If you want to understand why Newsweek put a badly photoshopped picture of Obama with a gay halo on its cover or features Romney doing a number from The Book of Mormon, you need only look at those numbers. Fifteen years ago desperate tactics like that were for alt weeklies like The Village Voice, but Time and Newsweek are the new Village Voice.

There is no news business anymore, just media trolls looking for a traffic handout, feeding off manufactured controversies that they create and then report on. Magazines and sites struggling to stay alive while preaching to a narrow audience which likes essays by leftist cranks and mocking pictures of conservatives. And they’re not alone; any magazine that still covers politics, covers it in the same exact way.

There are house-style differences between the New Yorker, which still features its trademark cartoons, and Vanity Fair and Esquire, and Time and Newsweek, but they are all basically the same. The same essays repeating the same views for the same audience; all of them fighting for that small slice of elitist leftist pie.

The real 1 percent is right there. That small elitist fragment of America which writes books for itself, makes TV shows for itself and writes outraged articles for itself about a tiny 1 percent elite that runs everything. It has its own books, its own TV shows, its own music, its own stores, its own stations, its own brands and now it has most of the magazines to itself. It’s a claustrophobic village raising its own inner child with inane repetitions of its narrow-minded views.

If I’m reading through a long mocking piece on Midwestern Republican primary voters who support Michele Bachmann or an essay by a Muslim columnist on American Islamophobia, how can I tell which magazine I’m reading? Easy. Is it the one with a gay Obama on the cover or the one with a woman breastfeeding a three-year-old?

The story is no longer the story. Now the cover is the story with magazines reporting on their own covers, which become the story. And the story? Who cares about the story really. You can know everything about the story by glancing at the cover. And then you don’t have to buy it anymore, which explains why newsstand sales aren’t doing too well.

Magazines like to tell advertisers that every single subscription sale actually means five or six readers across a family. That’s wishful thinking. Families with five or six members are not buying Time or Newsweek these days. They might be subscribing to Popular Mechanics or Ebony.

Don’t weep for Newsweek though. It’s a brand and brands never die. They just get dumbed down and sold and resold. Five years from now Newsweek may be an airline magazine or an internet portal tracking Twitter news trends, but it will be around in one form or another. For now there’s Newsweek Polska with a six figure circulation, Newsweek Korea with 40,000 readers and Newsweek Pakistan with 15,000 readers. Perhaps one day Newsweekwill be remembered as a Pakistani news mag that got its start in the States.

The brands may have a future, but the content doesn’t. There are only so many provocative essayists around and only so many people willing to buy badly photoshopped covers featuring the controversy of the week. The friction of the controversy makes dull people seem interesting and stupid people seem smart. It makes the kind of people who moved to New York to be able to see Will Ferrell make fun of Bush on Broadway feel that they’re relevant, but there aren’t enough of them to support a magazine with international news bureaus and all the trappings of a serious news organization.

There’s barely enough money in that market to cover the expenses of Salon, Slate and The Nation, reliably lefty publications which cravenly feed their audiences its prejudices back in small doses. Time and Newsweek muscling into that same turf, not to mention every other site and magazine following that same business model, is a bit much.

The left lives in a bubble full to the brim with self-righteousness and notions of grandeur. They see themselves as the tolerant, compassionate, intelligent ones, as opposed to those mean, greedy, stupid conservatives. In an attempt to reel these leftists back to reality, here are a few things every liberal should be reminded of:

1.) Che Guevara is not cool. In fact, he was a sadistic mass murderer, who killed in the name of Communism—arguably the worst ideology ever to be inflicted on the human race, along with Nazism, which killed about 100 million people in the 20^th century. Death and murder gave Che such a thrill that he had a stone slab removed from his office so he could personally witness the firing squads outside.

But, for some reason, Che Guevara is idolized by the Left. Naive college students wear t-shirts with his face imprinted on them, and admire him for being a “man of the people.” University of California, San Diego named its student café, “Che Café.” Much of Hollywood adores him, as is evident by Steven Soderbergh’s biopic, “Che,” starring Benicio del Toro, which portrays the Communist thug in a very pleasant light. This left-wing admiration of an anti-American, murdering Communist is repulsive.

2.) The Left treated George W. Bush much worse than the Right is treating Obama. This is just a friendly reminder to those who think the Right is mean-spirited. Yes, of course there are many on the Right who personally hate Obama and say cruel things about him. But nothing the Right has said about Obama even compares to the hate and vitriol directed at George W. Bush for 8 years.

Do you remember the constant death threats against George W. Bush? Do you remember the signs that read: “Hang Bush For War Crimes,” “Bush Is the Disease, Death Is the Cure,”  “Bush Is the Only Dope Worth Shooting” and “Death to Extremist Christian Terrorist Pig-Bush” (for more of the “tolerant” Left, click here). Do you remember those who burned Bush in effigy? Now, do you recall the signs at Tea Parties calling for Obama’s death? Didn’t think so.

Imagine what would happen if one person at a Tea Party rally carried a sign like those above about Obama. What would happen if a person at a Tea Party burned President Obama in effigy? Every single major newspaper in America would run a front-page story about it, condemning the Tea Party, and by extension the Republicans, for condoning incitement and racism. The Democrats would hold hearings on Capitol Hill about the fomenting of hate and violence by the Right. The double standard and hypocrisy of the left is laughable.

3.) Conservatives give more money to charity than liberals. Sorry to burst your bubble, my young, idealistic, liberal friends, but it’s true. And it’s not because conservatives have more money than liberal, because they don’t.

