2010 as it does not appear on the organization’s 2007, 2008, or 2009 records. Caipirinha used the Zakat Foundation of America as a “fiscal sponsor.—that is, as a non-profit intermediary to funnel tax-exempt donations to another organization that’s too openly radical to qualify for 501©3 status, the progressive non-profit world’s version of money laundering.

In 2009 the ILGGF gave $50,000 to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a George Soros-sponsored non-profit which disproportionately targets its Human Rights concerns on Israel. In both 2008 and 2007 the ILGGF made donations of $60,000 to HRW, making their three-year total $170,000.

When the Hamas-linked Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) sponsored a “humanitarian” flotilla last summer to try and break the Israeli “siege” of Gaza, the purpose was not merely to engineer a showdown between Israeli commandos and armed IHH “peace activists.” Far more vital to the IHH’s cause was the ensuing campaign to demonize Israel in the international media, a campaign in which propagandists such as documentary filmmaker Iara Lee played a key role.

Lee later appropriated the language of the American Civil Rights Movement to describe herself and the IHH:

Israeli spokespeople insist that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a provocation. It was, in the sense that civil rights protesters in the American south who sat at segregated lunch counters represented a provocation to segregationists, or in the sense that all nonviolent protests against the illegitimate acts of a government are by definition provocations. Under an illegal siege, the delivery of aid to civilians is a prohibited act; the intent of our humanitarian convoy was to violate this unjust prohibition.

This account of what happened on the Mavi Marmara was reprinted in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, and in the O/R Books anthology Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How it Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict. Online it was accompanied by footage Lee shot of the event. Touted as “the video Israel doesn’t want you to see,” Lee’s images, showing the IHH attacking Israeli soldiers with slingshots and other weapons, dramatically undermine her claims of innocent moral witness.

Who is Iara Lee and what was she doing on a ship determined to provoke an agitprop showdown with Israeli soldiers? And how is she involved in the next flotilla? The answers to these questions cast a harsh light on the movement supporting Hamas by making the “siege” of Gaza into another skirmish in the international propaganda war against Israel.

Lee first began her film career in the 1980s. She was the producer of the Sao Paulo International Film Festival – located in her native Brazil – from 1984 through 1989. She relocated to New York City and began Caipirinha Productions, a multi-media company. (The Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail.)

Behind Lee’s relocation to the US was her relationship with a new patron. In 1986 – when she was 20 and he was 47 – Lee met sports mogul and art film enthusiast George Gund III at the Berlin Film Festival. The couple married and the wealthy Gund started producing and distributing her films.

Throughout the 1990s Lee’s work centered on cultural issues. Her first feature documentary, “Synthetic Pleasures” (1995) focused on technology and art and featured countercultural figures Timothy Leary and R.U. Sirius. No company would release the film so Lee and Gund distributed it themselves. Lee followed this in 1998 with “Modulations,” a movie exploring the history of electronic music.

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 Lee has lived abroad and grown increasingly engaged in leftist political causes. The shift is reflected in her documentaries. In 2006 she lived in Lebanon, and claimed afterwards that her virulently anti-Israel political views were the result of having “experienced firsthand the 34-day Israeli bombardment of that country.” (The fact that Israel’s reaction was a response to Hezbollah’s terrorist attacks does not enter her discussion of her political development.)  By 2008 Lee was living in Iran with the goal of, “promoting arts & culture for global solidarity.”

Lee has released a film this year called “Cultures of Resistance” that compiles her adventures with more than a dozen other activists. The next showing of “Cultures of Resistance” will be sponsored by Code Pink on June 29 in Los Angeles. Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans will be on the panel and Lee will participate via skype from the Audacity of Hope in the Gaza “freedom” flotilla.

Jonathan Kay’s compulsively-readable new book Among The Truthers is as definitive a book on the American conspiracy culture as we are ever going to get.

Kay, a managing editor for Canada’s National Post, jumped right into the oddball world of the so-called Truthers who doubt Osama bin Laden’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks and instead suspect an “inside job.” Kay spent years in this world, going to Truther conferences, interviewing prominent Truthers in depth, and pouring over their literature.

In Part I, Kay describes the history and rise of American conspiracism, noting the powerful effects of the ambiguity of the JFK assassination, the real conspiracy of Watergate, and the shattering of a consensus media reality with greater technological development. He then positions the wide variety of Truther narratives in this context, noting the multitude of different stories. For some Truthers, Osama bin Laden really was responsible for 9/11, except that he did so under the orders of his American government handlers. For others, the hijacked planes were controlled by remote control and all the passengers and hijackers were secretly unloaded before they crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The motive for the attacks is generally the same – a cabal of “neo-cons” wanted to make money, colonize the Middle East, defend Israel, and transform the United States into a police state. (Though, for prominent British Truther David Icke, 9/11 was engineered by his unique boogeymen, the most creative and entertaining in all of conspiracy culture: blood-drinking, child-molesting, shape-shifting lizard humanoids from the fifth dimension.)

More interesting – and important – than the specific stories are the people themselves and the psychological conditions that drive them. Kay does not ridicule his subjects but analyzes them with affection and precision. In Part II, he creates a Truther taxonomy, identifying the following types: Midlife Crisis Case, Failed Historian, Damaged Survivor, Cosmic Voyager, Clinical Conspiracist, Crank, Evangelical Doomsayer, and Firebrand. Those who familiarize themselves with Kay’s profiles will be more than equipped to recognize which type of conspiracist they are dealing with when they bump into one on Facebook or the comments section of a blog.

