“I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

–Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1927

For the past 6 years, Chris Matthews has hosted a show in which guests gleefully reported the purported success of both indigenous insurgents and foreign al Qaeda fighters in Iraq.  On his network, MSNBC, that became the default setting.  They were the publicity arm of al Qaeda.  Car bombs led the news, successful American battles, infrastructure completion, or the like were not even news.  Bagdad Bob had nothing on them.

Chris would evoke the worst kind of moral equivalence by constantly posing some form of this the question, “Wouldn’t you be mad if someone invaded America and imposed a different form of government they thought was better?  Wouldn’t you fight back?”

Anyone who thought this was unpatriotic was the worst kind of scoundrel, an unquestioning lackey of the Bush Administration who was trying to quash dissent, the highest form of patriotism.

Losing a war was chump change compared to defeating evil Republicans.

Now, finally, Chris Matthews has spotted REAL anti-Americanism—people who were happy that President Obama was humiliated in his vanity-laden attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago.

Oh, the horror.

Matthews’s Monday show intro was unintentionally revealing, though not part of the video on the MSNBC website:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Anti-American?  Let’s play HARDBALL.  Good evening. I’m Chris Matthews in Washington. Leading off tonight:

The right roots against America. Remember how Republicans questioned Democrats’ patriotism during the Bush years, how you were either with Bush or with the terrorists? So what do we make the of the glee some prominent Republicans felt when Chicago and President Obama lost its Olympics bid? It’s one thing to argue politics and policy, what’s good and what’s bad for America. That’s what we do right here on HARDBALL. It’s another thing to root for America to fail.

Yeah, whether America wins a war or keeps thousands of innocent Americans are massacred on a normal work day—or Chicago gets the Olympics.  Same thing.  We won’t mention that more than HALF OF CHICAGO didn’t want the Olympics.

But the comparison tells us more about Chris Matthews than he meant to reveal, or wants to admit about his side of the political divide. Is he finally admitting that liberals rooted against America winning the war in Iraq so they could use it against George Bush?

Guest Terry Jeffrey did a great job of trying to bring a perspective of reality to Chris’s newfound feverish patriotism—which is really Obamism:

JEFFREY: I don’t think the city of Chicago getting the Olympics is synonymous with a vital national interest of the United States. I mean, you could be from Chicago and not want the Olympics to come to Chicago.

Exactly right.  Later, Jeffery got to the main point of who roots for America, which caused Matthews to lose it and throw out a mangled version of Churchill’s great quote.

MATTHEWS: You don’t think-just to get back to our point here, you don’t sense that on the right-well, maybe I’m asking the wrong person to agree with this-that there is a goal here that anything where there’s a contest, a chance to prove its success, whether it’s ideological, whether it’s pro-American or political or partisan, any chance for Barack Obama to fail, your side is going to root for him to fail, whatever it is. He must fail at any moment. Whether it’s health care, whether it’s the Olympics, whatever it is, you will cheer if he fails. Are you denying that now?

JEFFREY: Not any place, most places. There’s one place, clearly, where conservatives ought not want him to fail, and that…

MATTHEWS: No, but don’t be selective. Isn’t it true…

JEFFREY: No, it’s not true.

MATTHEWS: … that the evidence of this past week is, wherever he attempts to do something, you guys want him to stumble.

JEFFREY: No, actually, that’s true because…

MATTHEWS: Give me an example where you’re rooting for him.

JEFFREY: Well, let me give you an example. I’m very much rooting that what President Obama chooses to do, which he hasn’t yet chosen to do, in Afghanistan works because all Americans share an interest in our country succeeding in Afghanistan. It’s important for our national security that it happens. I hope his policy in Iraq succeeds. I hope what he does with the Gitmo prisoners, Chris, succeeds. I think conservatives are very much worried that he will not succeed because they think his policies in those areas may be wrong-headed.

On the domestic front, I think conservatives are opposed to just about everything President Obama is trying to do because he’s trying to augment the power of government over our lives and diminish our individual freedom. So to the degree that his ability to leverage the Democrats in Congress to attain his agenda is diminished, that’s a good thing for the United States of America….

MATTHEWS: … most of this began last fall under George Bush. The bringing in of Hank Paulson from Goldman Sachs, the whole works, the whole downfall of Wall Street, the attempt to bail out Wall Street, the banking industry, the failure of General Motors and those industries began long before Barack Obama came into office. He came in to clean up the mess, and I refuse not to take sides between the fire brigade and the fire. He’s the fire brigade. Your side was the fire.

During his softball interview with Alan “Republicans want you to die in the health care holocaust” Grayson, Matthews ludicrously exclaimed “I don’t always take sides, but you are right!”  Now we get it, Republicans are the fire, Barack Obama is the fire brigade.

However, when it comes to the American military versus America’s real enemies, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran—or in the case of civilization versus barbarians in, say Gaza, Chris Matthews has a lot harder time discerning who is the fire brigade.

To use Chris’s mangled analogy, he and his colleagues spent 5 years reporting on deaths and injuries to the fire brigade, but never mentioned any of the fires they put out.  But don’t you DARE call that anti-American.

Democratic Socialist Jan Schakowsky never heard Obama utter anti-American rhetoric. Honest.

As the Olympics head to Rio, unemployment edges toward ten percent, and Tehran barrels toward a nuclear weapon, the Left continues its “Question the Patriotism of Conservatives” tour ‘09. In one of the more unlikely scenarios of recent television history, MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” compared President Obama’s perpetual criticism of his country favorably against Rush Limbaugh. The episode was outstanding for its audacity and the light it shed on where the Left really pledges its allegiance.

Shortly after slamming conservatives’ “lack of patriotism” and insisting opposition to Obama’s myopic focus on the Chicago Olympics “rivals Jane Fonda sitting on a gun in North Vietnam,” Ed Schultz decided to talk patrotism with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-IL, who enjoys a cozy relationship with the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America…

Schultz played a clip of Rush ascribing part of the Olympic Committee’s rejection of Chicago’s bid to the fact that the president has “been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks.” Schakowsky replied, “How dare Rush Limbaugh – how dare he say that this president goes around talking about how bad our country is? [Obama] has finally been able to establish us as real participants in the world community.”

Blithely unaware what she said is itself an anti-American slur (America was not a “participant” in the world community B.B.O. – Before Barack Obama? America is only good if it is held in check by UN regulations?), she not only ignored the president’s harsh rhetoric; she confirmed it.

Only the most tin-eared leftist could fail to have heard the president bash the character of our nation. After all, in his UN address alone, Barack Obama nodded to the international community’s “belief that on certain critical issues, America has acted unilaterally”; he said “America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy”;  he claimed he prohibited “the use of torture by the United States of America,” tacitly asserting the United States was a monstrous human rights violator before his advent; and he declared the dark “days when America dragged its feet on [climate change] are over” – a less caustic version of his remark at the Climate Change Summit that, under a certain unnamed predecessor, America suffered “too many years of inaction and denial.”

Such stridency seems to be his typical attitude toward the country he has deigned to rule — so much so that while campaigning for the presidency, he could not restrain himself. “There’s no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we’ve got some very sad and difficult things to account for,” he said. “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged.”

Nor should we discount the fact that another member of the failed American Olympic delegation, Michelle Obama, called this country “just downright mean.” Indeed, the focus on America’s moral failures (mostly imagined) is a constant refrain of the Left.

