Who exactly are these “Black Bloc” individuals cited by Mayor McGinn? Black Bloc is not an organization, but rather a protest tactic employed by anti-capitalists and anarchists. Clad in black helmets, black ski masks, and black garments to conceal their faces and whatever distinctive clothing they may be wearing underneath their dark coverings, Black Bloc radicals make their presence felt by participating in all manner of left-wing demonstrations against free-market capitalism and Western culture; they generally are far outnumbered by fellow protesters who, while likeminded, are more traditionally attired. Because the Black Blockers so carefully hide their identities, they are often able to engage in criminal behavior—most notably property destruction—with impunity. In instances where they are pursued by police—whom they contemptuously regard as nothing more than “guard dogs for the rich”—fleeing Black Bloc protesters typically shed their dark coverings and blend into the crowd.

The animating core belief of Black Block, as explained in the Green Mountain Anarchist Collective’s Black Bloc Papers, is that “private property—and capitalism, by extension—is intrinsically violent and repressive and cannot be reformed or mitigated.” Lamenting “all the violence committed in the name of private property rights,” the document charges that “corporate private property” in particular “is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it.” By this logic, the destruction of a storefront window can be redefined and justified as the laudable creation of “a vent to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet.”

The origins of Black Bloc can be traced back to about 1980 in West Germany, where black-masked countercultural radicals calling themselves “Autonomen” (Autonomists) demonstrated against such despised targets as Western popular culture, conservatism, patriarchy, traditional gender roles, nuclear energy, and capitalist “greed.” They channeled their efforts chiefly toward the destruction of property belonging to corporations and financial institutions, because of their significance as symbols of capitalism.

In June 1987 a contingent of some 3,000 Black Bloc demonstrators were among the 50,000+ marchers who swarmed the streets of Berlin to condemn the policies of the conservative, pro-capitalist U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, who was visiting the city at that time. Berlin was again the scene of Black Bloc tactics fifteen months later, when demonstrators protested against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings which were being held there.

The first organized Black Bloc initiative in North America took place on October 17, 1988, when a relatively small number of black-clad protesters were among the 1,000+ demonstrators who convened outside the Pentagon to demand an end to U.S. intervention in the El Salvadoran civil war; the rally was organized by the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.

On Earth Day in 1990, Black Bloc militants were among a crowd of some 2,000 demonstrators who gathered on Wall Street in New York City to protest the allegedly anti-environmental practices of major American corporations. The protesters’ goal, as one supporter put it, was “to shut down business-as-usual in the heart of the capitalist beast.”

The assailants who beat Matthew Owens had clearly swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—the left’s disingenuous depiction of Trayvon Martin’s killing as the latest in a long line of racially motivated atrocities targeting black victims. To be sure, no leftist has pushed this egregious lie more loudly or more passionately than Jesse Jackson, who, in the immediate aftermath of Martin’s death, proclaimed that “blacks are under attack”; that “targeting … and ultimately killing [blacks] is big business”; that the Martin case “gives us insight into just how hard it is to be black in America”; and that the 2008 election of President Obama had “triggered [a] tremendous backlash” of the kind of racism that allegedly caused Martin’s demise.

And yet, neither the actions of Owens’ assailants nor the comments of Jesse Jackson make the slightest bit of logical sense when considered in proper context. Reflect upon this remarkable fact: The attack on Matthew Owens occurred precisely 55 days after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Extrapolating from annual homicide statistics in the U.S., approximately 1,191 African Americans had gone to their graves as a result of homicide during those 55 days. And 1,119 of them (i.e., 94% of them) had been killed by other blacks. Does it not seem odd, then, that a statistical rarity like the Martin case has been turned into the centerpiece of a national referendum on racism in America? Does it not seem odd, as well, that self-anointed black vigilantes, like those who attacked Matthew Owens, have chosen to impose their own brand of “justice” on Martin’s behalf, while turning a blind eye to the thousand-plus black victims who have been killed by fellow blacks in just the few short weeks since Martin’s death? And most importantly, does it not seem odd that a so-called “civil rights leader” like Jesse Jackson, characterizing Martin’s “cold blood[ed]” killing as an emblem of “the classic struggle of our time,” has vowed to “turn [the] moment” of the teen’s death “into a movement”—much as the 1955 slaying of Emmitt Till helped galvanize the early civil-rights movement?

The foregoing actions were those of people seeking retribution for two very separate offenses. First, of course, there was the killing of Martin—an act which, according to a Gallup poll, 72% of blacks (as compared to 31% of non-blacks) view mainly a result of Zimmerman’s own racial bias. Second, and much more important, was the perception that law-enforcement’s decision not to incarcerate the gunman in the immediate aftermath of the shooting reflected a racial bias that pervades the entire criminal-justice system of the United States. Gallup reports that 73% of blacks (vs. 35% of non-blacks) believe that Zimmerman would have been arrested (and presumably jailed) if his victim had been white, while a new ABC poll finds that 84% of blacks feel that the justice system—from the police to the courtroom to the penitentiary—treats them inequitably.

While it is virtually impossible to overstate the implications of this core belief which has so firmly embedded itself in the worldview of black Americans, one vital question begs for an answer: Is it true? Let us briefly survey the mountain of empirical evidence that the champions of “civil rights”—like Jackson and Sharpton—have so carefully avoided mentioning amid their incessant, thundering denunciations of the U.S. and its justice system.

The criminal-justice process is comprised of a number of stages, or decision points, at which law-enforcement personnel (such as police and judges) must determine how they should proceed—arrest or release a suspect; convict or acquit; impose a harsh or mild sentence; etc.  Contrary to popular mythology, there is virtually no evidence of racial discrimination at any of these decision points. Black overrepresentation is almost entirely at the arrest stage, reflecting the simple fact that the “average” black engages in criminal activity more frequently than the “average” white. Not only are the outcomes at other decision points nearly identical for both races, but the slight differences that do exist tend to favor blacks. Further, the arrest rates of blacks living in cities that are the politically black-controlled are no lower than the arrest rates of blacks in white-controlled cities. Nor are these realities anything new; they have been true for decades.[1]

Consider that as early as 1983, the liberal-leaning National Academy of Sciences found “no evidence of a widespread systematic pattern of discrimination in sentencing.”[2]  In 1985 the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology concluded that a disproportionate number of blacks were in prison not because of a double standard of justice, but because of the disproportionate number of crimes they committed.[3]  That same year, federal government statistician Patrick Langan conducted an exhaustive study of black and white incarceration rates and found that “even if racism [in sentencing] exists, it might explain only a small part” of the black overrepresentation among prison inmates.[4]  In a 1987 review essay of the three most comprehensive books examining the role of race in the American criminal-justice system, the journal Criminology concluded that there was little evidence of anti-black discrimination.[5]  The most exhaustive, best-designed study of comparative sentencing patterns—a 1990 analysis of more than 11,000 recently convicted criminals in California—found that the severity of sentences depended heavily on such factors as prior criminal records, the seriousness of the crimes, and whether guns were used in the commission of those crimes; race was found to have no effect whatsoever.[6]  A 1991 RAND Corporation study found that a defendant’s racial or ethnic background bore little or no relationship to conviction rates; far more important than race were such factors as the amount of evidence presented, and whether or not a credible eyewitness testified.[7]

This theme was nothing new for our president. Indeed it was but an echo of what he had said during his 2010 State of the Union speech—that it was imperative “to crack down” on the purportedly widespread “violations of equal-pay laws so that women get equal pay for an equal day’s work.” That, in turn, was but an echo of what Obama had said just nine days after his inauguration, when he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law making it easier for women to sue employers for pay discrimination: “It is a story of women across this country still earning just 78 cents for every $1 [that] men earn, women of color even less.” And that, in turn, was itself an echo of Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to eliminate the gender “pay gap” by taking concrete “steps to better enforce the Equal Pay Act, fight job discrimination, and … give women equal footing in the workplace.”

In the last presidential election, this type of rhetoric earned Obama the devotion of left-wing feminists from coast to coast. Vicky Lovell, a director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, lauded Obama for projecting “empathy for women’s financial struggles,” and for understanding that “women are more economically vulnerable than men.” Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, likewise praised Obama for articulating a plan to pass “essential legislation that provides basic fairness in the workplace.”