Kay does an especially good job of carefully threading the needle on the subjects of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party. The claim that Beck is an Alex Jones-style conspiracy kook has been one of the Left’s favorite rhetorical weapons to use against the popular talk radio host. Kay acknowledges that Beck has sometimes explored conspiracist themes but he does not position him amongst the Truther mainstream. Similarly, he does not cast the Tea Party as a conspiracist movement, instead defending it while noting that conspiracists have found a place at the margins – as they have with most political and religious movements:

It would be entirely wrong to call Tea Partiers a straightforward conspiracist movement – and I don’t want to stand accused of doing so here. Many of their political gripes about big government are shared by tens of millions of mainstream Americans: In a September 2010 survey, 71 percent of Republican respondents said they have a “positive opinion” of the Tea Party movement.

But as with all populist uprisings, it has attracted a fringe of angry extremists who will swallow just about any accusation launched against the nation’s elite.

The book’s most important contribution is the way Kay effectively traces the origins of all of America’s conspiracy narratives to a single document: the notorious, fraudulent Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

On Tuesday, we received this critique from someone called Robson who didn’t care for Calvin Freiburger’s foray into the debate about whether it’s appropriate for the Obama White House to honor the racist, pro-cop killer rapper Common:

Seriously  Calvin Freiburger i think you the man who needs to look at this in a different perspective. I don’t why all you americans bother about such a small thing but fox news of course trying to make it big. This matter is not a biggie. Lets start with Johnny Cash a man you totaly defend in your oeace  of writing. This Man whoin his younger years did write some really rough lyrics is given a National Medal of arts BY PRESIDENT BUSH. Okay fairly you say it wasn’t the whitehouse giving to him but President Bush was just presenting it to him, But as a President it’s your choice whether to endorse it or not, and what does the President do? he endorses it because he thinks the man deserves it. What does fox news and america say? nothing because they also conquer. Now Michelle Obama Invites common for a poetry slam, Common having some rough lyrics and has supported certain activists against cops. For the activists i will take Jon stewart position of saying maybe he supports them
because he thinks they were wrongly accused. But on the rough lyrics, on your blog you only have little extracts of his poem. Only getting the parts which are really rough and i think that is really not being a good analyst or critic. I think in your blog you start by defending Johnny cash and criticize common. Tell me what is really different about Common and Johnny cash? Jon stewart is simply just saying really why criticize Common invitation when other regimes have also invited and endorsed people with the same rough lyric. And if you take a look again at common’s poetry at the white house he is simply saying like the world is in a bad condition, full of corruption and corrupt leaders but lets make an end to this and live in peace. Poetry needs time to analyze, if you don’t analyze it and try to understand it from what you first read then truly you have high chances of misinterpretation.

I responded:

What Johnny Cash lyrics are comparable to Common? And why do you think the White House should be honoring racists who oppose interracial marriages?

Robson provided “evidence” to back up his claims:

http://www.metrolyrics.com/cocaine-blues-lyrics-johnny-cash.html

http://www.lyrics007.com/Johnny%20Cash%20Lyrics/Ship%20Those%20Niggers%20Back%20Lyrics.html

I don’t know is you got me properly.  But What am saying the whitehouse should not honour racists nor those who disagree about interracial marriages. The links i have sent on top, is johnny cash lyrics one of them being really racist. I don’t know why fox can’t pick up on that and now compare him and common. If johnny cash was accepted in the whitehouse and no drama was caused out of the visit then the same should be done for common.

I responded (and have yet to receive a reply):

I haven’t heard back from Robson yet but if anyone would like to check up on him his email is robsonchimenge@yahoo.com

And in memory of Cash — one of America’s greatest musicians — here’s the greatest music video ever made, which happens to be of the greatest cover ever recorded:

When I argue that capitalism pushes janitors to develop themselves and evolve into people who can create more value for society this isn't what I'm talking about.

I’ve been arguing with my leftist friends again. Bad habits die hard. I still manage to let the dirty laundry pile up for weeks too. Some day I’ll learn my lessons — and have more leftist drinking buddies and fewer days wearing faded t-shirts from college.

This time it’s Chris, an admitted Socialist and proud Union Man. (I suppose I’m being redundant aren’t I?)

An argument that started over the futility of the attempt to create a “digital picket line” to boycott the Huffington Post (Chris’s link was responsible for me suggesting to our star blogger Walter Hudson that he write this FANTASTIC post here) soon drifted over to the subject of the damaging effects of teachers unions. I challenged my friend when he seemed to play dumb on the horrific effects of lousy tenured teachers:

Oh come on, Chris. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Are you disputing the obvious reality that the result of making it much harder to fire elementary and high school teachers is that more bad teachers get to keep teaching kids poorly? It’s very hard to fire a tenured high school or elementary school teacher. The result of this is kids get left behind when they’re stuck with a lousy teacher for a year. Are you telling me that you’re perfectly satisfied with the status quo of the hoops that have to be jumped through to fire bad teachers?

I expected Chris to argue with me about this and insist that I’d been indoctrinated by evil right-wing talking points — not that I was genuinely concerned about children getting a good education. He’d demand that I produce statistics and research only to tell me why each factual piece I provided was somehow inadequate in its statistical methodology or that greater studies were required to prove what I claimed. Very smart leftists won’t disagree with you when the facts are clearly, indisputably on your side. Instead they’ll argue that it’s not adequate to prove what you claim and that instead more studies and research need to be conducted. This could be characterized as Socialism-via-Intellectual-Filibuster. (In these scenarios leftists don’t work to construct new socialist policies that will crush the American economy, but rather just keep the ones they have in place long enough to finish the job of bankrupting us.) Conservatives might be able to advance in the war of ideas but leftists will just keep setting the goal posts further and further away — but only if we don’t call them on it!