Schakowsky and Obama do not hear their criticism of the United States as negative, because they have a higher allegiance than this country, or any country; they pay their devotion is to the leftist Utopian ideal. Criticizing the “reactionary” elements of the United States — e.g., bitter people who cling to their guns and religion — is an act of deepest loyalty to collectivism and “humanity.” Modern leftists’s fidelity can be encapsulated by a poem that appeared in a 1916 issue of Solidarity, a publication of the Industrial Workers of the World:

“My Country”
by O.E.D.

I have a country
I love my country
I love it with a love that is lasting
And that must be returned.
If love of one’s country
Makes a patriot
Then I am a good patriot.

My country is boundless
It has no limit
No king, no potentate-
Only a race of human beings.

There need be no hunger, nor cold,
No want in my country.
There is room for all the
Children of the world there;
And they can dwell in peace,
And plenty, and happiness,
And joy forever
In my country.

I do not dwell in my country,
But I can live in the hopes it holds
For the future,
When many shall sojourn therein.

I can be a patriotic subject
Of my country
Without robbing or slaying
One of my brothers.
I need not wrest from others
Land, or riches of any sort,
That I may pour them into the coffers
Of a group, or of an individual.

I can be a true patriot
And love all the people of the earth
As I love my own family.
My country demands of her patriots
That they be charitable to all mankind.

I can work and fight
For my country,
And die, if need be,
But I cannot dwell there alone.
Humanity is the population
Of my country.

Industrial Democracy
Is my country.

Unfortunately, to build that country, they must destroy this one.

At the end of the evening, Prof. Cloud stepped up to the microphone to ask a question, which was actually a little speech. Even though the protocol for such occasions restricts audience participants from making their own speeches, I did her the courtesy she tried to deny me by letting her talk.

She presented herself as a devoted teacher and mother who was obviously harmless. Then she accused me of being a McCarthyite menace. Disregarding the facts I had laid out in my talk — that I have publicly defended the right of University of Colorado’s radical professor Ward Churchill to hold reprehensible views and not be fired for them, and that I supported the leftist dean of the law school at UC Irvine when his appointment was withdrawn for political reasons — she accused me of whipping up a “witch-hunting hysteria” that made her and her faculty comrades feel threatened.

When Ms. Cloud finished, I pointed out that organizing mobs to scream epithets at invited speakers fit the category of “McCarthyite” a lot more snugly than my support for a pluralism of views in university classrooms. I gestured toward the armed officers in the room — the university had assigned six or seven to keep the peace — and introduced my own bodyguard, who regularly accompanies other conservative speakers when they visit universities. In the past, I felt uncomfortable about taking protection to a college campus until a series of physical attacks at universities persuaded me that such precautions were necessary. (When I spoke at the University of Texas two years ago, Ms. Cloud and her disciples had to be removed by the police in order for the talk to proceed.)

I don’t know of a single leftist speaker among the thousands who visit campuses every term who has been obstructed or attacked by conservative students, who are too decent and too tolerant to do that. The entire evening in Texas reminded me of the late Orianna Fallaci’s observation that what we are facing in the post-9/11 world is not a “clash of civilizations,” but a clash of civilization versus barbarism.

– Campus Leftists Don’t Believe in Free Speech

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Neo-Communist propaganda artist Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story officially bombed in its opening weekend. It made a scant $4,447,378. Why is this after the comparative successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko?

The answer is quite simple: the focus of his previous films was hardly so fringe. Fahrenheit 9/11 critiqued the Bush administration, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War. Sicko attacked America’s crappy health care system. (Note: One can still oppose Obamacare while acknowledging the health care status quo in our country sucks.) These were issues that could resonate with more than just the Leftist True Believers. Centrists and independents could often be engaged as well.

Not so much with this new work. In Capitalism: A Love Story Moore lets his red freak flag fly in an all out assault on the capitalist system. In an interview with fellow leftist comedian Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time” we see just how radical Moore really is. Even Maher (who we’ve critiqued continually here at NewsReal) isn’t buying his propaganda:

Maher: I still don’t understand what direction we are supposed to move in. I mean capitalism I agree with you has gone off the rails, it’s become cronyism, it’s become corporate welfare. But in my way of thinking, the opposite of capitalism is communism. Which was trying to make the river flow in the wrong direction. At least capitalism is using what’s in human nature, which is greed. I agree that river needs a lot of dams and locks on it, it needs a lot of regulation – wouldn’t that be better than scraping the system?

Moore: We’ve heard that now for about a year since the crash. All we need are to get those regulations. How many regulations have been passed? Zero… He [Obama] has a choice to make now. Is he going to side with the people or is he going to side with Wall Street? I’m counting on him siding with the people. I believe that’s what he’s going to do and that’s what we expect him to do.

There could not be a clearer illustration of why Moore is a Neo-Communist.

Let’s break this down nice and simply because the use of “Neo-Communist,” as confrontational as it might be, is not some slur. It’s an accurate, well-thought-out descriptor of Moore’s ideology.

One of the cornerstones of Marxist thought is the division of the world into two conflicting classes: the noble proletariat workers and the malevolent bourgeoisie owners. In the Marxist schema the bourgeoisie are perpetually exploiting the proletariat. The politically ideology then flows from this basic assumption that those with less money are being screwed by those with more money.

Does this sound familiar?

All Moore — and many other so-called “progressives” — have done is replace proletariat with “the people” and bourgeoisie with “Wall Street.” My “populist progressive” friend Pat (who recently started his own blog) does this too. It’s a kitsch Marxism that is blind to the reality perceived by the vast majority of Americans: the fates of Wall Street and Main Street are intimately linked. Those that live on Main Street work for corporations that are listed on Wall Street. One cannot succeed for long at the expense of the other. This distinction between the “haves” and the “have nots” as two separate, warring entities has been demonstrated to be a lie.

But that’s not all Moore is up to. And there’s more to understand about his fringe ideology. Come back tomorrow evening as I continue the dissection of this encounter. In the mean time, check out NewsReal’s previous refutations of Moore:

David Horowitz: “Creators and Destroyers”

Michael van der Galien: “Morning Joe Pimps Michael Moore’s New Propaganda”

Paul Cooper: NewsReal Sunday: Michael Moore uses Democracy and Finds Jesus – for socialism propaganda

Click here for a summary of NewsReal’s ongoing coverage of the radical politics of Marc Lamont Hill.

More information is pouring in about Fox News contributor Marc Lamont Hill, who has been in a public battle with David Horowitz of late. Horowitz has drawn attention to the far-left radicalism of numerous people whom Hill regards as political and ideological luminaries of a high order.

In an O’Reilly Factor appearance two years ago, for instance, Hill defended the America-hating professor Ward Churchill, who was fired from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007.  The issue that cost Churchill his job was an essay he had written just after 9/11, titled “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” In that piece, the professor asserted that the victims who had perished in the World Trade Center were akin to “little Eichmanns” who, as a consequence of their status as faceless cogs in America’s (allegedly destructive and exploitative) capitalist economy, had essentially brought the terrorist attacks upon themselves. The controversy that resulted from this essay led to an investigation that ultimately revealed Churchill to be a plagiarist unqualified to teach in his specialty.

Does Churchill’s argument make sense? Of course not. It’s crazy talk. Yet Hill went on television two years ago and defended this guy — and in fact agreed with Churchill’s assessment:

Hill: “He [Churchill] has the right to make [those comments], in fact he has the responsibility to make [those comments] as an academic if he believes them to be true … and if he can empirically substantiate them.  And I think he’s done that.”

Hill went far beyond merely saying that Churchill should not have been fired.  He actually supported the argument Churchill had made, calling it “a valid point” that “we have to defend.”  Hill believes, like Churchill, that bond sellers and stock traders are essentially “little Eichmanns.” Both men believe that those who died in the Twin Towers were targeted because they were, as Hill puts it, “advancing an American global financial empire without any thinking about it.”