To be sure, such sentiments would have considerable merit if not for a single, stubbornly inconvenient detail: The contention that women are underpaid by American employers in comparison to men is demonstrably untrue. A complete fiction. A gargantuan lie, actually. As longtime employment lawyer Warren Farrell, who served as a board member of the National Organization for Women from 1970 to 1973, explains in his book Why Men Earn More, the 22-cent “pay gap” is neither a result of gender bias nor workplace discrimination. It can be explained entirely by the fact that women as a group tend to make certain very logical and legitimate employment-related choices which, while affording them a number of benefits that they value highly, tend to suppress incomes—for reasons that are also logical and legitimate.

Consider some pertinent facts. Far more often than men, women tend to seek employment in fields that are non-technical or which involve the social—as opposed to the physical—sciences. Moreover, they seek employment in fields that: offer a high level of physical safety; involve work that is performed indoors as opposed to outdoors (where bad weather can make working conditions poor); feature a pleasant and socially dynamic working environment; are characterized by lower levels of emotional turbulence; offer desirable shifts or flexible working hours; and require fewer working hours per week or fewer working days per year. As well, women tend to gravitate toward fields that do not require long commutes; men on average commute 36% farther to get to work, a fact that translates into about $1,500 in extra annual pay. Similarly, women are more inclined to pursue jobs that do not require geographic relocation—the result being that females make up only 18% of all workers who are transferred abroad by their employers.

Such advantages come at a cost; they make certain fields more attractive and thus expand the pool of applicants to a point that, in some cases, exceeds the demand for services. This, in turn, exerts a downward pressure on salaries. Yet this tradeoff is quite acceptable to many working women: Only 29% of women, versus 76% of men, report that their primary motivation for working is to “build wealth.” Research has shown repeatedly that women are more likely to pursue jobs that they perceive to be socially useful, while men, for various reasons, tend to give greater emphasis to money.

An even more significant cause of the gender pay gap is that women tend to compile fewer years of uninterrupted service in their jobs than men. Indeed, women are far more likely to leave the workforce for extended periods in order to attend to family-related matters such as raising children. This is simply a life choice to forego some degree of financial reward in exchange for the emotional reward of being an at-home parent, whether full-time or part-time. During the course of their overall work lives, men accumulate an extra 5 to 9 years on the job as compared to their female counterparts, and each of those additional years translates to approximately 3 or 4 percent more in annual pay.

Spearheaded by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the massive, escalating protests over Trayvon Martin’s February 26th death in Florida—protests featuring desperate pleas to “stop the killing of our children”—continue to rivet the nation’s collective attention. By contrast, the death of 63-year-old Tommie Lee Caldwell a few weeks earlier created no such stir. One morning this past December, Caldwell, an African American who was caring for his terminally ill wife, was stabbed and then shot in the back of the head by an intruder inside his Detroit home. If you’re like most people, you’ve never heard of Mr. Caldwell prior to this moment. His murderer was black—not a “white Hispanic” like George Zimmerman—so the guardians of “civil rights,” like Jackson and Sharpton, were spared the trouble, at least in that instance, of having to gin up a national referendum on America’s unyielding, ubiquitous racism.

The “civil rights” crowd was likewise silent two months ago when a 19-year-old African American named Joshua Brown—angered over a dispute with a black Detroit woman named Almanda Talton—shot and killed the woman’s 12-year old daughter, Kade’jah Davis, a sixth-grade honor student. No doubt, that youngster’s name is unfamiliar to you as well. Neither is it likely that you’ve heard of Eyanna Flonory or her 2-year-old son Amani, both of whom were murdered, along with two other black victims, by a pair of black gunmen in Boston. Nor is it conceivable that many readers could name any of the ten people who were killed (or the forty who were wounded) by gang violence in Chicago during the recent St. Patrick’s Day weekend—or, for that matter, the two who were killed (in addition to the twelve who were wounded) by a spray of gunfire in south Florida just this past Friday.

In stark contrast to the Trayvon Martin killing, none of the horrors that befell the aforementioned black victims prompted anything even remotely resembling a media sensation. No massive rallies were held in memory of the dead. Jesse Jackson did not lament that “blacks are under attack”; that “killing us is big business”; and that few people really understand “just how hard it is to be black in America.” Luminaries like Carmelo Anthony, Lebron James, P. Diddy, Jamie Foxx, and Arsenio Hall did not tweet expressions of outrage to their millions of “followers.” Celebrities like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr did not use their respective Twitter accounts to publicly post the home address of any of the perpetrators. Entertainers like Chaka Khan did not produce any music videos in honor of the slain. And the president of the United States did not feel compelled, as he did in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, to urge all Americans “to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen.”

Something like what, exactly? Presumably the president was referring to the popularly accepted cartoon version of the Zimmerman-Martin confrontation, a narrative that essentially went like this: A racist, aggressive white vigilante (later identified as a “white Hispanic”) relentlessly “hunted down,” as Florida Congresswoman Federica Wilson explained it, an unarmed “sweet young boy … like a dog” and mercilessly executed the child because his black skin and the hooded sweatshirt (“hoodie”) he was wearing gave him the appearance of being a potential criminal who “didn’t belong” in the gunman’s neighborhood. In short, a deadly brew of racial profiling on the one hand, and “walking while black” on the other, had claimed yet another innocent black victim.

It is reasonable to assume that Congresswoman Wilson, like Jackson and Sharpton, is genuinely troubled by the enormous number of African American lives that are prematurely snuffed out in acts of senseless violence each year. Homicide is, after all, the leading cause of death for black males aged 10-24, and the second leading cause of death for black females aged 15-24; African Americans as a whole are six times as likely as whites to die at the hands of a murderer, and young black men in particular are fully fifteen times as likely to be murdered as their white male counterparts. These are tragedies of inexpressible magnitude.

Distilled to its essence, the original, widely accepted narrative of Trayvon Martin’s death was that of a clearly delineated battle between good and evil which went something like this: On the night of February 26^th in Sanford, Florida, a racist vigilante named George Zimmerman relentlessly and unjustifiably stalked an African American “child,” as Al Sharpton tenderly described him, who had been minding his own business, eating “a bag of Skittles.” Zimmerman then gunned the boy down in “cold blood,” according to Jesse Jackson—simply because, like so many Americans, he instinctively viewed all black males as potential criminals. Notably, a host of major media reports described the Hispanic gunman specifically as a “white Hispanic”—a term rarely if ever used prior to the Martin killing—to emphasize the familiar “oppressor-versus-victim” racial storyline that the left has grown so proficient at reciting.

Recently the New Black Panther Party—never known for mincing words—has weighed in on the case as well, ominously declaring that “White America,” having “failed black people” for “400 years,” will no longer be permitted to “kill black children and get away with it.” To drive the point home, the Panthers initially offered a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of George Zimmerman. Lest there be any ambiguity about what the Panthers meant by “capture,” the group not only demanded “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” but also circulated a flyer that read: “MURDERED in Cold BLOOD—Child killer of Trayvon Martin—WANTED DEAD or ALIVE.” Soon thereafter, the Panthers upped the ante to $1 million, a sum which they expected to collect in donations “from the black community [including] athletes and entertainers.”

The Panthers, it is worth noting, have been unpersuaded by some inconvenient facts that emerged following the announcement of their bounty, including eyewitness evidence that Trayvon Martin actually attacked Zimmerman (rather than vice versa) and was beating the latter quite badly just prior to the shooting. Of course, not all the facts are known yet, but as far as the New Black Panthers are concerned, the collection and evaluation of evidence are merely tiresome formalities that would serve only to delay and deny “justice” for the racist killer. The Panthers’ southern regional leader, Mikhail Muhammad, puts it succinctly: “He [Zimmerman] should be fearful for his life. You can’t keep killing black children.” Righteous crusades against evil don’t require due process; they only require victory.

Anyone familiar with the New Black Panthers knows that they have long been vexed by the racism which they claim pervades “White America.” Indeed, who could forget one of the Panthers’ most famous leaders, the late Khalid Abdul Muhammad, whose angst about white racism led him to express his deepest “love” for one Colin Ferguson, a black gunman who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters (killing six of them) in a racially motivated rampage aboard a New York commuter train in 1993. Determined to stamp out white racism by any means necessary, Muhammad announced: “I honestly wanna kill the enemy…. I would be embarrassed if we couldn’t point to one Colin Ferguson that decided one day to … just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.”