(Particularly academic leftists will often insist that online political debates have the same number of footnotes as scholarly papers. If you don’t have three citations to peer-reviewed journals to back up every sentence your write in your facebook comment then you’re not going to persuade them. Not that you’re ever going to change their minds even if you did meet all of their hard data demands.)

Instead, Chris admitted that lousy teachers keeping their jobs was a real problem — and that some form of merit-based pay for teachers might be a good idea. He then cited numerous examples of various teachers unions trying to correct this problem while acknowledging that not all union members and teachers were happy about it. In other words: he was actually willing to meet me halfway and agree on the nature of the problem so we could discuss techniques for solving it.

He seemed to expect that I would be horrified that some of my political opponents might actually be trying to sincerely solve real problems. What he doesn’t seem to grasp yet is that I’m not anti-union; I’m anti-the-problems-that-unions-usually-cause. Conservatives and Tea Partiers’ anti-union public policies do not have the end goal of breaking up unions but of correcting some of the problems that have resulted from union overreach. If unions didn’t actually hurt the people they claimed to be trying to help (as well as the rest of us too) then they would not be on the Tea Party’s radar. This was my response to Chris, which I tied into another economic debate he and I have had recently (which NRB readers might recognize from a sharp post the fiery Megan Fox wrote not long ago):

Well this is a more encouraging response — and further evidence that you are as I’ve regarded you for a long time, a political opponent more prone to decency and intellectual honesty than many in your movement.

But in your opening paragraph there’s still not a recognition of a core reality that seems to divide us. You say that bad teachers should simply be filtered out and not permitted to achieve tenure. That’s of course true, but the reality is that a good number of the bad teachers today may have been good enough to achieve tenure but wouldn’t if they were judged today. Having a job where you’re unlikely to get fired has the ability to change people. Stuff happens in life and people lose their motivation to work as hard as they once did. And that’s a core thing that we seem to disagree on at an implicit level: the reality that in this country people have the potential to go through pretty dramatic changes in their lives. We don’t stay the same people. (Most of the people in the bottom 20% of earners today won’t be there for their entire lives. If you insist on seeing the economic data proving this then I’ll be happy to provide it.)

For example, in the conversation about janitors’ salary I dispute paying janitors $50K per year not because I don’t think the work they do is meaningful and not because I don’t think they deserve to live comfortably. I’ve known plenty of janitors in my time and they’ve certainly been decent people. But the reality is that if people can live comfortably doing work that any high school dropout is qualified to do then there is nothing motivating — FORCING — people to try and push themselves to be something better than they are today. I spent years working entry-level jobs that paid around 25K a year. And what did that do for me? It pushed me to work harder so that someday I could provide more for my family and do more meaningful work. If the call center jobs I worked had paid me $50K per year then I would have had less motivation and would never have been forced to grow and evolve. I might still just be working these pretty easy, low-stress jobs and working on novels between calls. (Call center work is not as stressful as being in the Fight with David Horowitz.)

Thus, when you tell me that you think janitors should get paid $50K per year I don’t perceive that as you doing anything that actually helps janitors. Instead I see you creating a situation in which poor people are given incentive to spend their whole lives doing nothing more valuable than sweeping floors. Being a janitor is a job, not a career. People should aspire to more than mopping.

The honest truth, Chris, is that even though I might work full time for David Horowitz the political positions I advocate aren’t going to be based in some version of a conservative utopia but rather in a reaction to the leftist dystopia that we already see. It’s a politics of pragmatism. If leftist programs actually worked as people thought they did then I’d still support them. (I’d love to pay higher taxes if it meant that healthcare wouldn’t be as much of a pain in the neck as it is now! It sucks that we lose our health insurance if we lose our jobs and then face bankruptcy if something goes wrong. But it’s also a DAMN GOOD motivation to get a new job. If we had single payer healthcare system then I might work some easy, part-time job to just cover the bills and then spend all my time working on books.)

So your advocacy of $50K janitors doesn’t have the real world effects you think they do. All it does is hurt poor people more than it actually helps them — which is an apt description of most leftist political efforts to advocate on behalf of various disadvantaged groups.

Chris hasn’t responded to me yet. But I’m very interested in his answer.

There was reason for anxiety right before David Horowitz’s speech began Wednesday night in Moore Hall at UCLA.

What manner of disruptions and demonstrations might be planned by campus leftists and Muslim Students Association officers? From my vantage point in the front of the hall I observed several students come in with t-shirts featuring leftist art work. It was anyone’s guess whether an attempt would be made to embarrass David (perhaps with a pie or some other projectile) or merely physically intimidate  him and the others who had come to hear his speech.

Past experience had revealed the common tactics of the campus Left. A demonstration might not occur until midway through the speech. Perhaps at 15 minutes in a whole row of students would stand up and turn their back to David as a sign of their unwillingness to consider his facts and arguments. Or maybe David would get the same treatment that Ambassador Michael Oren received, where MSA members scattered throughout the audience would just randomly pop up throughout the speech with outbursts and have to be removed by security.