Here’s another tidbit which Churchill wrote (and Hill defended) about the two planes that ripped into the World Trade Center and killed thousands of innocent Americans:

“If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”

Such a view is even more contemptible than that of a 9-11 Truther who thinks the government caused the Twin Towers to go down. Churchill contends that the people who died in those towers deserved it; that they had allowed themselves to devolve into “little Eichmanns” and thus brought the ultimate penalty on themselves.

A disturbing twist to this whole affair is the fact that Bill O’Reilly is wholly aware of just how radical are the ideas that Hill is defending, but doesn’t seem to care at all.

So powerful is the hold of the progressive faith, however, that Lerner too is finally unable to break its hold. This, despite the fact that it has been the basis for her lifelong commitment to a monstrous cause. “Like all true believers, I believed as I did because I needed to believe: in a utopian vision of the future, in the possibility of human perfectibility,…. And I still need that belief, even if the particular vision I had embraced has turned to ashes.” (Emphasis added.)

After a lifetime of lies, her political choices are the same: hostility to the capitalist democracies of the West and faith in a utopian future. This is the illusion that led to her commitment to Communism in the first place, undisturbed the earth-shattering events of seventy years. She clings to her faith even though she now knows (like Hobsbawm) that Communism was never the solution she believed and argued it was, and the Communist state no longer exists. Notwithstanding that the West and her anti-Communist enemies were right all along, Gerda Lerner is still a determined and passionate enemy of America and the West. In the conflict in Iraq it does not matter to her that Saddam Hussein did not even pretend to advance the cause of “social justice” as Stalin did. It just matters that its antagonist was the Great Satan itself.Lerner includes “idealism and heroism” in her catalogue of utopian ideas, but this is just typical radical bad faith. The idea of human perfectibility – of a society embracing the ideals of social justice –  is integrally connected to the Communist catastrophe. But in what way do a belief in the possibility of individual heroes and/or noble aspirations lead to Marxist gulags? They don’t. Nor are they concepts specific to Marxism and Communism.

– Unholy Alliance

This Horowitz quote of the day was submitted by Marylou who said:

——

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For weeks, the Left has lectured conservatives on the importance of decorum and civility, warning of mythical incitements that could lead to assassination. But this week a writer for the chief publication of the Left, Nation magazine, went on TV to tell Congressional leftists it was OK to equate opponents’ positions with the Holocaust and offered as normative the murder of Alexander Hamilton.

Ed Schultz, host of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” asked John Nichols of Nation and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek if Rep. Alan Grayson (whom he’d interviewed earlier) was “out of bounds” for likening opposition to socialized medicine with the Holocaust. Alter said this hate speech was appropriate on outlets like “The Ed Show” (in fact, it seems to be Ed’s only form of discourse) but Congressmen should “try to keep it civil on the floor. That’s the way the Founders wanted it, and that’s consistent with the traditions of the American republic.” He added Grayson need not apologize, since Republicans were vastly more guilty of hate speech than Grayson (without offering any examples).

John Nichols said Democrats “need a lot more of this” kind of rhetoric, then cited the murder of one of America’s great Founding Fathers, saying:

Nation's John Nichols (left, naturally) defends hate speech with bad history.

Nichols: Let me remind Jonathan Alter as regards the Founders that the third vice president of the United States was in a duel and shot the secretary of the Treasury, I believe.

Alter: Yeah, but that wasn’t good! We’re not for that!

Nichols: That wasn’t good, Jonathan, but the Founders were not that into civility. And the fact of the matter is, there’s not only no need for apology, I think this is what you take to the floor.

The reference is bizarre on any number of fronts, which is presumably the reason Alter is so taken aback by it. The duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton was not only anomalous but one of the most tragic events in the Founders’ era. Aaron Burr was hardly a “Founding Father”; he was an egomaniac whose contributions to American life include the political campaign and perhaps an early seccessionist movement. By all accounts, Hamilton, who wrote most of The Federalist Papers, went to the duel under duress. He knew Burr to be an ambitious scoundrel who had trapped him, by the conventions of the day, into facing him in a duel or renouncing his most deeply held political convictions. (Think of it as a more extreme form of refusing to settle out-of-court.) In a letter to be delivered if he died, Hamilton wrote to his wife, Eliza, “If it had been possible for me to have avoided the duel, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone decisive. But it was not possible, without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem.”

Hamilton deliberately wasted his opening shot, firing the first of two rounds above his head into a tree. This was the ritualistic way of denoting one had too much honor to contest a duel to the parting of soul and body. Burr aimed, fired, and killed Hamilton.

Nichols smears America’s Founders as bloodthirsty devils — a longstanding goal of the Left — and places Grayson’s extremist rhetoric on the side of the angels. The Left had a different view of dueling a few years ago, when it was mentioned by another individual.

Alter tried later to act as the voice of reason, only to be rebuffed by fire-breathin’ Ed:

Alter: Yeah, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr had a duel, but why do we have these traditions: “My distinguished colleague from South Carolina, the esteemed gentleman from Pennsylvania….

Schultz: We’ve got too many friends!

Nichols let the truth slip about why he wants more of this moral idiocy: he admitted Obama is “losing” the debate over socialized medicine. He offered a unique reason for why this may be the case: Democrats, he claimed, have “pulled punches for the better part of 8 or 9 months.”

Hmm, slurring average American protesters with a sexual term, calling them racists, lying about the signs they carry, and laying the bodies of 45,000 people a year at their feet because they refuse to kill even more through government rationing is “pulling punches,” eh? And the implicit message is, if all else fails, it’s permissible to take conservatives out into the woods and shoot them.

The reference to political violence was most fitting from a publication that hewed to the Stalinist line during the Thirties and apologized for the show trials. For the Left, it is always an option to abolish the people.

See Big Ed decry conservatives's "lack of patriotism."

In the misty past of ten months ago, dissent was patriotic, mass protests were a sign of passionate civic engagement, and the greatest sin any politician could commit was questioning someone’s patriotism. But that was America, B.B.O. (Before Barack Obama). Now dissent is potential incitement, middle American protesters are Swastika-carrying yokels, and disagreeing with a president’s decision to put his hometown above the well-being of troops in Afghanistan demonstrates a “lack of patriotism.”

On Friday’s edition of MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” Ed Schultz blamed Chicago’s first-round rejection, not on Rio or behind-the-scenes maneuvering, but on American conservatives who questioned whether Obama ought to spend more time finalizing his Afghanistan strategy — incredibly saying their actions were comparable to Jane Fonda’s in Vietnam.

He began by blaming the loss, not on Obama’s failed full court press, but on Republicans….

You can hang it right on the right-wing talkers, and yes, the Republican Party. Their negativity and lack of patriotism underscores just how damaged the country has become over the last eight years…Their negativity in the 11^th hour just cost this country billions of dollars in economic development and hundreds of thousands of jobs – and I might add, union jobs that are greatly needed…This is not a failure of President Obama. This is a failure of Republican Party, the right-wing talkers in this country that openly, openly, campaigned against the Olympics by denigrating the president again.

This is not a failure of Obama? He made it the highest profile event of the week — dispatching Michelle and Oprah Winfrey as emissaries of Chicago, then personally pleading in a futile effort to land the games…in a way that may have benefited his political cronies. Yet again, the charm offensive fell short. Big Ed blamed those who tried to warn him, equating their domestic statements with Jane Fonda’s propaganda broadcast against U.S. troops in the field:

The same crowd that says they support the troops didn’t support the United States getting the Olympics. They only support the troops when it’s good for them. They only support America when it’s good for them. They only support America when it’s good for their political agenda. What the Republicans did I think rivals Jane Fonda sitting on a gun in North Vietnam.