When Muhammad died of a brain aneurysm in 2001, he was succeeded as Panther chairman and crusader-in-chief-against-racism by his longtime protégé, Malik Zulu Shabazz. Like his mentor, Shabazz reads American history as an unpunctuated narrative of white-perpetrated oppression. He asserts, for instance, that George Washington was little more than a slave owner who “raped black women,” while “old wooden-teeth-wearin’, wig-wearin’ Thomas Jefferson, [was] nothin’ but a slave-master, a slave-owner, an Indian-killer.”

Since the release of the video, Obama’s backers have been quick to dismiss it as nothing more than a young scholar’s affectionate tribute to a liberal academic icon who not only made major intellectual contributions to his profession, but who also was a leading champion of racial “diversity” in higher education. For instance, CNN host Soledad O’Brien, when interviewing Breitbart.com’s editor-in-chief Joel Pollak yesterday about the significance of the video, described Bell benignly as “the first tenured African American professor of law at Harvard University,” and characterized the gathering merely as “a rally in support of racial equality among the faculty at Harvard Law School.” O’Brien then asked her guest, with apparent bewilderment, “What part of that was the bombshell? Because I missed it. I don’t get it. What was a bombshell?”

In a similar spirit of willful blindness, Media Matters describes Derrick Bell as “a respected academic” and “an influential figure in the Civil Rights movement.” This portrayal is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s pathetic characterization, a few years back, of Bill Ayers as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But just as the reality of Bill Ayers was far more interesting than Obama indicated at that time, the truth about Derrick Bell is likewise far more compelling than the pablum the left has provided in the wake of this latest video. For you see, by the time Barack Obama was delivering his glowing remarks about Derrick Bell in 1991, the professor had already established—and would continue to cultivate for another two decades—a reputation as someone who thoroughly, resolutely detested the United States and who viewed the nation’s institutions and its people as irremediably racist. In short, until his death last October at the age of 80, Bell was secular academia’s version of Jeremiah Wright—a raging, fulminating racist without the clergyman’s robe. And something about his philosophy resonated strongly with Barack Obama.

Derrick Bell is best known as the founding father of Critical Race Theory, an academic discipline which maintains that society is divided along racial lines into (white) oppressors and (black) victims, similar to the way Marxism frames the oppressor/victim dichotomy along class lines. Critical Race Theory contends that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently its legal structures are, by definition, racist and invalid. A logical derivative of this premise, according to Critical Race Theory, is that the members of “oppressed” racial groups are entitled—in fact obligated—to determine for themselves which laws and traditions have merit and are worth observing. Such a perspective’s implications for the ability of civil society to function at all, are nothing short of monumental.

Further, Critical Race Theory holds that because racism is so deeply ingrained in America’s national character, racial preferences (favoring blacks) in employment and higher education are not only permissible but necessary as a means of countering the permanent character flaws of white people who, as Bell put it, seek to “achieve a measure of social stability through their unspoken pact to keep blacks on the bottom.”[1]  Asserting that “few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks,” Bell—right around the time Obama was praising him at the Harvard rally—believed that “racial discrimination in the workplace is as vicious (if less obvious) than it was when employers posted signs ‘no negras need apply.’” Bell complained, in fact, that most white employers were loath to hire African Americans for “any position above the most menial.”[2]  Nor did the professor look kindly upon his black colleagues who failed to share his enthusiasm for affirmative action. Indeed, Bell was among the first critics to condemn the June 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating: “To place a person who looks black and who, in conservative terms, thinks white, is an insult.”

Ideological conformity among blacks was of the utmost importance to Bell, since wherever he looked, he saw white racism. Lamenting that “no African Americans are insulated from incidents of racial discrimination,” Bell excoriated “a white society that condemns all blacks to quasi citizenship as surely as it segregated our parents.”[3]  Claiming that racism was “an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society,” Bell went so far as to state: “The fact that, as victims, we suffer racism’s harm but, as a people, [we] cannot share the responsibility for that harm, may be the crucial component in a definition of what it is to be black in America.”[4]  On the premise that “black people will never gain full equality in this country” due to the unending evils of the white “oppressor class,” Bell advised African Americans to squarely confront “the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status.”[5]  This gloomy view of black destiny was reflected most vividly in the title of Bell’s 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism.

By Bell’s reckoning, “the racism that made slavery feasible” was “far from dead.” He added: “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”[6]  Bell also railed against the racism that motivated acts of white-on-black crime, lamenting that “even our lives … are threatened because of our color.”[7]  That claim did not square with the fact that more than 90 percent of African American murder victims nationwide are actually killed by fellow blacks, but it made for a nice sound bite. And in fact, Bell did not entirely turn a blind eye to the epidemic of black-on-black crime. That phenomenon, he explained, was itself a reaction to white oppression: “Victimized themselves by an uncaring society, some blacks vent their rage on victims like themselves.”[8]  In other words, whenever something bad happens, it is always the fault of whites.

As Bell saw things, white malevolence knew no bounds. In one of his writings, he mused that if scientists were to someday develop a magical pill that could transform any black person who consumed it into a perfectly law-abiding individual, whites would undoubtedly conspire to destroy it so as to prevent such an effect. Why? Because black crime, he explained, benefits many whites such as those who profit from the manufacture of prison uniforms.[9] Wholly disgusted by the white race, Bell predicted that eventually America would witness the rise of charismatic new black leaders who, in the interests of retribution, would “urge that instead of [African Americans] killing each other, they should go out in gangs and kill a whole lot of white people.”[10]  Presumably this was some of the lofty “scholarship” that so impressed Barack Obama.

As the political air hangs heavy with uncertainty about whether the U.S. or Israel might launch an attack against the nuclear facilities of Iran—a nation whose president has pledged to “wipe off this disgraceful blot [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world”—the American “peace” movement is once again doing what it was born to do: condemn the United States and Israel while giving a free pass to the genocidal murderers who seek to annihilate both nations. One of the most noteworthy recent newcomers to this movement is Chicago Mass Action (CMA), an activist group that engages in street demonstrations protesting America’s alleged racism, imperialism, and fascism.

Currently, CMA is busy circulating a petition exhorting members of the American and Israeli armed forces to disobey their commanders if ordered to attack Iran—an attack that, according to CMA, would “violate morality, international and domestic law, and the interests of humanity.” By contrast, CMA asks nothing of Tehran, save its patient forbearance in the face of provocations from the Great Satan and the Little Satan. As CMA puts it, the United States is nothing more or less than “the world’s greatest terrorist,” a nation whose “bloody hands” give testimony to the many “reckless military assaults” it has launched throughout its history. Contending that America’s “unending” wars are “only for the benefit of the super-rich who want to expand the U.S. empire and get control over other peoples’ resources, markets, labor power and strategic locations,” CMA pontificates that “the U.S. has no right to prowl around the world, looking for opportunities to gain control of more countries.”

Earlier this month, CMA staged a rally in Chicago demanding that the U.S. refrain from punishing Iran in any way whatsoever—especially with economic sanctions or military measures—for its continued development of a nuclear-technology program. Local endorsers of the rally included such champions of “peace” as ANSWER (a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party); World Can’t Wait (founded by a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party); Code Pink (founded by a lifelong pro-Castro socialist); and Peace Action (an outgrowth of a Soviet-sponsored initiative of the 1980s that sought to permanently freeze the USSR’s nuclear and military superiority in place). Satellite rallies were also held in more than 20 cities across the United States, Ireland, Canada, and elsewhere.

Launched a month ago in Lower Manhattan, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has since spread to more than 140 cities nationwide while winning the hearts of leftists everywhere, most significantly in the Democratic Party‘s mainstream. By now, many Americans have seen some of the photos and film footage of OWS demonstrators spewing anti-Semitic diatribes; shutting down traffic in busy urban areas; engaging in public nudity, copulation, defecation, and illegal drug use; and defacing their environs with colossal mounds of trash that are utterly incongruous with the protesters’ professed concern for responsible environmental stewardship. But beyond their penchant for the bizarre and the odious, what exactly animates the OWSers in New York, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between?