This is what the Left has transformed the university into over the past 40 years as it’s pursued the Gramscian plot of “seizing the means of cultural production.” The low tone of debate at most college campuses now is WORSE than what one sees between screaming pundits on MSNBC and Fox News. This was one of David’s chief laments in his speech. Universities should be modeling how intellectual discourse should take place. We should be sitting together as friends and challenging one another’s positions and scrutinizing the other’s facts. Instead the Left has created a toxic environment in which to hear a conservative speaker one must sit on edge the whole time.

But as David’s speech got going no campus Stalinism manifested. I counted approximately five or six walk outs at varying times throughout the speech but none were done with any fanfare indicating that leaving the room was supposed to be a statement. For all anyone knew some people should have skipped the venti mocha frappuchinno before the speech to avoid having to go to the restroom.

(Video shot by Donald Douglas who you can see on the right in the image at the top of this post, more to come soon including David’s complete speech)

David touched on many themes he’s talked about in the past few years: the lack of intellectual diversity on campus, the professorial community’s silence in condemning the hatefulness of campuses’ “Israel Apartheid” walls, the Jewish community’s disturbing reaction to our Palestinian Wall of Lies campaign, and the attacks one receives for stating basic facts about the history of the Middle East. (Israel was not founded on stolen Arab land. For centuries before Israel existed the region named “Palestine” by the Romans was ruled by the Turks.)

Given how smoothly David’s speech went, it was anyone’s guess what would happen once the questions began.  The first was a reasonable challenge to David to clarify his position on freedom of speech.

A respectful question from a UCLA student.

Throughout his speech David had been critical of two different occurrences. First, he explained that during the Palestinian Wall of Lies campaign the Freedom Center had sought to place advertisements in school papers listing the various anti-Israel lies we were fighting. David explained how editors had often denied our ads on the grounds that they were offensive to religious and ethnic groups. David would ask what needed to be changed in the ad only to rarely get specific answers in return.

David also spent much of his speech debunking some of the lies commonly propagated on the “Israel Apartheid” walls. He spoke passionately about how terrible it was that no other group on campus was subjected to the kind of attack as Jewish students having to walk by the “Israel Apartheid” walls in the quad every day for a week at a time.

The student above asked David to explain his position. If he was objecting to his own censorship was he calling on universities to now censor the speech of the MSA students with their “Apartheid Wall”? David said, “That’s a good question” before explaining that he wasn’t calling on “Israel Apartheid” walls to be banned or for pro-Hamas activists to be silenced. Instead his challenge was primarily to administrators and professors to properly assert themselves as the intellectual mentors to students. Professors should be standing up for civility and intellectual standards and saying that this is not appropriate for a university. The purpose of the modern university is to equip students with the tools to be able to make arguments and analyze the world — not to train them in the tactics of political warfare and to launch activist campaigns.

This response is in the same mode as the Academic Freedom campaign that has been one of the Freedom Center’s key issues over the past decade. A common misinterpretation (wholly fueled by a deceitful, union-backed, Academic Left) when David has challenged certain professors and promoted the Academic Bill of Rights has been that he wants to create some kind of mechanism to police speech. The smear circulated is that David wants to force profs to shut up. That’s not the case at all. Instead, he wants the professional, non-indoctrinating professors to assert the proper academic standards.

Note to campus progressives: ex-leftists tend to have very little faith that passing a new law is the effective way to solve any given problem.

A Tea Partier asks about fighting Shariah Law.

This question from the gentlemen in the picture above was an encouraging sign. He identified himself as a Tea Party activist and wanted David’s advice on encouraging others in his movement to also take up the issue of Sharia.

I’ve been thinking for many months now that one thing we’re going to see more and more of in the coming years is a greater fusion between Tea Partiers, the Anti-Jihad movement, and Pro-Israel activists. What so many in the mainstream media and the Left don’t understand about the Tea Party is that it’s primarily a movement that has developed in reaction to a particular threat to our freedom — our growing government and its accompanying budget deficits. Tea Party activists don’t have a central vision of what the federal government should do. (There are many different ideas.) Instead, they’re unified by the shared commitment that we need to have a government period and that certain steps need to be pursued to prevent us from being swallowed up in debt.

Those newly energized into political awareness by the Tea Party are inclined to have the same reaction to the threat of global Jihad once they learn the facts on this issue too. And after awareness of the threat of Shariah comes then Israel’s role as the front line in this battle follows.

Three students from the African-American students organization on campus challenge David to explain his comments on successes in the black community.

Chances are when I’m debating with a leftist and the subject of my boss comes up it will be very easy to predict which specific talking points they use. It’s not difficult to know what happens when campus progressives find out that a conservative students group is bringing in David Horowitz to speak. Self-righteous young activists google David’s name and find collections of out-of-context quotes and general characterizations of him as a racist or racial provocateur or Klansman. One of the favorite proofs of David Horowitz The Political Demon Who Students Should Not Listen To is a campaign the Freedom Center engaged in a decade ago. In Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery David describes his attempt to place ads in college newspapers arguing why reparations for descendants of slavery 140 years after the fact was a racist idea and bad for blacks.

The three student activists above challenged David on a particular comment from one of his writings (they likely only read the quote itself and not the entire piece it was from) which claimed that the black people on the earth with the greatest quality of life and levels of freedom and equality were those living in the United States. Citing the poor conditions in inner city schools, the three students wanted David to explain his definitions and how the inequality between predominantly black and white schools could be justified.