So, Rush Limbaugh is no different than this:

This is part of the Left’s ongoing attempt to equate conservative deviation from the left-wing party line with…the left-wing party line. Until Kruschev’s secret speech, the Left looked to the Soviet Union as a beacon of socialism in practice. The New Left idolized Cuba, then sent its faithful on pilgrimages of North Vietnamese “rice roots democracy.” After the slaughter of more than a million Southeast Asians, Fonda and her ilk moved on, to pictures of Daniel Ortega wearing sunglasses and now draws hope from figures like Hugo Chavez. But as they change the beneficiaries of their useful idiocy, they blame the crimes of their last heroes on conservatives. Thus, today’s history-challenged (and irony-impaired) leftists sometimes call conservatives “Stalinists.” One group produced a picture of David Horowitz wearing a Maoist revolutionary uniform. Such is the lot of those who cannot face up to the consequences of shilling for totalitarians.

Opposing a sitting president wasting an entire week obsessing over the Olympics, while refusing to commit to a strategy to win a declining war in Afghanistan has got to be the flimsiest excuse yet for equating anti-Communists with traitors.

Leave it to MSNBC.

Cliff Kincaid over at Accuracy in Media has unearthed additional bombshells in his investigation of the radical ideology of Fox News Contributor Marc Lamont Hill:

In the same way that Van Jones was exposed originally by New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon by using Internet search engines to look into his controversial background and writings, over the course of just a few days Accuracy in Media has been able to determine the following about Hill from public sources:

• He called the notorious anti-white, anti-Jewish Khallid Muhammad a “mentor, teacher, and revolutionary hero,” and believes that the black racist died not from a brain aneurysm but was assassinated. Muhammad was so extreme that he was ousted from the Nation of Islam because of his hatred of Jews.
• He gave a lecture on “The Importance of Ideological Training in the New Millenium (sic)” at the Polymathematic University’s “Political Education Program for the Poor Righteous Communist Party.”
• He declared on a “MySpace” page that the people he’d like to meet personally include Assata Shakur, Louis Farrakhan, Fidel Castro, and Mumia Abu Jamal, another convicted cop-killer.
• He speaks on “The Importance of the Nation of Islam to Hip-Hop Culture” and says that he once belonged to something called the Ansaaru Allah Community, an Islamic sect with doctrines similar to the Nation of Islam that has been accused of being a religious cult.
• Hill’s “MySpace” page features a slide show of such figures as Assata Shakur, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ella Baker, who just happens to be the namesake of the Ella Baker Center, founded by Van Jones.
• The Marc Lamont Hill website includes a graphic and obscene “Sex With Timaree” segment that features advice from a “Sexpert” on how to enjoy the “Land o’ Anal” or anal sex.

Hill told me in an interview that while he supports Shakur (his Twitter page is plastered with police photos of the fugitive), he was not the author of an article under his by-line and on his website that hails her escape from prison and grant of political asylum in Cuba. However, the article concludes with the name of “Marc.”

Hill has deleted his MySpace page, by the way. But you can still access it as a google cache here. Note that one of his friends is also the cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten hate mail. And, oh, how I’ve missed it.

Five years ago when I was a leftist op/ed columnist for my college paper the hate mail would come in regularly as I delivered a new radical assault against the Iraq War, the Bush administration, and the Conservative Movement each week.

Now that I write exclusively online — there’s no longer a printed page with an email at the bottom — most of the time hateful responses just show up in the comments section. But is it ever a delight when I get a hostile, insulting email.

This one did not come as the result of a piece I’d written but as something I’d done. After weeks of putting up with “Pbrauer,” one of NewsReal’s leftist trolls, I finally decided to ban him. The previous day I’d given him a warning and he’d decided to ignore it. He unleashed one final ad hominem attack on my old friends and now colleagues Tim and Alissa Birkel. Instead of thoughtfully rebutting their argument,  he decided to make fun of them. And that was it. He sent me an angry email in response to his banishment. It was every bit as ad hominem as his comments:

David,

Your response was not at all unexpected, frankly I am surprised that I lasted this long at David Horowitz’ blog. He wouldn’t know the truth if it was staring him in the face. Or maybe he would, but would not admit because it didn’t fit his agenda.

You as young man at the tender age of 25, idolize this creep? He is on the fringe, you are on the fringe, of reality that is. Horowitz was once on the radical left, now he is on the radical right. The term “Koolaid Drinking” comes from the fact that the followers of Jim Jones drank Koolaid laced with cyanide. While I wouldn’t equate Horowitz exactly with Jim Jones, I would say your dedication to a man so distructive is not far off.

When I said you had an unfortunate surname, I meant no harm. Most normal people would have responded with “Yeah, Tell me about it.” But you chose demonize me and tell me I am horrible human being , that told me more about you and your radical agenda than you know.

Please tell Tim and Alissa Birkel, that it my plan to email Rachel Maddow to call them out and publicly invite them on the show. I will provide links to their posts critical to her. Maybe she will and maybe she won’t. I think it’s worth a try.

Rachel Maddow and Media Matters are targets because they are so effective in getting out the truth.

Pete S,

[Emphasis added - DS]

(Incidentally I’ve counted three attempts in which Pbrauer has tried to make comments on NewsReal. They’ve all been immediately spammed.)

What struck me most about Pete AKA Pbrauer’s hate mail was what I’ve emphasized above. Look at the way he uses the term “the truth.” In his opening paragraph he notes that Horowitz cannot see “the truth.” He concludes by noting that Media Matters and Rachel Maddow are great at getting out “the truth.”

This is the way religious fundamentalists talk. (And note I’m not referring here to the many friendly Christians who comment at NewsReal.) Without even realizing it, Pbrauer affirmed the validity of the central thesis of my favorite Horowitz text, The Politics of Bad Faith. (He’s not the first leftist I’ve encountered who has done this.) For much of the Left they do not have political ideas or opinions. They have political Truth. The Left is a political religion.

And leftists’ behavior reflects that. There is a connection between Pbrauer’s political religion and the behavior he exhibited at NewsReal that caused him to be banned. He never really engaged us in dialogue. His objective was always to sabotage with ad hominem attacks. And the reason is simple: why be in dialogue with someone when they’re pushing a lie? With Pbrauer — and others like him — it is NEVER an exchange of ideas. That’s not what interests them. They have all the correct ideas — The Truth — and we’re just the unsaved heathens who need to hear the leftist gospel.

Now there are certainly conservatives that talk and think this way too. I cringe every time I get an email in which a conservative supporter emails me talking about their political opinions as though they were “the Truth.” And I wince when conservatives refuse to consider ideas from the Left or even to have leftist friends. Adopting such an approach perverts conservatism into a Political Faith instead of a coherent, intellectual approach.

That main point made I’ll respond to Pbrauer’s other points for the amusement of

1. I don’t “idolize” Horowitz. He’s my friend and now my boss. We certainly don’t agree on everything. I support him and the Freedom Center because America and the American Idea need to be defended from those who seek to destroy them.
2. The paragraph about my name is referring to an exchange in a comment thread where, out of the blue, Pbrauer mentioned at the end of his point, “you have an unfortunate last name.” This told me everything I needed to know about him. Just a few days prior I’d written a post explaining how the great thing about my last name (and other “unfortunate” names) is that as soon as someone makes a comment about it I know they’re an insensitive, thoughtless jerk. It’s not that the comment hurt my feelings or that I was offended. (Pbrauer didn’t get this point then and he doesn’t get it now.)
   