While they have been widely described as a motley crew without a unifying agenda, the OWSers are in fact bound together by a strongly anti-capitalist worldview that characterizes America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where “lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of perpetual economic “growth for the sake of growth,” says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation … to cover the world.” OWS’s prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy. Thus it is not at all surprising that the Communist Party USA, the International Socialist Organization, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America have all embraced OWS and its objectives.

OWSers, casting themselves as the victimized “99%” of the population who “will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the [wealthiest] 1%,” advocate the imposition of a “Robin Hood Tax” on most goods and services, with the aim of using its generated revenues (taken mostly from “the rich”) to fund social-welfare programs for “the poor.” Among those joining the “one-percenters” in denouncing America’s purportedly contemptible “millionaires and billionaires” are filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon, actor Alec Baldwin, film star Jane Fonda, activist Yoko Ono, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Marxist professor Cornel West, New York councilman Charles Barron, socialist radical Frances Fox Piven, TV personality Keith Olbermann, congressman John Lewis, congressman Charles Rangel, financier George Soros, labor leader Richard Trumka, former U.S. senator Russ Feingold, entertainer Roseanne Barr, left-wing preacher Jim Wallis, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee director Robby Mook, and revolutionary communist Van Jones. Notably, most of these self-proclaimed champions-of-the-oppressed are themselves millionaires and billionaires. And yet another very wealthy man – President Obama – has likewise praised the OWS protesters for “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

It is impossible to understand the world around us, or to cultivate a coherent set of core principles, if our use of language is fraught with sloppiness and imprecision. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of politics, where emotionally charged terms are routinely bandied about with scarcely any conception of what they actually mean. “Liberal” and “conservative” are perhaps the most significant of these.

Many people who describe themselves as “liberal” typically use the term as a synonym for all things noble and morally pure. The late newsman Walter Cronkite, for instance, equated liberalism with a “broad-minded,” “unprejudiced,” and “beneficent” mindset. Author and radio personality Garrison Keillor – who views “conservatives” as people of “ugly and rancid” political beliefs  – proudly declares: “I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness … tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.”And the revered “Liberal Lion” of the U.S. Senate, the late Ted Kennedy, defined a liberal as “someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions” and “someone who cares about the welfare of the people.”

But if one merely equates liberalism with what is “good,” and conservatism with what is “bad” – or vice versa, for that matter – he or she cannot lay claim to any authentic understanding of either term. Thus we need an operational definition for each term, just as we need definitions for any other words we employ in our daily lives. Regardless of how we feel about “liberalism” or “conservatism,” we need to know specifically what qualities give each of them their respective identities.

When the term “liberalism” (from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “pertaining to a free man”) first emerged in the early 1800s, it was founded on an unwavering belief in individual rights, the rule of law, limited government, private property, and laissez faireeconomics. These would remain the defining characteristics of liberalism throughout the liberal epoch, generally identified as the period from 1815-1914.

But many who call themselves “liberals” today are in fact leftists – i.e., the very antithesis of liberals. The modern Left – which traces its roots back to a faction of early-19th-century French liberals who proclaimed that capitalism and private property were agents of inevitable moral decay – is animated by a desire to topple the existing capitalist order and to replace it with a socialist regime where the utopian ideal of perfect equality will reign. Disingenuously portraying itself as an agent of enlightened commitment to “liberal” causes, today’s Left in fact rejects each of the liberal ideals enumerated in the preceding paragraph. We can readily observe for instance, that the modern Left is the stalwart champion of:

• group rights and collective identity, rather than of individual rights and responsibilities (e.g., racial preferences, notions of collective guilt and innocence, and a devotion to identity politics generally);
• the circumvention of law rather than the rule of law (as exemplified by the flouting of immigration laws and nondiscrimination laws, and by a preference for judicial activism whereby judges co-opt the powers that rightfully belong to legislators);
• the expansion of government rather than its diminution (favoring ever-escalating taxes to fund a bloated welfare state and a government that oversees — and intervenes in — virtually every aspect of human life); and
• the redistribution of wealth (through punitive taxes and, again, a mushrooming welfare state), rather than its creation through free markets based on private property.

By calling themselves “liberals,” leftists have entirely redefined the terms of debate. The media and the general public have largely gone along with this fraudulent self-identification, as evidenced by the fact that few people nowadays draw any distinction between liberalism in its original and authentic sense, and leftism — or socialism posing as “liberalism.” Indeed the terms are generally used interchangeably by people at every point along the political spectrum. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, for one, calls Barack Obama “the most liberal president ever.” Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly similarly calls Obama ”the most liberal president I’ve seen in my lifetime,” and then, in the next breath, says Obama “may well be the most left-wing chief executive in American history.” As a consequence of such imprecision, we witness the travesty of the “liberal” label being widely attached to leftists like Obama, Michael Moore, George Soros, Noam Chomsky, Al Sharpton, Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton. In the process, the noble values and ideals that are genuinely “liberal” in the true sense of the word — and that are in fact wholly consistent with what is nowadays called “conservatism” — are wrongly conflated in the public mind with the socialist, revolutionary, and anti-American agendas of the foregoing leftists. As a result, the definition of “liberalism” continues to drift inexorably leftward.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has created a website, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, to help explain exactly what, and who, the Left is – and how it utterly rejects every major principle that can legitimately be classified as “liberal.” This NewsReal blog post will be followed in the coming days and weeks by a long series of posts taking you on a guided tour of DiscoverTheNetworks and its multitudes of special sections and features. We invite you to come along for the ride. If you do, you will understand the Left, its agendas, its tactics, and its key players in a profound and illuminating way. And you will see clearly how the Left has fraudulently draped itself in the vestments of a once-noble tradition — liberalism — thereby giving the false appearance that its own socialist objectives are somehow consistent with that tradition. They are not.

For today, why not visit DiscoverTheNetworks’ section titled “Defining and Understanding the Left”? It’s a great starting point if you’re not yet familiar with this vast and informative website.

Seventy-year-old Democrat James Clyburn has been the U.S. Representative for South Carolina’s 6th congressional district since 1993. He also has served as House Majority Whip since 2007, making him the third-ranking Democrat in the House behind Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. When the new Congress convenes in January 2011, Clyburn will retain a #3 leadership position – “Assistant Minority Leader” – among the now-minority Democrats. As one of the most influential political figures in the country, he merits the closest scrutiny of the American people – particularly in light of the fact that his politics are those of Democratic Party orthodoxy writ large.

A member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Clyburn, in the longstanding tradition of the CBC and the political Left, has cultivated an uncanny ability to spot white racists lurking menacingly around virtually every corner. For instance, when former President Bill Clinton likened Barack Obama‘s 2008 Democratic primary victory in South Carolina to then-candidate Jesse Jackson‘s primary victory there twenty years earlier, Clyburn concluded that Clinton’s remarks were embedded with a racist intent to diminish Obama’s achievement. “When he [Clinton] was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,” said Clyburn. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.”

When South Carolina’s Republican governor Mark Sanford formally rejected federal earmarks for his state early last year, Clyburn alleged that Sanford was a racially insensitive elitist: “He [Sanford] happens to be a millionaire. He may not need help for the plantation his family owns, but the people whose grandparents and great-grandparents worked those plantations need the help.”

In February 2009, Clyburn offered this assessment of why Sanford and three other southern white governors were opposing President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package: “The governor of Louisiana expressed opposition. [Louisiana] has the highest African-American population in the country. Governor of Mississippi expressed opposition. The governor of Texas, and the governor of South Carolina. These four governors represent states that are in the black belt. I was insulted by that. All of this was a slap in the face of African-Americans.”

In March 2009, when Governor Sanford compared Obama’s massive stimulus spending to the disastrous fiscal policies of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, Clyburn characterized the governor’s remarks as “beyond the pale.” When reporters subsequently asked Clyburn if his use of that phrase was intended to imply that Sanford’s comments had racial overtones, the congressman replied: “I’m sure he would not say that, but how did he get to Zimbabwe? What took the man to Zimbabwe? Someone should ask him if that’s really the best comparison.… How can he compare this country’s situation to Zimbabwe?”

After Rep. Joe Wilson infamously shouted “You lie!” during President Obama’s September 9, 2009 address outlining his healthcare-reform proposal to a joint session of Congress, Clyburn again sniffed the pungent stench of racism. Claiming that he had always tried to “look past” Wilson’s “membership in some groups that call into question his feelings about his whole notion of white supremacy,” Clyburn said: “Joe Wilson has worked very hard to cultivate a sort of choir-boy image, but I think that most people realize that there’s something else going on with him.”