Honestly, these three young women are admirable examples of civility and respect compared to the leftists David has encountered on campuses before. They didn’t call him any names and they engaged in a constructive back and forth. So David did not respond to them with the combative tone which he usually needs to employ when on campus. Instead the side of him more on display in his books The End of Time and A Cracking of the Heart emerged. He agreed with the young women’s assessment of inner city schools as inadequate. He asks the girl in the yellow sweatshirt above if she voted for Democrats. She said she did. Then David pointed out the fact that all of the inner city schools that were destroying black and Latino children were run by Democratic political machines — LA, New York City, Denver, Chicago, all of the inner cities. If blacks want to improve the education for their children then they need to stop being so devoted to a Democratic Party that fails to help them. It was then that one of the African-American students demanded to know what the conservative solution was to the problem.

David had a concrete answer for them: vouchers for every child in America so that parents can be responsible for making sure their kid can go to a high quality school.

The question and answer session ends peacefully and David gets to have more extensive discussion with students.

In the end it was an odd event. David got up and made many of his usual arguments about Academia, the Left, anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And NO ONE challenged or disputed him on ANY of these issues. In other words: campus progressives and the MSA forfeited the round to the conservatives and Israel supporters. Instead the only challenge that David got was on a completely unrelated issue from activism he engaged in ten years ago.

Does this mean that the campus Left is losing some its bite? Is it realizing that in the age of YouTube and a half dozen videocameras at speeches that it’s no longer as easy to cause disturbances and get away with it? Probably not but one can always dream. In another few weeks David will be speaking at UC Santa Barbara and there’s already plenty of arguing. Will the Unholy Alliance stay home again and let the open-minded, tolerant students have a chance to engage in some constructive dialogue for ONCE in their college careers? That’s up to the Santa Barbara faculty. Students can only get away with disruptions and demonstrations because such acts are condoned by the profs and administrators who are supposed to be teaching them. Will college leaders take up the challenge to model civil intellectual behavior? Probably not but one can always dream.

In the mind of progressives it's OK to compare being rejected from a blog to murdering millions of people.

One of my bad habits that I’m still working to overcome from my days on the Left is being too open-minded.

I still want to give people the benefit of the doubt when they express interest in participating in the publication. In the past this has bitten me from time to time as deviants and narcissistic self-promoters have wormed their way into publishing posts only to eventually reveal their true colors.

Still, I at least remain willing to listen to people who might not agree with all of our positions who still want to help out in the fights. If someone wants to write in defense of Israel but they hold socialist views on health care then I’m inclined to let them stand with us in defense of the Jewish state. I just won’t publish their writings promoting crackpot economics.

That’s kind of what I was hoping for when someone identifying as possessing “the viewpoint of the left” wanted to write for us. On April 26 my co-editors Jenn Q. Public and Michael van der Galien and I received this inquiry from NRB‘s contact form from “Allen James Burnham” (I’d wager probably his real name given his level of earnestness):

To whom it may concern,

I would like to blog about what I have put in the subject line of this message. I of course understand that this is a right wing blog, but it would be hardly a free and democratic blog in a free and democratic society if the viewpoint of the left were not incorporated. Or not even so much the left as the perspective of someone who was a Soldier for five years and has been an Official for forty two years. In any case the moment nobody engages with what the other side thinks, the country ceases to be a democracy.

I responded back and included an attachment with our standard application that we use to learn about the views and writing histories of those who want to write for us:

Dear Allen,

Thank you for your interest. Attached is an application for you to fill out to tell us more about what you’d like to write about at our publication.

A few notes of clarification:

1. We are not a “right wing blog.” We are a liberal publication, as the philosophy is defined here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=102&type=issue

2. The viewpoint of the Left is incorporated at NewsReal Blog. Most of our posts are dedicated to rebutting leftist viewpoints. Also, leftists are perfectly welcome to respond in the comments section provided. We are also perfectly happy to publish posts by leftists who dissent from the predominant views in their movement. There certainly are some leftists who are willing to stand up for Israel’s right to exist (Congressman Anthony Weiner comes to mind) and there are others who will speak honestly about the threat of radical Islam (Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher and some other secularist leftists are examples.) Leftists with these approaches can find a home at our publication to join the fight on these issues.

3. The country is not a democracy. We are a constitutional republic ruled by law, not a democracy ruled by the tyranny of the majority. James Madison warned of the totalitarianism of democracy in Federalist #10: “From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.” http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa10.htm

Thank you for your service to our nation.

-David

Allen replied back and included a completed application:

I recognize point 2 but I would debate aspects of 3 with you and deny 1. Here is the relevant information. I am sorry that I don’t have more writing samples but I don’t think inter-staff papers from DoL would be of much interest and I don’t like to release papers unless I am told to. Habit picked up from working 34 years as a DoD official. Thank you for your time and attention.

I looked through the application. This in particular jumped out:

I am for heavily regulated Capitalism, State Capitalism, a welfare State, the deathpenalty, the withdrawal of US forces from all foreign bases, an increase in FederalIncome Tax for the top 1% to 45 or even 50%, as well as the minimal amount of PrivateSector participation in Government.

Alright. So he wasn’t going to be a liberal hawk and he wasn’t any friend of the free market. I didn’t bother to respond to the application.

Then on May 2 I got a follow up from Allen:

Dear Mr. Swindle

I sent in my blogging application form for your examination I have not received confirmation as to whether or not I have been accepted. If a decision has been made I would very much like to know what exactly it was. Please get back to me at your earliest possible convenience

Yours Sincerely,

Allen Burnham

I responded quickly (I recall at the time being swamped with other more urgent NRB tasks):

I don’t see how it’s possible for you to contribute to the publication when you disagree with everything that we’re trying to accomplish.