   Perhaps with this post I'm breaking this guideline. But can one feed a troll if they cannot comment back?

3. It would be delightful if Maddow commented on the Birkels’ “Spoonful of Saccharine” series. I’ve been meaning to email Maddow’s producers about it. So if Pbrauer wants to do my work for me then he’ll be making himself far more useful than he ever did as one of NewsReal’s trolls. In fact if he wants to email every leftist we criticize to let them know then I’d certainly be thrilled. (In fact if any of our other readers would like to email out links of our commentaries then that would be very much appreciated.)
4. As Horowitz pointed out to me when I showed him the email: Jim Jones was an icon of the Left. Pbrauer probably doesn’t know that — just as he knows next to nothing about me, Horowitz, and the nature of his own “progressive” faith.

It’s been a long time coming. And I’ve resisted it for weeks, often arguing against the idea of banning him when some of our regulars email me his comments to complain. His comments are always ad hominem attempts to discredit, never thoughtful critiques of arguments.He exhibits classic internet troll behavior — constantly baiting and provoking other commenters to try and get emotional reactions. (Sometimes he’s successful.) He basically violates points 1, 5, and 11 of our commenting guidelines on a regular basis.

When he mocked Tim and Alissa for their degrees in creative writing (actually Alissa’s is in literature) I’d had enough.

I don’t ban at the drop of a hat. And I don’t like doing it. But if someone is not going to be a respectful guest in our house and contribute to a healthy discussion and they refuse to change when instructed otherwise… Then they’re out.

This is not to say, of course, that McCarthy’s response to Communism was not destructive.  In his hands, the struggle against this fifth column was perverted first into a weapon aimed at the Democrats and ultimately into a scattergun aimed at his own party, at America, and finally at himself. His reckless demagoguery did damage to innocent people, and the atmosphere created by his success cast a pall over the political arena.  It imperiled the democratic process, and it destroyed the credibility of anti-Communism itself.  Robert Lamphere, the head of the FBI counterintelligence team that caught the Rosenbergs, has since said, “Senator McCarthy’s crusade, which was to last for the next several years, was always anathema to me.  McCarthy’s approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States.”  Whittaker Chambers saw the problem with McCarthy at the time the problem was unfolding: “All of us, to one degree or another, have come to question his judgement and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions … will lead him and us into trouble.  In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come.”

As a result of Truman’s internal security programs, many Party members did lose their jobs in institutions considered vital to the nation’s defense and survival- in government, in the media, and in education.  But with extraordinarily few exceptions, they were not fired from government agencies and other institutions for holding “unpopular ideas,” as the Communists themselves maintained and as the mythology that has grown up around the McCarthy period still holds.  They were fired for being members of (or for refusing to cooperate with inquiries into their membership in) an organization that was subservient to a hostile foreign power and whose purposes were inimical to American democracy.  Thus Columbia University justified its policy of excluding Communists from its faculty in the following statement (of which Lionel Trilling, spokesman for American liberalism, was one of the authors): “Membership in Communist organizations almost certainly implies a submission to an intellectual control which is entirely at variance with the principles of academic competence as we understand them.”

– Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz

–

Today’s Horowitz quote of the day was selected as an answer to the questions of such commenters as KuhnKat, The Inquisitor, and Sovereign Jim.

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

That was snarky, I know. But given how hard it is to keep up with the latest “progressive” “goodthink” without my Left Wing Decoder Ring (I had to pawn it when my Z.O.G. check bounced…), I trust you’ll forgive me.

Media Matters‘ Jamison Foser manages to out-snark me anyway. With unconcealed contempt, Foser blasts two Washington Post columnists for downplaying the crimes of filmmaker Roman Polanski, who fled the country in 1978 after being convicted of sexually assaulting an underage girl, and is now being extradited to the United States.

As well, Foser generously credits conservative blogger Patterico (who works for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office) with pointing out columnist Anne Applebaum’s unstated conflict of interest in the matter: her husband, “Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is lobbying the U.S. to drop proceedings against Polanski.”

Finally, the one thing conservatives and progressives can agree upon: child molesters should be punished, no matter how many Oscars they’ve won.

Sadly, we can’t even go that far.

To site just one example from this week: on The View, liberal Whoopi Goldberg opined that what happened to Polanski’s victim wasn’t “rape-rape,” adding that, in Europe, the incident wouldn’t have been such a big deal. And please don’t comment that “nobody watches The View;” millions of women do, every day.

Now, American liberals bemoaning the philistinism and puritanism of their unwashed fellow citizens is nothing new. What is relatively new is what Catholic blogger and author Mark Shea has called “the mainstreaming of pedophilia,” a phenomenon driven by Hollywood and other cultural taste-makers.

People were shocked back in the 1990s, when little girls dressed up as “Pretty Woman” (i.e., a prostitute) for Halloween. These days, pre-pubescent girls dress like that to go to school every day. Movies from obscure festival prize-winners to Oscar winners like American Beauty are incrementally normalizing pedophilia. Glamor is a potent agent of erosion. (Which is why, incidentally, Catholics renewing their baptismal vows promise to “reject the glamor of evil.”)

As Mark Shea has observed ruefully: today’s progressives (rightly) condemn pedophile priests (although mostly as a stick to beat the Catholic Church with); tomorrow’s even “more enlightened” ones will be obliged by their own twisted, doctrinaire logic to hail them as poor, misunderstood victims of society’s “dark age” intolerance.

Gee, if only all those Catholic priests had thought to go to film school instead.

The last few weeks have not been kind to the aura of President Barack Obama.

Internationally, he has begun to be perceived as a weak leader. None of his campaign promises have led to any results on the international stage. The detention center at Guantanamo Bay is still open. The Middle East remains a mess. Oil prices are still too high. All is pretty much the same as the day he took the Oath of Office.

The Iranians, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the North Koreans, the Venezuelans, the Chinese and the Russians are all quite pleased that Barack Obama has replaced George W. Bush—a man they all feared—as president. They have understood, this early in the game, that the President lacks the one quality that makes for a strong leader: decisiveness. And they are taking advantage of it.

Domestically, things are not much better for the President.

As Bill O’Reilly reported last night, Obama’s approval ratings are in freefall, with only 49% of Americans now approving of the direction the country is moving under his leadership. Cash-for-clunkers, massive bailouts, cap-and-trade, increasing unemployment, health care reform, and now a plan to reform the educational system have left Americans shell-shocked and wondering when it will all end.

Naturally, the left needed a theory to explain away this precipitous drop in Obama’s popularity so soon into his Presidency. As luck would have it, they had an old one in the archives, which they have newly re-packaged and re-introduced. Only this time, it has now been put forth by the husband of its originator: former President Bill Clinton has resurrected the “vast right wing conspiracy” theory first put forth eleven years ago by his wife, Hillary Clinton.

This past weekend, Mr. Clinton was asked by David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program about the possibility that such a conspiracy still exists (assuming it ever did), and his soon-to-be-famous answer may have shocked even Mr. Gregory:

DAVID GREGORY: Your wife famously talked about the vast right wing conspiracy targeting you. As you look at this opposition on the right to President Obama, is it still there?

BILL CLINTON: Oh, you bet. Sure it is. It’s not as strong as it was, because America’s changed demographically, but it’s as virulent as it was. I mean, they’re saying things about him – you know, it’s like when they accused me of murder and all that stuff they did. But it’s not really good for the Republicans and the country, what’s going on now….