In Clyburn’s calculus, even a refusal to dutifully swallow the fantasy of manmade global warming qualifies as evidence of racism because, as the congressman explains, “African-Americans are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change economically, socially and through our health and well-being.”

Clyburn’s unwavering leftism manifests itself not only in such reflexive charges of racism, but also in the congressman’s voting record on a wide range of vital issues. A devoted fan of the bloated welfare state, Clyburn, early in his legislative career, voted against a 1995 bill designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs. In addition to limiting welfare aid to five years per family, this bill barred states from giving cash assistance to children of unmarried teenagers; to families that had given birth to additional children while on public assistance; to any person who had fraudulently sought to obtain benefits in more than one state; and to fugitive felons, parole and probation violators, alcoholics, and drug addicts. But alas, Rep. Clyburn thought all these stipulations were bad ideas. The following year, he voted against the landmark Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which caused welfare rolls nationwide to shrink by more than 50 percent, as millions of formerly dependent people were moved successfully into jobs where they were able to earn their own way instead of being the wards of American taxpayers.

Clyburn also thought it was a bad idea in 2003 to place even minimal new conditions on welfare eligibility. Thus he voted against a proposal to raise the work requirements, from 30 hours per week to 40, for individuals receiving public assistance. By contrast, boondoggles requiring absolutely nothing of their beneficiaries are just dandy in Clyburn’s eyes. In 2006 he voted Yes on a $70 million amendment to fund 10,000 Section-8 housing vouchers. Two years after that, he voted in favor of yet another spending bill to revitalize public housing – despite the fact that the U.S. already had more than 80 federal housing programs operating on an annual budget exceeding $30 billion.

Just as Clyburn is willing to funnel billions of other people’s dollars toward redistributive welfare and public-housing initiatives, so is he ever-eager to pour rivers of cash into a public-education system that has scarcely proven to be worth its weight in dirt. In 2007 he voted in favor of a bill – stuffed with more than 2,200 earmarks totaling nearly $1 billion, and funding nearly five-dozen programs that were duplicative or had proven ineffective – allocating an additional $10.2 billion to federal education and HHS projects. Two years later, he voted Yes on a proposal to spend $40 billion for the modernization, renovation, and repair of “green public schools.” Every year since 2005, Clyburn has received a perfect rating from the National Education Association, the largest American labor union, the leading engine of leftist indoctrination in the public schools, and a major funder of Democratic candidates and causes.

By Clyburn’s reckoning, only the enlightened Washington elite are qualified to determine how American children ought to be educated. Thus in 1997 the congressman voted against permitting certain federal education funds to finance vouchers that would enable low-income families to send their children to private schools rather than to dismal, failing public schools. The following year, Clyburn again voted against federally funded vouchers for impoverished children in Washington, DC, a city whose schools are the very embodiment of fiscal waste and academic incompetence.

The extreme left-wing bias of American academia is well documented. Thus, it is not at all surprising that our nation’s university presses – nonprofit publishing houses that are ideological extensions of their parent institutions – invariably serve as platforms for the dissemination of far-left dogma. Each year, they produce hundreds of tracts extolling the virtues of pacifism, radical environmentalism, open borders, and socialism, while delivering an endless stream of literary assaults on capitalism, American culture, and Western civilization generally. Because these books carry the implied intellectual legitimacy of the colleges and universities with which their publishers are associated, their influence on policymakers, opinion leaders, and even the general public can be considerable – even though the sales of such books are, by industry standards, typically meager.

Whereas commercial publishers focus on producing books that will have broad popular appeal and generate profits, university presses deal mainly, though not exclusively, in scholarly works (monographs) that are geared toward a small audience of specialists in certain concentrated fields of research. A large percentage of these books are sold in hardcover editions to libraries. The American Association of University Presses (AAUP), under whose umbrella these academic publishing houses are counted, currently includes 125 members, of which 95 are affiliated with public and private research universities in 40 separate U.S. States and Canada. The remaining 30 are situated variously in Belgium, China, Egypt, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, and the Netherlands.

In 2005, the most recent year for which a complete set of statistics is available, AAUP members collectively published 10,159 new book titles, an average of 81 titles per publisher. That same year, AAUP members reported $267 million in total book sales, an average of $2.1 million per publisher and $26,370 per title. At an average per-copy sale price of $41, the typical university-press title sells approximately 643 copies. All told, book and journal sales account for about 85 percent of AAUP member revenues. Another 10 percent comes from the publishers’ respective parent institutions (which, in the case of public universities, means taxpayers), and the remaining 5 percent derives from government and foundation grants.

A survey of the books that university presses across the U.S. are currently featuring in their catalogs and on their websites, reveals a host of titles promoting doctrinaire leftism in a variety of disciplines:

Environmentalism

A particularly hot topic for university presses nowadays is global warming. In Worst Case Scenarios, published by Harvard University Press, author Cass Sunstein – President Obama‘s regulatory “czar” –  discusses how Americans ought to prepare for the looming disaster called “climate change.” Another newly released Harvard production is an update of Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, “revised throughout to reflect the latest science and with a new conclusion that shows how the scientific consensus caught fire among the general world public.” That description, in light of the devastating “Climategate” revelations about the global-warming crowd’s deliberate falsification and concealment of inconvenient evidence, is nothing short of delusional.

Approaching environmentalism from a different angle is Images of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a University of Alaska Press book that presents an “emotionally evocative and beautifully fierce” collection of “lyrical essays and stunning panoramic photographs” paying “homage to a vast and remote land that remains untamed by technology and undisturbed by human development.” The book’s purpose is to argue against U.S. oil drilling in Alaska’s ANWR region by tugging on readers’ heartstrings rather than by engaging their brains.

Baylor University Press, meanwhile, has blended environmentalism with religion in The Bible and Ecology:
Rediscovering the Community of Creation. Here, author Richard Bauckham takes issue with the biblical “mandate of human dominion given in Genesis 1,” which, he writes, “has too often been used as a justification for domination and exploitation of the earth’s resources.” Taking up a similar theme is Baylor Press’s Greening Paul:
Rereading the Apostle in a Time of Ecological Crisis. This book aims “to read the Pauline literature from an ecological perspective,” challenging the Bible’s “anthropocentric worldview that gives humanity license to exploit the earth for our benefit.”

Islam

While university presses may be distressed by the dangers of climate change, they are apparently unconcerned about any threat from radical Islam. Indeed, the University of Chicago Press has published The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, wherein author Tzvetan Todorov “argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect.”

Meanwhile, the Canada-based University of Alberta Press has published The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, billing it as “the perfect starting point for students and academics looking to understand ‘Political Islam’ in contemporary Arab and Muslim societies.” The book’s editor, Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, is an anti-Semitic demagogue who says that “the Nazi Holocaust has been “exploited fully” by “the Israeli Zionist state since 1948”; that Jews seek to frighten the Palestinians with the implied threat of a “mini holocaust” which may be carried out against the latter; that “militarism” has “defined the nature of the Israli state from 1948 until the present time”; and that “Israel has exploited Judaism in a very negative and violent way” in order to advance its own “project of hegemony and project of dispossession of the Palestinian people.” Abu-Rabi’s book features the work of such luminaries as: (a) Abdullah Azzam, the late Muslim scholar who was an influential figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a leader of Hamas, and a mentor to both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; (b) Sayyid Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, a Shiite spiritual leader of Hezbollah; and (c) Ahmad Bin Yousuf, a political advisor to Akram Haniyya, who served as an advisor to the late terrorist Yasser Arafat.

Immigration

Regarding issues on the home front, immigration occupies the thoughts of many in the scholarly community. The University of Arizona Press, for example, has recently published several books on the topic. One of these, Dead in Their Tracks, focuses on what it terms “America’s killing field” – that portion of the Arizona desert where many Mexicans, in the process of trying to sneak across the U.S. border in pursuit of “a better life,” have died of heat and sun exposure, making the region “the deadliest immigrant trail in America today.” Crossing with the Virgin elaborates on this theme, urging readers to “see past political positions to view migrants as human beings,” and lamenting that “over the past ten years, more than 4,000 people have died while crossing the Arizona desert to find jobs, join families, or start new lives.” Similarly, Between The Lines – a “collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in California and their families back home” – seeks to put “a human face” on illegal immigration, a topic which too often “has been presented as a monolithic abstraction” rooted in “political rhetoric and fear.”