He decided to play dumb in his response to me:

In what way am I against the publication, a detailed explanation with quotes would be welcome. I am not against free speech, the United States, or the right of the citizen to choose. What could I possibly harm or undermine?

I quoted the above passage from his application back to him and then said,

We do not support the welfare state, increasing taxes, “State Capitalism” or the withdrawal of US forces from all foreign bases. Your economic and foreign policy views run counter to the publication. There are plenty of leftist blogs and publications where you can submit pieces on those causes.

His response to this was a delight:

Mr. Swindle, I am aware of this, but Salon has right wing writers on it, I see no reason why your blog should not have an author writing from a left wing perspective. After all, as I said, there is no debate if only one side is talking. Are you really admitting to me that conservatives desire a dictatorship? Are you telling me you will not tolerate any dissenting views? That you have contempt for our constitution? our way of life? Are you telling me that? If so, I would remind you that this makes you as bad as Bolsheviks. You will not countenance the idea that there is any rectitude in the ideas of your opponents. You will not hear them out, and you will do your utmost to see that those ideas are repressed. If that is so, then you are un-American. Bear that in mind. The world is never all one way, and that is something the Founding Fathers left room for, a country where man could fully explore the intellectual horizons of his consciousness, do you intend to restrict that consciousness? Read your Orwell and then tell me seriously that you are fundamentally different from Oceania’s ruling Party.

In other words, a publication that doesn’t publish the views opposite of its editorial line is a “dictatorship” run by those who have “contempt for our constitution” and are thus “as bad as Bolsheviks” and “un-American.” Those of us who spend all day reading and listening to leftist media, who make no effort to try and shut down progressive publications “will not hear them out” and will do our “utmost to see that those ideas are repressed.” This is the insane paranoia the Left has in its heart for conservatives who believe in property rights. NewsReal Blog is the property of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. It’s not a neighborhood sandbox where any stray progressive cat is entitled to relieve  himself.

I’ve read Salon almost every day for years now. It’s a publication that no longer strives to offer regular conservative views as it once did long ago. A Socratic responses was appropriate, ignoring all of Allen’s dumb hyperboles:

Who are Salon’s conservative writers?

Deep down I kind of knew that he was going to give a response this braindead:

David Horowitz, and a number of individuals on Open Salon are conservatives. Mr. Horowitz actually contributes regularly to the magazine.

Had this guy been living under a political rock the past decade? Did he still think that Bush was president and we were debating WMDs? I decided to dip my response in the jar of sarcasm that I keep in the bottom right drawer of my desk:

Does he now? Goodness, I must be an idiot totally in the dark about what my boss and mentor is doing with his time. How “regularly” do his columns appear at Salon.com these days?

I was under the impression that Salon hadn’t printed an original column from him since 2002 and has only reprinted 2 of his FrontPage columns in recent years — both of which cautioned conservatives early in Obama’s presidency to give him a chance. http://www.salon.com/author/david_horowitz/index.html

I was also under the impression that OpenSalon was a service similar to WordPress and Blogger where anyone could start a blog.

I still await your examples of the conservatives who allegedly get to present their ideas from Salon’s platform.

I still laugh out loud when I reread his answer to me. This is the height of bigotry — a leftist demanding the conservative movement operate by standards higher than what he holds his own movement to. Because I won’t let him use NRB as his litter box he saw fit to compare me to every totalitarian he could think of. Now that I reveal that his beloved Salon operates by the same principles, they’re of course spared from a similar excoriation:

Yes that is true, and so what if Open Salon is open to all. Blogs are blogs, even if there is a platform it is only fair that there is at least some dissent from the line prescribed by it. Besides I would not exactly be contributing an article every week, compared to what normally goes on, as with Horowitz, and he should get back to writing more on Salon, I would be but a drop in the bucket. Unless, and if you believe truly in your own arguments you cannot possibly think this is true, your point of view is so totally wrong my writing of articles would undermine what your blog aims to do, the very presence of my ideas on the blog as articles should energize discussion and make your arguments sharper. Besides even if, as you claim, Liberals monopolize their blogs there is no reason you should not perform to higher standards than them. So unless you really think that your arguments are shoddy and easily undermined, and that you really have better arguments and morals than leftists, you will allow me to write articles and publish them on your blog.

At this point a #facepalm seems to be the appropriate physical response. Here’s the written response to go along with it:

You don’t really understand the political world.

When a political publication publishes an article it’s telling its readers that it agrees with the ideas presented. That’s why Salon, The Nation, Media Matters, Mother Jones, Think Progress, etc. etc. don’t publish conservative articles — and why we (and National Review, The Weekly Standard, Breitbart’s Big blogs, etc.) don’t publish leftist articles. Political publications aren’t general interest newspapers or magazines that publish a wide range of opinions because they’re trying to make a product that a broad range of people will buy. They publish because they’re pursuing particular activist agendas.

If you want to disagree with an article then that’s what the comments section is for. As long as you don’t violate our terms and conditions then you can dissent all you want. (And if you made a good argument then perhaps I’d excerpt your comment in a post and respond to it.) But apparently we’re still “Bolsheviks” even though we allow this.