Mr. Clinton went on to imply that the President’s popularity is falling because of lies and accusations levied against him by the extreme right:

BILL CLINTON: Their agenda seems to be wanting him to fail, and that’s not a prescription for a good America. They can take his numbers down; they can run his opposition up. But fundamentally, he and his team have a positive agenda for America.

Clinton and the Democrats can make all the noise they want about a “conspiracy,” but the reality is much different. Obama’s sinking popularity is not the result of external forces acting upon him; it is of his own doing.

The intellectually bankrupt left, however, will continue to appear on their media outlets, crying foul and blaming others for the President’s failings. As their ideology unravels, they will make even more noise. They have to, for as Shakespeare observed, the “empty vessel makes the greatest sound.”

Newcomers to political activism may be surprised to learn that this summer was not the first time the Left had used lies and distortions to smear its opponents as racist. As David Horowitz pointed out Monday, this is the Left’s defining modus operandi and has been for a generation: as he writes, “the left’s chief political contribution to American politics is witch-hunts.”

Another chief contribution would be the myths that undergird those witch-hunts. On the health-care front, we’ve seen MSNBC talker Ed Schultz lie to transform protest signs into death threats (even though the correct wording was on the screen for everyone to see). Jimmy Carter soon repeated the lie as Gospel.

Last night on Fox News, Bob Beckel revisited a golden oldie “racist” hoax to smear a man who is now dead…

Beckel was part of Sean Hannity’s “Great American Panel,” discussing the current outbreak of racial hypersensitivity. Beckel — who has transformed into one of the most sensisble and likeable Democrats this side of Ron Radosh or Pat Caddell — said he had experience with genuine racial campaigning. “I had a campaign with Jesse Helms where he played the race card,” he said. He described a TV ad during the 1990 North Carolina U.S. Senate race between Helms , the one “with the application — a black man pulling it from a white man’s hands.”

There’s only one problem: the ad doesn’t exist.

As seen above, the ad shows a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter. There is no job “application,” and no one of any race would wish to seize it from its rightful owner. As far as I can tell, the myth of the grasping black hands originated with a Jesse Jackson appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, in which Jackson wrongly described the ad the same way Beckel did. Co-host Pat Buchanan corrected him, but it seems the Reverend’s talking points won out.

The ad was neither racist nor out of bounds (although Helms at times in his career was). Helms opposed Affirmative Action, and his opponent, Harvey Gantt, supported it. At the time of the election, the 1990 Civil Rights Act was pending President George H. W. Bush’s signature. (Bush vetoed the “quota bill,” then signed a substantially similar bill a year later.) The Left’s lies, then as now, were an excuse to paint all opponents of reverse discrimation as “racists.”

(Roger Clegg at NRO’s The Corner shared his thoughts on the ad here.)

Nineteen years later, the dishonest witch-hunt continues.

By now, just about everyone has seen the above video footage of New Jersey elementary-school children singing two highly politicized songs extolling the virtues of President Barack Hussein Obama. One of the videos was aired on the “Glenn Beck Show” and subsequently made the rounds on the other cable programs and YouTube, causing quite a stir.

Here are the lyrics to the two songs:

Now, some people may be wondering what the fuss is all about. After all, what is the harm in schoolchildren singing patriotic songs honoring a sitting president?

Actually, there is nothing wrong with it—in a socialist state.

In fact, in a socialist state, it is not only patriotic; it is quite necessary for the survival of that state. Socialism spreads its ideology partly through force, and partly through its manipulation of the state-controlled arts. Political indoctrination through the arts (and this includes painting, film, songs literature, etc.) must be introduced at an early age in order to obtain maximum effectiveness, and the socialists are masters at this.

Take, for example, an early sample of socialist indoctrination from Communist China:

Although unpolished by today’s cinematic standards, notice the constant stream of images of the “Great Leader” Mao Zedong, the schoolchildren, the People’s Liberation Army, and state-commissioned art, while the “socialism is good” mantra is repeated over and over in the song. This marriage of socialist imagery and song is a technique that has been shown to be very effective and is still in use today in socialist and communist tyrannies.

Take a moment to reflect on the similarities between the below lyrics from the Chinese film and the lyrics from Song Number 1, second stanza, above. For example:

Chinese Communist lyric: The entire nation is in great unity. And has raised the socialist construction to new height[s].

Song Number 1: He said that all must lend a hand to make this country strong again

The video and the song have the same sentiments, similarly phrased.

Song Number 2 is a great example of a favorite technique often employed by socialists, namely the “cult of personality,” where a larger-than-life persona is created for the leader. Note the second stanza of Song Number 2, which exclaims:

Hooray, Mr. President we honor your great plans
To make this country’s economy number one again!

Here is how the North Koreans would do this one:

Again, the similarities between the imagery of the North Korean production and Song Number 2 are chilling.

Closer to home, we have Hugo Chavez, who, in the following video, explains quite clearly the importance his socialist state attaches to the control of the education of Venezuela’s schoolchildren:

Chavez says, “In the U.S., it is all about the individual. Here, you are all the same.” That assertion echoes the sentiments expressed in Song Number 1, third stanza, when the New Jersey children sing:

He said we must be fair today
Equal work means equal pay

As you can see from the above examples, a primary goal of all socialist tyrants is the indoctrination of children.

In America, the mechanism for the implementation of socialist indoctrination of our children is already in place — in the form of leftist teacher’s unions like the National Education Association. And now we have a president with a “cult of personality” whose minions have quietly begun to elevate indoctrination to an art form.

My reflections after Betty’s murder did not stop with the Panthers. I understood better now who they were, yet was puzzled by the way they seemed to operate with impunity. This was a reality that was a far cry from the image of the persecuted vanguard we had created (and were able to establish widely in the press). Law enforcement seemed unable to stop them, and at times was even paralyzed in its efforts to do so. If one thought about it without ideological blinders, the authorities we accused of harassing them were surprisingly forbearing, and on occasion even showed exceptional consideration. Although Newton had murdered an Oakland policeman, the chief of the Oakland force had warned him when his life was in jeopardy, even though the danger was created by his own criminal acts. And this was not the only instance I knew of. During Bobby Seale’s campaign for mayor, one of his bodyguards, jittery from lack of sleep, in the early morning hours had inadvertently shot and killed a crippled newsboy. This presented the authorities and the press alike an opportunity to destroy the campaign and do the Panthers serious damage. But the bodyguard was arrested and prosecuted quietly, while Seale went on with his mayoral quest—which included regular denunciations of the “fascist” power structure and its brutal repression of Panthers like him.

– Radical Son

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please email it to DavidSwindle {@} Gmail.com. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” is garnering  a lot of media attention and plenty of media praise.  In his interviews he reveals his strategy to destroy capitalism and insert socialism.  He uses techniques right out of the pages of  Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  He takes the resentment of the corruption and failures related to Wall Street this past year as a platform to push for radical change.  As Alinsky wrote, the organizer

“must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.”

Moore takes this public anger at Wall Street corruption and jumps the shark to say that the culprit of this evil greed is capitalism itself.  For Moore capitalism = greed.  Here is one exchange he had on primetime television with Jay Leno:

LENO: Well, it’s interesting in the film. You say capitalism is evil. I think greed is evil, but I think capitalism is OK as long as you, I mean, moderation in all things. I mean, uh, explain.

MOORE: Yeah, well, capitalism, capitalism is actually legalized greed.