Capitalism

In contrast to the presumably benign trend of illegal immigration, capitalism, according to the scholar-authors of America’s university presses, poses a grave threat not only to our nation but to the planet at large. From Predators to Icons, a new release by Cornell University Press, contends that ruthless “predation” traditionally has been the key to economic success in United Stated States. Another Cornell title – an updated edition of Jennifer Clapp’s Toxic Exports – asserts that as a result of “investment relations in the context of a highly unequal world,” business firms in “rich industrialized countries” routinely ship “toxic waste and hazardous technologies” to “poor countries” that are “ill equipped to manage the materials safely.” In a glowing review of the book, UC Santa Cruz professor  Ronnie Lipschutz lauds Clapp for having exposed the ugly truth about the “hazardous wastes generated by contemporary industrialism and capitalism.”

The old maxim about a picture being “worth a thousand words” would serve as a fitting epilogue for the work of Paul Conrad, who spent 43 years as an editorial cartoonist famous for his withering attacks on political figures – especially conservatives. Indeed Conrad, who died September 4^th at the age of 86, actually believed that the best cartoons were those that let the pictures do all the talking and contained no words at all – only images to depict what Conrad called the “political, social and moral injustices” of our time.

Conrad came of age as a cartoonist after the Second World War. His first professional job was with the Denver Post, where he spent 14 years until the Los Angeles Times eventually hired him in 1964. The Times, where Conrad would stay until his retirement 29 years later, gave the cartoonist an extraordinarily high-profile platform from which to disseminate his leftist view of the world. Vowing that he would never stoop so low as to vote for any Republican political candidate, Conrad was outspoken and forthright about his leftism. “Don’t ever accuse me of being objective,” he often said.

When it came to commenting on American culture, Conrad, as leftists are wont to do, focused almost exclusively on the negative. During his first several years at the Times, he directed much of his attention on the civil rights movement’s effort to disinfect what he viewed as a society that was morally contaminated to its core. In a cartoon that appeared shortly after the 1965 Watts riots in California, for instance, Conrad drew a group of white men gathered around a black man who was seated on a therapist’s couch, saying to him: “You’ve mentioned unemployment, housing, education, police brutality and despair … but, what was the reason for the riot?”

While his cartoons commonly touched upon broad themes such as civil rights, Conrad gained his greatest renown for the way he skewered particular key individuals. Indeed, his indignant passions reached their apogee when he made Richard Nixon the object of his wrath. So searing were Conrad’s depictions of the 37^th president, that they earned the cartoonist a spot on Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” in 1973 – a distinction Conrad welcomed as a sure sign of his own effectiveness. In one particularly famous cartoon, Conrad portrayed an agitated Nixon sitting, with pen in hand, at a large desk covered by long, serpentine scrolls of names – titled “Enemies List.” The caption of the cartoon read, “His Own Worst Enemy.” As James Rainey of the L.A. Times recently observed, Conrad’s renderings of Nixon invariably showed the president with “brow furrowed, eyes ringed with dark shadows, head slumped into rounded shoulders – helping to cement the image of a desperate, paranoid chief executive.”

After Nixon’s precipitous fall from grace in the Watergate affair, Conrad’s attacks on him became still more relentless. The day after the illegal break-in at the DNC headquarters in Washington, the cartoonist drew Nixon disguised as a telephone-company worker boring a hole in the DNC’s office wall. In another famous cartoon of the period, Conrad, emphasizing that Nixon’s troubles were mostly self-inflicted, depicted the president nailing himself to a cross. As a variation on that theme, Conrad drew a hangman’s noose fashioned from long strips of unraveled audiotape from Nixon’s secret Oval Office recordings. On yet another occasion, Conrad drew Nixon as a modern-day Gulliver, bound and rendered helpless by multiple reels of those same tapes. Many times, Conrad emphasized Nixon’s allegedly imperial mindset as one who believed himself to be above the law, and thus likened the beleaguered president to such historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, Richard III, and Julius Caesar. So deep was Conrad’s contempt for Nixon, that there seemed to be no bounds to what he would imply about the president. Indeed, at least a year and a half before the Watergate scandal would erupt, Conrad drew the satanic murderer Charles Manson wearing a wicked grin on his face and a “Nixon’s the One” campaign button on his shirt. (Notably, L.A. Times editor Tony Day determined that this particular cartoon was, even by Conrad’s standards, beyond the pale, and thus prevented it from being published.)

Striking a powerful blow in defense of Martin Luther King’s memory, Reverend Al Sharpton accused Glenn Beck – who held his “Restoring Honor” event in DC last Saturday, on the 47th anniversary of King’s immortal “I Have a Dream” speech – of engaging in “a blatant attempt to hijack” the civil rights movement “that changed America.” As one of the leading stewards of that movement over the past quarter-century, Sharpton is of course eminently qualified to determine who should – and who should not – be permitted to enter the fraternity of those who nobly defend the cause of civil rights.

Indeed, who could forget the unrivaled dignity with which Sharpton himself first took up the mantle of Dr. King’s legacy and became a renowned civil-rights gladiator in his own right? The year was 1987. Sharpton, demonstrating his unwavering commitment to stamping out racism, promoted — for the ultimate good of society, no doubt — the fiction that a black teenager named Tawana Brawley had been repeatedly raped and sodomized by six white kidnappers in upstate New York. A Sharpton aide named Perry McKinnon later revealed that Sharpton had privately acknowledged “early on” that he knew the Brawley allegations were obviously “bull—t,” but that he had chosen to pursue the matter anyway because he was “building a movement” around this “perfect issue” of “whites on blacks” – a key component of which would be to convince “all the deprived people … that all white people are bad.” Moreover, said McKinnon, Sharpton had predicted that the publicity surrounding the case would make him and his fellow defenders of Brawley “the biggest ni–ers in New York.” Was it at that point, pray tell, that the torch of civil rights leadership which Dr. King had once held, was officially passed into Reverend Sharpton’s capable hands?

If not, then perhaps it was in 1991 — when Sharpton really showed his mettle as a civil rights champion in the aftermath of a Brooklyn, New York car accident in which a Hasidic Jew accidentally killed a seven-year-old black child. At the boy’s funeral, Sharpton declared that this death was due not merely to a car accident, but rather to “the social accident of apartheid.” Thereafter he organized a series of massive demonstrations to protest the racial undertones of the killing. He even challenged local Jews—“diamond merchants,” he affectionately called them—to “pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” to settle the score if they disagreed with his portrayal of the incident. Stirred in part by Sharpton’s soaring, inspirational oratory, hundreds of Crown Heights freedom-fighters took to the streets, pelting Jewish homes with rocks, setting vehicles on fire, and shouting “Jew! Jew!” As the riots continued for three days and nights, Sharpton, with his characteristic level-headedness, put everything in perspective: “We must not reprimand our children for outrage, when it is the outrage that was put in them by an oppressive system.”

In 1995, the great civil rights champion led his National Action Network in a noble boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem, New York. The boycott started when Freddy’s owners had the temerity to announce that because they wanted to expand their own business, they would no longer sublet part of their store to a black-owned record shop. The street leader of the boycott, Morris Powell, was the head of Sharpton’s “Buy Black” Committee. He repeatedly referred to the Jewish proprietors of Freddy’s as “crackers” and “greedy Jew bastards.” All of this occurred under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who vowed not to allow “some white interloper” to “expand his business” in Harlem, and who exhorted blacks to join “the struggle brother Powell and I are engaged in.” The subsequent picketing became increasingly violent in tone, until one of the protesters eventually shot four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire—killing seven employees. 
But as everyone knows, of course, any great crusade is bound to be marred by a few unintended casualties.

That same year, Sharpton again demonstrated that the reins of the civil rights movement were in the firm grasp of the most expert hands when he eloquently informed an audience at New Jersey’s Kean College: “White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires … We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was … we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” One can only speculate as to how many of those in attendance may have wondered whether Sharpton had excerpted those electrifying passages from Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. In response to a few squeamish critics who later suggested that Sharpton’s reference to homosexuals may have bordered on the insensitive, the good Reverend condescended to inform the nervous ninnies that, lo and behold, the word “homos” was “not a homophobic term.”