And if you couldn’t tell from the lack of conservative views at Salon the past 8 years, they’re not interested in publishing David anymore. Salon wouldn’t even get back to me when I offered them a book review of David’s recent book A Cracking of the Heart, which tells the story of the life of his progressive daughter Sarah. No leftist publication had any interest in celebrating the life of a progressive who campaigned for Obama like Sarah. If you’re concerned about “Bolshevik” attitudes why don’t you work on pulling out the log from your own movement’s eye before going after the splinter in ours. Why not get a leftist publication to have a debate with us? Both publications could print both sides in the context of a debate. Unfortunately you’re going to get nothing but crickets in response. The Left is not interested in debating the Right, they’re interested in obliterating it — which is why we’re smeared as bigoted, sexist, homophobic, racist, warmongering, greedy imperialists. Our motives and character are always maligned, our arguments and facts never actually addressed. Go ahead and try and find a single leftist that has tried to seriously rebut Radical Son, The Politics of Bad Faith,Uncivil Wars, Unholy Alliance or any of David’s other books. I’ve spent years looking and have found NOTHING.

Now of course his true motivations came out. He just wanted to argue:

You know what, you are right, I do not understand the Political world. That’s why for all my working life I have served the US Government and the American people. By the way, in fairness you do allow comments, but the Bolsheviks also had Democratic Centralism, which allowed for inside debate, but ultimately once it was established, all had to toe the Party line. As for Salon not publishing Mr. Horowitz, that is something you should complain to them about. You want to complain to them about it, with moral righteousness, you can have me published and say in truth and honesty “See, we publish a genuine leftist on our blog, please reciprocate. I am not familiar with David Horowitz’s books.

You do have a log in your movement Mr. Swindle, you do. Ann Coulter and her eliminationist rhetoric. If you want I could provide examples. Gordon Liddy telling listeners on his program how to assasinate myself and my co-workers (federal workers). As for greedy imperialists, see Saipan, racist see Jack Abramoff and the comments he made about his clients while accusing good men and women who were trying to get rid of what amounted to a GULAG on American soil of racism. Warmongering, oh my god, I was an official in DoD during the lead up to Iraq and I can tell you all about that for a very long time. A movement that is dedicated to enriching the few and impoverishing the many, of course people will aim to be rid of it or marginalize it to insignificance. Take a good look in the mirror, if you are a good person, if you are committed to human dignity, social justice, and the American way of life, you will not like much what you see that you have been supporting. Furthermore I do not support the Democratic Party, I am an independent.

Regards and with hopes for continued debate,

Allen James Burnham

Do you see that? “If you are a good person” then you can’t be part of the conservative movement. That’s the mentality of the Left. It’s kind of a non-starter for any constructive discussion. Reminder: the Left hates you and everything you stand for.

Alright, so he wanted a debate, I might as well give it to him. Here’s a tactic I regularly use when talking or emailing with leftists: ask them what conservative books they’ve read (usually the answer will be zero.) If it isn’t then talk with them about the book they claim to have read:

Can you name any books by conservative authors that you’ve read?

Allen answered:

Sure Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Facism” and “Trickle Up Poverty” by Michael Savage.

And what did you think of Jonah’s book? I haven’t read it yet but it’s on the to-do list. (I’ve read many books already about the history of the Left.) Should I bother with reading it?

I believe it is fundamentally flawed, but some of the things he says about Liberals are funny. I incidentally do not own it, I borrowed it from my local library. His argument that Fascism is a product of Liberalism, because it too claims to be about “a third way” I do not think stands up to proper scrutiny. There also seem to be contradictory voices in his head about issues, such as accusing Liberalism of being Dictatorial and nasty at the same time at being such because it is nannying to people, which comes off as cloying. However the fundamental paradoxes, I do not think, are addressed properly. How could Liberal FDR be a Fascist, when he was the one really eager to get people into World War II and the fact that Roosevelt was more anti-business than either Mussolini or Hitler and was in power because he had been put into office by the American people.

So you would say that FDR was being unfair (to whom? himself?) when he compared his own policies to Hitler’s and Stalin’s? Or is Jonah Goldberg being unfair by quoting him?

Yes he was, it was a foolish thing for him to say, and I don’t think, given all else that FDR did, that he can seriously be compared to Hitler. Hitler did not support working people and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights idea was not fascistic.

So you’re going to deny the historical fact that FDR and his New Deal architects admitted to being influenced by fascism? You’re just going to dismiss this historical fact “as fundamentally flawed”?

There’s no comparison to Hitler here, just the historical fact that FDR and his people admitted that they were intellectually influenced by fascism. FDR didn’t kill Jews and he wasn’t an evil man. He just had some bad ideas that were influenced by fascism.

I don’t think that they were influenced by Facsism, the New Deal measures came before what Hitler did. They only way FDR was influenced by Fascism was his desire to see its existence terminated. I think their influences were based on their background, community work, Progressive ideology, and the ideas brought forth by William Jennings Bryan that the Democrats were on the side of working people. Furthermore the New Deal was not a bad idea. I grew up in the aftermath of it, and practically everyone I knew loved it. My father was saved from being unemployed by it, and was able to purchase a house because of the New Deal. The New Deal saved the country and it is sad that we have forgotten the lessons from it.

When reading through issue #1 of Bosch Fawstin’s long-awaited graphic novel The Infidel I try and take myself back to when I first encountered the artist’s work.

Bosch and I first connected in February of 2009. He got in touch with me to give me a pat on the back for a freelance article I’d written for FrontPage about comic book heroes called “Superhero Conservatism.” He told me about his own anti-Jihad superhero he’d created, a tough character named Pig Man. A few months later I sold another article to FrontPage, an interview with Bosch about his life, art, and philosophy.