Michael Moore, like Alinsky taught, believes that the end goal is “the radicalization of the middle class”.  To get to that goal the organizer must learn “to talk the language of those with whom one is trying to converse.”  Use whatever language works and make sure it centers around morality.  Moore has chosen two ways of doing that.  Instead of calling for socialism by name, he calls for democracy.  And to convince people of the morality of it, Moore manipulates the teachings of Jesus in a way that makes Jesus sound like a socialist (without using that word of course).  So Moore’s plan of attack is to turn socialism into simply democracy and the values of Jesus.

Instead of Christianity being the enemy of the left — Alinsky understood that would turn people off as we see with Bill Maher’s work — Moore decides to pervert Christianity as a tool for socialistic propaganda.  It’s been tried many times before, but not so often with film.

Here is Moore on Larry King on Wednesday giving his not-so new economic theology:

In this clip notice how he calls capitalism a system that is both “anti-democracy” and also something Jesus would not approve of.  Moore says we aren’t a democracy, because we can vote.  We are only a democracy and a Judeo-Christian nation if “we come up with a new economic order that is fair”.  Of course, all this is a coded and homogenized way of slipping in socialism.

Here is Moore on Countdown with Keith Olbermann:

Notice on left-wing Olbermann he drops almost all pretense that he cares so much about democracy or Christianity (because the regular middle-class that he wishes to radicalize doesn’t watch Olbermann).  It’s all anti-Reagan, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and anti-conservative courts.  He even says at the end of the interview that the goal is to see the “people revolting”!

Back on Leno, Moore was talking about democracy and morality:

MOORE: No, not right. It’s wrong. Some things are just wrong. And this capitalist economic system that we have, it might have been right at one point, it’s not right now. And I don’t think we’re ever gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So we need to come up with something new to replace it. And I’m not talking about… This isn’t a debate between capitalism versus socialism.

LENO: Right.

MOORE: I’m actually suggesting go back to our roots of this country, democracy. What if we had an economy that you and I had a say in? Right now, we all don’t have much of a say in this economy. What if we applied our democratic principles and said, ‘We, the people, have a right to determine how this economy is run.’

Leftist magazine The Nation (which has often been a proponent of communism) treats the interview on Leno as one of the greatest moments in television history.  They claim if you missed that interview you “missed one of those rare moments when the vast wasteland gives way to an oasis of realism.”

Friday on The View, while talking to middle America once again, Michael Moore actually paraphrased the teachings of Jesus multiple times to help make his case for socialism by another name.  He has relabeled an old (and false) economic system to look new.  How did he come up with it?  Does he have a degree in either economics or seminary?  No, Moore was a college drop out with no experience with economics, and his only seminary experience was to join a Catholic Seminary after 8th grade.  “He admired the Berrigan brothers [radical anti-Vietnam War Catholic priests Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan] and thought that the priesthood was the way to effect social change,” wrote The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar in February 2004. “This resolve lasted only through his first year, though, after the Detroit Tigers made it to the World Series for the first time in Moore’s life and the seminary wouldn’t allow him to watch the games.”

Moore offers old wine in new wineskins.  There is nothing new in his attack on capitalism and perversion of New Testament scripture to support socialism.  It’s been done for decades.  Leftists, communists, socialists, and radicals have attempted to use Jesus as a god of their own socialist image.  The only thing new is that Moore is using film and popular television interview shows to push his drivel, and he is attaching it to a concept of “democracy” that sounds like good old fashioned socialism.

I would suggest anyone that starts to fall for Moore’s tactics read Poverty and Wealth: Why Socialism Doesn’t Work.  In that book, philosophy and theology professor Ronald Nash breaks down all the false arguments of socialism being the economic system of Jesus and the New Testament.  He writes,

“Unfortunately, many Christians act as though the only thing that counts is intention.  But when good intentions are not wedded to sound theory, especially sound economic theory, good intentions can result in actions that produce consequences directly opposite to those we planned.  This is precisely what has happened in the case of the social policies to help the poor adopted in the United States since 1965.”

Nash reveals in his books that people attempting to use Christ for leftist economics have no understanding of basic economics and “use the Bible as a weapon against capitalism.”  Some use it to push for a very liberal Democrat form of government, while others “use the Bible to show that God is a Marxist.”  And the result has been that such policies meant to help the poor have actually kept them in poverty.  Moore, for example, in his interviews uses the idea that our economy is a fixed pie.  And the rich take 9 slices and only leave us one.  He thinks that isn’t fair.  He has a false understanding of free enterprise.  In capitalism, that pie exists because of bold free marketeers.  And the pie size is not fixed.  In fact, the better the entrepreneurs do in creating wealth, the bigger the pie gets for everyone.  Moore would rather the government steal the whole pie and then hand it out evenly until there is no more pie left.

Jesus did condemn making wealth your God.  And many of the problems we saw in the economy this past year stem from that very problem.  However, it is error to then make a jump that Jesus condemned all wealth.  He never did.  Jesus had great friends and followers who were wealthy (Luke 14:1).  He stayed and ate with wealthy people (Luke 11:37).  He even was buried in the tomb of a rich  man.

Jesus also used parables that told his feelings on wealth.  Many of them centered on the call for Christians to use their privately owned wealth as stewards for good things (Luke 12 and 16).  He at no times suggests that we give our private wealth to the government, so that they can redistribute it.  To make that conclusion from the New Testament is a misrepresentation at best, and in the case of Moore, plain old manipulation.

Moore, we know your strategy.  We are calling you out.  Instead of making movies trying to convince us all to be radicals like you, why don’t you just share that $50 million plus personal empire you have with the poor of our society.  Set an example instead of shoving propaganda.

Today one of our commenters, Ben, posted a link to Media Bistro on David Horowitz’s post about the newest installment in the debate with David Frum.

Ben did so to demonstrate an interesting point: Glenn Beck did fairly well in a recent public opinion poll. Only 19% of Americans have a negative view of him. Compare that to the 50% who have a negative view of Rush Limbaugh. When it comes to Beck most people are either neutral or ignorant of him.

The source of Media Bistro’s information was a blog by Nate Silver, the influential polling analyst behind FiveThirtyEight.Com. And it was there that I discovered an idea far more interesting than Beck’s low negative numbers. Silver identified Beck in a fashion I’d never considered before, but now cannot help but enthusiastically embrace:

Beck is a PoMoCon — a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate.

I’ve previously identified David Horowitz as a post-modern conservative. It’s a label that I identify myself with as well. (Note: I refuse to use PoMoCon. It just sounds dumb. Sorry.)

Silver describes the conservative components of this emerging political philosophy:

It borrows a couple of things from traditional American conservatism:

– It shares an extreme distrust for government, particularly the Federal Government.
– It shares the notion that American society is in some sort of state of existential decline.

There are a few other key elements as well that link postmodern conservatism to traditional conservatism which Silver leaves out (or perhaps was not aware of.) First and foremost is an overwhelming enthusiasm for the principles of the founding and the Founding Fathers themselves. Second is a revulsion at the the decidedly non-postmodern nature of the True Believer Left. So much of Beck’s approach — as well as the emphasis of Horowitz, many at the Freedom Center, and myself — is an analysis and a relentless critique of the Left. This sort of conservatism — one that develops in reaction to the Left — is unfortunately alien to many conservatives today. Because they do not understand the Left they cannot effectively fight it.

Silver goes on to elucidate where postmodern conservatism parts ways with traditional (Limbaugh and Mark Levin) conservatism:

On the other hand, it also features some important differences:

– It is much more distrustful of non-governmental institutions, such as labor unions, corporations, political parties, community groups, the media, and scientific institutions.
– It is largely indifferent toward ’social issues’.
– It is much less explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.
– It has much less use for elites, which it also distrusts.