Sharpton’s Kean College speech also featured his uplifting assertion that America’s founders consisted of “the worst criminals, the rejects they sent from Europe … to the colonies.” “So [if] some cracker,” Sharpton continued with his characteristic elocution, “come and tell you, ‘Well my mother and father blood go back to the Mayflower,’ you better hold you pocket. That ain’t nothing to be proud of, that means their forefathers was crooks.” As for those few jittery souls who recoiled at Sharpton’s use of the term “cracker,” the good Reverend was more than prepared to educate them: “Cracker,” Sharpton said instructively, was merely a “colloquial term used to describe a certain kind of bigot, who hates both blacks and Jews. It’s certainly not a racist term and certainly not an anti-Semitic term, because a cracker hates Jews and blacks.” Because such etymological subtleties generally escape the understanding of the average American imbecile, we evidently ought to be grateful that the civil rights movement is currently guided by an intellectual and moral giant like the Reverend Sharpton. How tragic it would be if a Johnny-come-lately like Glenn Beck – or any other “white interloper,” to borrow a term from the holy man’s lexicon – should be so brazen as to try to steer the movement off its current path of interminable racial grievance.

Beck devoted his DC gathering Saturday to the themes of Honor, Character, Faith, Hope, and Charity. How utterly presumptuous of him, or anyone else, to think that they could teach anything about those lofty traits to a civil rights leader as great as Al Sharpton. Lead on, gracious Reverend. Lead on.

Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division (CRD) in the Department of Justice (DOJ), is the quintessential Obama appointee – capable of feeling the proverbial pea of discrimination under a thousand mattresses. A self-styled redeemer, Perez aims to save the weak and the exploited from the ravages of America’s purportedly intractable bigotry. His passion for this mission recently prompted him to tell an American Constitution Society (ACS) gathering, to enthusiastic applause: “I love this job.” Elaborating on that theme, Perez cited the deep satisfaction he had derived from successfully prosecuting a pair of white racists who had attacked a black man in a South Carolina restaurant. Why, in a nation where black-on-white crimes far outnumber their white-on-black counterparts, did Perez elect to focus on an instance of the latter? Just remember that Perez views the U.S. as a veritable snake pit teeming with racist white vipers, and the question answers itself.

Perez comes to the Obama administration with a wealth of experience as a protector of white racism’s many alleged victims. Indeed, he served as a prosecutor with the Civil Rights Division of Bill Clinton‘s DOJ in the early 1990s, and as that same Division’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 1998 to 1999. Also in the Nineties, Perez volunteered for – and later became a board member of – Casa de Maryland – a George Soros-funded advocacy group for illegal aliens. As Michelle Malkin has pointed out, this organization opposes the enforcement of deportation orders for illegals; has condemned the post-9/11 coordination of local, state, and national criminal databases; has published a “know your rights” pamphlet for illegal aliens; supports the granting of driver’s licenses to illegals; favors in-state tuition discounts for illegal-alien students; and laments “the history of domination” that has always afflicted nonwhites in the United States. According to Perez, Americans who call for the strict enforcement of immigration laws are … you guessed it: racists and “xenophobes.”

As a devoted advocate for illegal aliens and the dissolution of America’s borders, Perez found a natural ally in the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a man who never met an immigration scheme he didn’t love – provided, of course, that it was structured to import a massive, permanent Democratic voting bloc and economic underclass into the U.S.  Thus, from 1995 to 1998, Perez served as Special Counsel to Kennedy, advising him on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues.

In 1996, Perez was instrumental in facilitating the passage of the Church Arson Prevention Act, a bill founded on the premise that southern black churches were being targeted with disproportionate frequency by (presumably white) arsonists. That premise, it turned out, was 100-percent false. But crusaders like Perez are impressively immune to facts that, were they to be acknowledged, would inconveniently interrupt the self-satisfied, public exhibitions of moral preening that are their stock-in-trade.

Illegal Mexican immigrants and southern black church congregations are only two of the many victim groups to which Perez solemnly pledged his advocacy when he joined the Obama administration. As Byron York reports, Perez has articulated his view that the Civil Rights Division’s role is to help people who are “living in the shadows” – a reference not only to illegal aliens, but also to “our Muslim-American brothers and sisters subject to post-9/11 backlash”; “communities of color disproportionately affected by the subprime meltdown”; “LGBT brothers and sisters … forced to confront discrimination”; and “all too many children lacking quality education.” Such is life, as Perez sees it, in the Good-Ol’ jingoistic, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, child-hating U.S. of A.

From the moment he first joined the Obama team, Perez pledged to greatly expand the DOJ’s prosecution of alleged hate crimes. Perez also made it clear, as Byron York again informs us, that he would view “disparate impact” as prima facie evidence of discrimination. In other words, if a company makes its hiring or promotion decisions based on the results of employee-aptitude tests on which whites as a group score higher than blacks, or if a particular bank rejects black loan applicants at a higher rate than white applicants, those racial disparities are proof of injustice – period, end of story.

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, previously famous for leaking a video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed several people (with a scene showing one of them carrying a rocket-propelled grenade edited out), is making headlines again — this time for his data dump of classified material about the war in Afghanistan. His supporters like to think of him as “an Internet freedom fighter.” Assange himself has collaborated with this image by making pious assertions about the value of “transparency” — of the sort WikiLeaks has produced — for reducing international corruption and creating better government. But Assange’s own profile, far from that of a conscientious moral critic bent on revealing unethical behavior, shows the evolution of an information vandal sublimely indifferent to those who might be put at risk by his behavior.

Born in Australia in 1971, Assange grew up in an unanchored family which had moved 37 times by the time he was 14. His cheap teenage thrills involved invading the secure worlds that others created. By 1987, Assange had established a reputation as a sophisticated computer programmer who could break into even the most well-protected networks. But he indicated his real intentions by joining with two fellow hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives. They broke into computer systems from Europe to North America, including, most notably, networks belonging to the U.S. Defense Department and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book to which he contributed – Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier – Assange tried to create an aura of morality around this activity, defining what he called the Golden Rules of the hacker subculture: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Hacking remained an obsession for Assange throughout his late teens; the excitement he derived from it was only amplified by his knowledge that federal authorities were doggedly trying to catch him and his fellow “Subversives.” This self-dramatization continues today, as Assange constantly moves from place to place, maintaining no real home, because he fears that international governmental agencies, particularly those in the U.S., may have targeted him for reprisal for the leaks he has orchestrated.

In September 1991, Assange hacked into the master terminal that the Canadian telecom company Nortel maintained in Melbourne. Soon thereafter, he was caught by federal investigators and was charged with 31 counts of hacking and related offenses. Facing a potential sentence of a decade behind bars, Assange pled guilty to 25 charges and 6 were dropped. At his final sentencing, the judge went easy on him: “There is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what’s the expression—surf through these various computers.” Thus Assange escaped with the lightest of penalties — the payment of a small fine.

After the hacking trial, Assange lived below the radar in Melbourne for a number of years, working variously as a computer programmer and software developer, among other pursuits. He also studied physics and math at the University of Melbourne. Then, in 2006, he began the process of creating WikiLeaks, a website that would publish confidential government documents and images. His inspiration for this brainstorm was the infamous Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 — the year of Assange’s birth — had published the Pentagon Papers.

Shortly after getting WikiLeaks off the ground, Assange flew to Kenya to attend the World Social Forum — a yearly symposium dedicated to the redistribution of wealth and the eradication of capitalism — where he delivered a presentation about his new website.

Every now and then, a smug, gloating know-it-all unexpectedly comes face-to-face with painful reality, causing his or her seemingly permanent smirk to be wiped away in a mere instant. For the self-proclaimed “radical human rights attorney” Lynne Stewart, such a day came last Thursday, when she learned, to her astonishment, that the length of the prison sentence she already has been serving will be more than quadrupled.