Reading through some of my questions for Bosch readers more familiar with the kinds of things I tend to say about Islam these days might be taken aback. Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009 were the turning point for me as I was making my shift from Left to Right. At the time I was still doing all I could to try and avoid wholly embracing conservatism. I labored under the illusion that I could be some kind of “New Centrist” and not have to stand wholly with “scary people” like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Pamela Geller. I thought I could find some kind of gray middle ground between the supposed “extremes” of the Right and the Left. And of course part of this was my hope that people like Bosch (anti-Jihadist activists) were going too far in their critique of Islam. They weren’t seeing the “diversity” and “nuance” within Islam.

This was, of course, the arrogance that comes from being a leftist. Being a progressive means never bothering to read the Koran or a book about Islam’s history but KNOWING that you know more about it than ex-Muslims like Bosch.

Fast forward two years later and I’m now editing NewsReal Blog and after reading a stack of books on Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, Bosch and I are more on the same page. And he’s emerged as one of the key forces at NRB and the Freedom Center, usually doing several cartoons a month while creating illustrations for our campus campaigns and pamphlets. He also was responsible for bring to life David Horowitz’s vision of a Palestinian Wall of Lies. Collaborating with Bosch on these projects has been one of my great professional joys of the past few years.

In spite of all these extracurricular activities, Bosch has still managed to find the time to release The Infidel as a digital download. (Hopefully someday a publisher will have the courage to print it in the nice edition it deserves.)

The Infidel is a multi-layered work with a comic-book-within-the-comic. The main character, Killian Duke, is basically a foil for Bosch himself, much as Ayn Rand’s protagonists were variations of her. Killian is the controversial creator of the anti-Jihad comic hero Pig Man and the first issue interweaves sequences from Killian’s life (getting into confrontations with a group representing CAIR, and appearing on FOX News) and also action scenes of an unapologetic Pig Man fighting Jihadists. The first issue concludes with the introduction of the graphic novel’s antagonist — Killian’s Muslim twin brother Mo who responded to 9/11 by going in the opposite direction by aligning with the Islamists. The next issue will likely be a confrontation between the two brothers over Killian’s provocative comic book.

What kind of response do leftists have to this material? The same as I did years ago. Here’s one example from Jason Wilkins at Broken Frontier:

Lacking balance but overflowing with belligerent swagger and clever storytelling tricks, The Infidel was a disappointing read from a past Eisner nominee. Somehow, despite Fawstin’s closeness to the subject matter, I was expecting a story that at least alluded to the many shades of grey permeating any discussion of religion and politics. What I received instead was a disappointing, if not disturbing, opening salvo in a petty game of name-calling.

Of course the reviewer was expecting “many shades of grey.” I’ll bet money right now that he’s never read a single book about Islam and the only verses from the Koran that he’s familiar with are the ones that CAIR has integrated into their talking points.

Gray is what leftists want because it provides them with a new utopia right now. If everything is just endlessly complicated and abstract then it means we can just argue about it forever without ever having to do anything. It removes our responsibility to take action against ideas that threaten our existence.

And that’s ultimately why so many people are going to have such a hard time with both Bosch’s work and the anti-Jihad movement. The Infidel is a challenge to all who think that we can just wallow in post-modernism and relativism. It presents facts about the nature of a threat facing us. And unfortunately for our leftist friends,  those facts cannot be separated from the moral response that follows them. Islam-as-it’s-written and Islam-as-it’s-practiced are a threat both to us and most of the Muslims caught up in it who likely care more about their families than Jihad. That’s a much tougher pill to swallow than the “grey permeating any discussion of religion and politics.”

We’ve seen where we’re heading today in this country and it’s the Parisian streets, with Muslims transforming prayer into an act of political intimidation and a politically correct government refusing to enforce the law against a favored minority group.

But this kind of thuggery has a political expression too and with the election of Barack Obama we’re starting to see its creep into our own political system. Look at the recent history of the United Nations and you’ll see an Islamist infiltration akin to the occupation of Paris’ streets.

NewsReal Blog‘s all-star blogger Joseph Klein has recently published Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam, a book which tackles this issue like no other.

With numerous anti-Obama books on the market right now what makes Lethal Engagement stand out? Joe is an expert on the United Nations and has covered it for years for our sister publication FrontPage Magazine. His previous book was Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom. In Lethal Engagement Joe looks at a disturbing triangle. He tells the story of how radical Islam came to dominate the UN and now how the UN has now come to dominate the Obama administration — insights that are now coming to be even more relevant after our misguided venture into Libya.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Joe ever since I came onboard as NRB‘s editor almost two  years ago — he’s one of our original contributors. Since then Joe’s blossomed into one of our most important writers. He’s developed as a blogger and learned how to blend his foreign policy and economic insights with the attention-grabbing style of the blogosphere. Just as he makes complex issues accessible in his blog posts he does so with his book as well.  Lethal Engagement is an easy crash course in the Islamist incursion into the UN, the triumph of bogus multiculturalism, and especially the issue of Shariah finance. And it’s not just a compilation of ideas you’ve heard before. Joe has filled the book with original reporting from his own tough questioning of UN officials.

Make a point to pick up the book today and follow Joe’s NRB posts here and his FPM articles here. The first step in preventing the Islamists’ Civilization Jihad against our nation is educating ourselves on the nature of the threat.

Click the image to purchase at Amazon.