These four aspects of postmodern conservatism allow the ideology to expand to reach out to the apolitical, the moderate, and the open-minded elements of the Left. It allows for the defense of America and the spirit of the Founders to penetrate beyond the confines of the Conservative Movement.

Silver also describes a very important stylistic and temperamental difference:

The PoMoCons are not so much less self-consistent as they are less concerned with consistency, as compared with traditional conservatives. Theirs is a bric-a-brac, skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid), play-it-by-ear, relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now — not something cooked up by a K Street thinktank. There is no future, no past — there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.

In other words: Beck and other post-modern conservatives are OPEN-MINDED. They have a functioning core of patriotism and freedom-oriented libertarianism but they are willing to take in new ideas and adapt to the circumstances of a changing world.

One of the key side effects of this is something I observed when watching Beck the other day. I realized my enthusiasm for what Beck was saying throughout his show would fluctuate wildly. I would be with him one moment, in complete agreement, and then all of a sudden he might present an idea or say something in an over-the-top fashion and I’d strongly disagree. I probably found myself supporting maybe 70-80% of what he had to say with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Other times I’d want to reach through the screen to yank him back before he stumbled off an ideological cliff. Such is the nature of a figure like Beck whose mind frees itself to explore the world of ideas with less rigidity than a traditionalist.

My friends, this is the next evolution in Conservatism. This is what will transmit the defense of the American Idea to the next generation and the politically disenchanted masses. And Beck is its representative in the mass culture of cable news and talk radio. Therefore it is all the more vital to make sure Beck does not stumble down Wile E. Coyote-style as he chases the Road Runner of the Left.

Raising broadcasting to a whole new level

In recent weeks, Glenn Beck has elevated political/news television to an entirely new level. Without fealty to any particular party, he is shining a light into the dark corners of a political cesspool that has been hidden for too long. He is taking the esoteric and making it accessible; taking the complex and making it simple. The result: Millions of Americans are waking up and beginning to understand, often for the first time, exactly what the left is all about. At the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we’re honored that one of the most vital resources from which Beck draws information that is presented on his program is our online encyclopedia of the left at www.DiscoverTheNetworks.org. It was our hope that by putting the networks, funders and covert agendas of the left up on the Web, we would awaken Americans to the internal threat to their freedoms from the legions of what is misnamed the “progressive” left. (In fact they are reactionaries and closet totalitarians who want to re-run the discredited socialist scripts of the past.) Since we launched DiscoverTheNetworks in February 2005, more than 20 million people have visited the site. But Glenn Beck is reaching over half that number of Americans every single day.

A thorough researcher who does plenty of homework in preparation for his program, Beck has perhaps done more than any other broadcaster to make Americans keenly aware of so many vital facts that few others in the media have ever even mentioned. For instance, he has stressed the immense significance of Saul Alinsky, the late godfather of radical “community organizing” — and probably the single most formative tactical influence on Barack Obama during his years as a political neophyte.

Alinsky’s blueprint for social upheaval and revolution largely eschewed any form of confrontational defiance that might scare off or alienate ordinary Americans. Instead he stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to deceitfully present themselves as moderates, until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. No source, anywhere, offers a clearer or more comprehensive exposition of Alinsky’s tactics, and by extension of Obama’s campaign strategies, than DiscoverTheNetworks. Glenn Beck has helped bring this information to the American people, presenting it in a way that everyone can understand.

Beck also has done a magnificent job of bringing to light the vitally important, though not widely understood, Cloward-Piven strategy — a key tactic of the left.

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, this strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands. Though undertaken ostensibly to protect the “rights” of the “poor” and the “working-class,” the strategy’s ultimate objective is to thrust society into a political and financial crisis that will cause people to lose all faith in the existing system (capitalism), and to follow the lead of a self-assured, charismatic “community organizer” to a socialist alternative. Again, DiscoverTheNetworks has proved to be a vital resource for Beck; no source, anywhere, has laid bare the principles of Cloward-Piven with greater clarity than DiscoverTheNetworks.

Cloward-Piven, of course, dovetails seamlessly with ACORN, an Alinskyite organization with a long history of attempting to stress American institutions to their breaking point. In its early days, ACORN members invaded welfare offices across the United States — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every last cent to which the law ostensibly “entitled” them – all in an effort to overwhelm the welfare system and spark an economic crisis. More recently, ACORN’s malign ambitions have focused on trying to overwhelm our electoral system by means of a voter-fraud campaign of unprecedented magnitude. And, on yet another front, ACORN worked long and hard, and with much success, to help bring about the collapse of the housing market — by aggressively pushing banks to extend credit to undercapitalized, high-risk borrowers in low-income, mostly-minority areas. Beck and DiscoverTheNetworks have been pointing this out for a long time.

In recent months, Beck has driven home vital revelations about so many significant people and organizations on the left: the Supreme Court Justice and promoter of ethnic politics Sonia Sotomayor; the Harvard professor and racial grievance monger Henry Louis Gates; the America-hating communist revolutionary Van Jones; the Apollo Alliance on whose board Jones sat, and whose environmental recommendations have a profound influence on President Obama; the former Weather Underground terrorist and current Apollo Alliance board member Jeff Jones; the FCC Diversity Chief who seeks to deal a death blow to conservative talk radio, Mark Lloyd; and most recently the Tides Foundation, funder of an anti-capitalist animated video that is being shown to schoolchildren across the United States.

Through it all, DiscoverTheNetworks has been a vital resource upon which Beck has drawn. His recognition of the value of the information in DiscoverTheNetworks, coupled with his unwavering commitment to truth – wherever it may lead – will go a long way toward waking up the American people to the corrosive agendas of the left.

Former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya (left) and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gesticulating during happier times

Like a bad penny that keeps coming back, ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya has slipped across the border back into Honduras and is now holed up in the Brazilian embassy, thrusting that country once again into the international spotlight.

Shortly after Zelaya’s attempts at subverting the constitution in an effort to give himself expanded powers (on par with other despots in the region) led to his removal from office a few months ago, media coverage of the event died along with Zelaya’s dreams of a socialist dictatorship.

Amy Goodman and her Marxist entourage at Democracy Now!, however, have not let this story go. They have had specials and “exclusive” reports ad nauseum since Zelaya was shown the door, and their latest reports out of Honduras once again paint a one-sided picture of the events following Zelaya’s midnight ride back into the country in the trunk of a car.

Roberto Micheletti, who heads the interim government, assumed the presidency after Zelaya’s removal and has the support of the military, Congress, Supreme Court, business leaders, and a majority of the population. Although he has called for new elections to be held on November 29, he has endured public scorn from most world leaders, has seen aid to his country dry up, and has been vilified in the world press (especially the leftist press).

And yet, as most world leaders (including our own), shun him, Micheletti has shown the world something: there is no shame in loving your country so much that you are willing to risk everything for it. And despite one-sided reports about the evils of the “coup regime,” there is another issue here that has not been investigated by Goodman or anyone else on the left, namely, the role of Brazil’s Socialist government in interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.

Although it is unknown at this point if the Brazilians were involved in smuggling Zelaya to their embassy, they have been the most vocal in their demands that Zelaya be reinstated as president of Honduras, going so far as to issue a dire warning to the Micheletti Government against raiding its embassy in an attempt to arrest him!

In less than two months, there will be an election, and the left is not barred from fielding a candidate. Zelaya, however, is barred, and despite his efforts to re-write it in his image, the Honduran Constitution prohibits him from serving another term.

Zelaya is irrelevant, and it is time for him to fade away.