The roots of Stewart’s imprisonment date back at least to the year 2000, when she illegally smuggled messages from her incarcerated client, the Muslim terrorist sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, to his violent devotees in his native Egypt. In 2005, the now-disbarred Stewart was convicted of those transgressions. Given the serious nature of her crimes, prosecutors at the time asked the court to impose a 30-year prison sentence. But instead, judge John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced her to a mere 28 months. Koetl explained that while Stewart’s actions did indeed constitute “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct” – as well as “dishonesty and breach of trust” with “potentially lethal consequences” – during her long legal career she had “performed a public service, not only to her clients, but to the nation.”

Because her prison term was so short, a gloating Stewart instantly depicted herself as the victor in the case. Soon after her sentence had been handed down, she told a crowd of supporters: “He [the judge] gave me time off for good behavior, and he gave it to me in advance of the sentence … he said that my extraordinary work meant that I could not get a sentence that the government wanted.” Stewart then told the press not only that she could serve such a brief period “standing on my head,” but also that, if ever the opportunity were to present itself, she would once again do the very things for which she had just been convicted. After numerous delays, the 70-year-old Stewart finally began serving her 28 months in November 2009. Then, last Thursday, Judge Koeltl increased that sentence to ten years.

Stewart herself sowed the seeds of this bitter harvest by gloating without restraint after the original sentence had been handed down. Soon thereafter, prosecutors filed an appeal of the sentence, arguing that a more appropriate prison term would be in the range of 15 to 30 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit – after considering how egregiously Stewart had abused her position as an attorney in her dealings with Rahman, and how Stewart had subsequently committed perjury when testifying at her trial – overturned the original sentence and sent the case back to Judge Koetl, asking him to consider lengthening Stewart’s jail time. Koetl concluded that Stewart’s self-congratulatory statements and jovial demeanor in the aftermath of her first sentencing indicated “a lack of remorse” on her part, and suggested that “the original sentence was not sufficient.” Thus he imposed the ten-year sentence.

To provide context, a quick review of the precise nature of Stewart’s crimes, and the crimes of her client, are in order. The client, Omar Abdel Rahman, is the longtime “spiritual leader” of the Egypt-based Islamic Group, which was was originally an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and is closely linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. From its inception, the Islamic Group’s objective was to overthrow Egypt’s existing government and replace it with a fundamentalist Islamic regime. Eschewing diplomatic compromise entirely, the Islamic Group viewed violent jihad as the only acceptable means of advancing its power. In addition, the organization advocated the spread of violence and mayhem to “infidel” countries like the United States and its allies, and openly called for the destruction of Israel. In 1981 Rahman issued a religious edict condemning Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to death for the role he had played in negotiating peace with Israel; soon thereafter, Muslim fundamentalists assassinated Sadat.

In October 1995 a federal court in New York – in a case where Lynne Stewart served as the head of a legal defense team that also included Ramsey Clark and Abdeen Jabara – convicted Rahman and nine co-defendants of seditious conspiracy for planning to wage a “war of urban terrorism” against the United States. This war, which Rahman never managed to launch successfully, was slated to feature the near-simultaneous bombings of the United Nations Building, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the main Federal office building in Manhattan. According to prosecutors, the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people, was also part of Rahman’s overall conspiracy, though the latter was never accused of helping to carry out that particular attack. In addition, Rahman was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1993. In January 1996, three months after his convictions, Rahman was sentenced to life in prison. Fifteen months later, the U.S. government, in an effort to terminate Rahman’s connections to active terrorists, blocked him from communicating with anyone in the outside world.

During her Senate hearings this week, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan confirmed, beyond any doubt, that she is indeed the leftist which most objective observers have always known her to be. In one of her more remarkable assertions of the week, Kagan denied that the late Thurgood Marshall, whom she identifies as one of her heroes, could properly be described as an “activist” judge. Yet this was the same Thurgood Marshall who advised judges to “do what’s right and let the law catch up”; who said that the U.S. Constitution, “as originally drafted and conceived,” was “defective” and thus in need of fundamental change; and who, in a defense of affirmative-action policies, once told William O. Douglas, “You [white] guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it’s our [blacks'] turn.” For whatever merits Marshall may have had as a civil-rights crusader and a jurist, he was clearly an activist on the bench.

It is noteworthy that Kagan, on other occasions, has approvingly cited Justice Marshall’s assertion that the Supreme Court must “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.” That perspective is entirely consistent with President Obama’s view that a Justice, first and foremost, should have “the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old.” Such a mindset dovetails seamlessly with judicial activism, where courts – unfazed by the letter of the law – dole out preferential treatment to the “have-nots” and impose retributive justice on the “haves.” It was precisely this type of activism that Obama countenanced when he called the Constitution “not a static but rather a living document [that] must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.”

During her Senate hearings, Kagan candidly echoed Obama’s notion that the Constitution cannot be interpreted strictly by the “original intent” of its framers. “The constitutional law that we live under does develop over time,” Kagan said. “In [some] cases, the original intent is unlikely to solve the question, and that might be … because we live in a world that’s very different from the world in which the framers lived.” Rejecting the strict-constructionist philosophy of such sitting justices as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Kagan also criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ contention that a Supreme Court Justice’s job is “to call balls and strikes” like an umpire, rather than to try to dictate the course and outcome of the proverbial game.

In a 6 to 3 decision last week, the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for Americans to provide “material support” of any kind – be it in the form of cash, weaponry, training, personnel, services, or “expert advice or assistance” – to a foreign terrorist organization, even if that support is for ostensibly peaceful purposes. At issue in the case, known as Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, was the question of whether this restriction violates Americans’ First Amendment rights of free speech and association. Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that “even seemingly benign support” for such an entity “bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization”; “frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends”; “helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups”; and strains “the United States’ relationships with its allies.” As to the specific issue of free speech, Roberts pointed out that people “may say anything they wish on any topic”; that they “may speak and write freely about” any organization of their choice; and that they are even free to become members of whatever group they wish to join. Roberts was backed in his decision by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and the soon-to-be-retiring John Paul Stevens. Dissenting from the majority decision were Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Sotomayor, who saw the “material support” restriction as a violation of the First Amendment.

A lead plaintiff in the case was the longtime civil-rights attorney Ralph Fertig, whose professed desire is to help the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) find peaceful ways of advancing its goal: the creation of an independent Kurdish state in southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, and parts of Iran and Syria. Because PKK’s history is replete with bombings, kidnappings, and a violent insurgency responsible for some 22,000 deaths, the U.S. government has designated it as a terrorist organization. Notwithstanding this bloody track record, Fertig and his fellow plaintiffs maintained that with a proper blend of persuasion and education, PKK could be convinced to renounce its violent tactics and to work, instead, within the framework of “various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief.” By Fertig’s reckoning, the ban against giving aid to PKK and other terrorist groups is “more dangerous than McCarthyism” ever was. After the Court announced its decision last week, a dejected Fertig said: “This is a very dark day in the history of the human rights struggle to assist groups overseas that are being oppressed.”

A look at Fertig’s background and affiliations will help place his disappointment in proper perspective. First and foremost, Fertig is president of the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), an organization created by Los Angeles real estate magnate Aris Anagnos, who since the early 1970s has bankrolled Marxist causes around the globe — including the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the Marxist rebels in Chiapas, and the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Over the years, HLP has consistently sided with America’s Marxist adversaries in international disputes; has accused the U.S. of committing “atrocities” in both Iraq wars; has called for the United States to be prosecuted for its alleged war crimes by the World Court; and has identified American disarmament as a chief prerequisite for peace around the world.

Fertig also serves as a supporting member of the Campaign Against Criminalizing Communities (CACC), which complains that the war on terror was concocted by warmongering conservatives to “promot[e] a racist culture of suspicion towards migrant and Muslim communities”; to “generat[e] and manipulat[e] public fears [that will] justify a perpetual state of war”; to plac[e] entire communities under suspicion of associating with such ‘terrorism’”; to “us[e] ‘intelligence’ obtained by torturing detainees abroad”; and to “wag[e] psychological warfare through disinformation and mass-media scares about ‘al Qaeda cells.’” (All scare quotes were in CACC’s original literature.)

Fertig also endorsed World Can’t Wait (WCW), a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party – a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist group calling for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a Communist dictatorship. WCW sought to “halt” the Bush administration’s alleged pursuit of “endless wars,” its routine use of “torture,” its indifference to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and its quest to transform the United States into a Christian “theocracy.”