Check out these statistics from a Syracuse University study:

Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

– Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.

– Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.

– Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.

– In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

This discredits the argument that “conservatives are greedy, rich people who don’t care about the poor,” doesn’t it?

The reason conservatives get labeled as uncaring and greedy is because they do not think that an ever-expanding government is the best way to help the needy. Therefore, conservatives are against tax hikes, spending increases and other measures that grant the government more power. This principle of limiting the size of government should not be confused with greed and apathy for the poor, as the statistics above definitively prove.

FP: David Cohen, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin with you telling us how it is exactly that you became a conservative without abandoning your liberal ideals. How can it be that conservative policies can be the best way to achieve liberal ideals?

Cohen: When I was a liberal, I wanted America to live up to its billing as the Land of Opportunity, with no one being held back because of race, ethnicity, religion or gender.  I believed that America’s diversity was its strength.  I was concerned about poverty; I wanted poor people to have a genuine shot at realizing the American Dream.  The key to that, I thought, was making sure that poor children across America had access to a good education.  My concerns weren’t limited to America; I wanted people everywhere to be free from oppression and to have the same opportunities that I wished for my fellow Americans.

Now that I’m a conservative, guess what?  I still have those very same ideals and concerns.  Back then, I thought that those ideals and concerns made me a liberal.  There was never any doubt in my mind that I should support the liberal agenda.  I had never really been exposed to conservatives growing up, and what I thought I knew about them—from friends and family, from the media, from popular culture—I didn’t like.

Reagan was the first president that I was old enough to vote for, but I never remotely considered voting for him.  He started to plant seeds in my head, though, that wouldn’t sprout until later.  I remember when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”  My fellow liberals were outraged.  But it got me starting to wonder why all of their outrage was directed at Reagan and none at the Soviet Union.  I started to think that in this one-sided outrage, my fellow liberals were not being sufficiently supportive of the victims of Soviet oppression—and hence were essentially tolerating for others what they would never tolerate for themselves.  Was that consistent with my liberal ideals?

I started to become a little more open to Reagan’s ideas on foreign policy, but not on domestic policy.  It wasn’t until Jack Kemp became HUD Secretary during the Bush Administration that I started to become familiar with conservative ideas on fighting poverty.  I had never considered that liberal policies might actually be harming the people they were intended to help.  When I read up on Kemp’s ideas, it was a real eye-opener.  I started to consider that liberal policies might be condescending to the poor—and particularly minorities who were poor.  I started to see how well-intentioned liberal policies might be promoting dependence, undermining self-belief, and incentivizing destructive behavior.  I came to believe that conservative ideas to fight poverty showed a greater belief in human potential, showed a greater respect for the dignity of the poor, and were more likely to encourage the behaviors required to escape poverty.

Once I was able to get past the stereotypes I grew up with—that conservatives were greedy, racist warmongers intent on getting rich by oppressing others—I was able to consider their ideas with an open mind.  And I eventually concluded that conservatives had much better ideas to achieve the things that I had always cared about, and still care about.

FP: There are two Dave Cohens, right? Tell us about Liberal Dave and ConservaDave and their relationship with one another.

Cohen: Liberal Dave and ConservaDave are the two protagonists in my book.  Liberal Dave is the person I was, and ConservaDave is the person I eventually became.  I treat them both as live characters in my book.  Even though Liberal Dave technically has not existed for many years—or perhaps I keep him locked up in the attic of my brain—I trot him out in the book to react to current events like Tea Party protests and the passage of Obamacare.  I even have a chapter where Liberal Dave and ConservaDave are sitting in a pizzeria having a wide-ranging debate.  They discuss everything from capitalism, socialism, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, Steve Jobs, income disparity, taxing the rich, you name it.  I think that the way that ConservaDave explains things to Liberal Dave is a great way for conservatives to explain their ideas to liberals in a way that might actually get through.

Liberal Dave and ConservaDave get along, just like I get along with my dear friends who have not joined me on my journey from left to right.  A lot of times when people switch sides in either direction, they look back in anger.  I don’t look back in anger, which is maybe why the tone of my book is one that liberals will not find threatening.  Since I’m not yelling at liberals or lecturing them, they might drop the defense mechanisms and actually engage with me and consider my ideas.  Keeping Liberal Dave alive is my way of reminding myself not to feel superior to people I disagree with.  I used to be that guy, so it allows me to have a generosity of spirit to those who are still that guy.  It also helps me remember how  I used to think when I was that guy, and what arguments eventually got through to me to help guide me rightward.  This is what my book is really about:  how to explain conservatism to Liberal Dave in a way that will make him see the light.

FP: Is this book targeting any group in particular? Who do you think might most benefit from your book?

Cohen: Pardon me for being self-serving, but I think that everyone will benefit from my book.  For conservatives, the book illustrates how to communicate our ideas not in ways that we would respond to, but rather in ways that others would respond to.  Most conservative pundits are good at pressing the buttons that turn conservatives on, but they might be turning off people who don’t yet think like conservatives.  In my book, I try to preach to the not-yet-converted rather than to the converted.  Also, I try to celebrate the inherent idealism of conservatism—something that you wouldn’t know existed if you just listened to the mainstream media and the popular culture.

For independents, this is a great guide to what I think are the most important issues of our time.  I think that independents will by and large be very receptive to the arguments I put forward in the book.  And I think that many liberals will be receptive as well—after all, I’m using arguments that would have resonated with me when I was a liberal.  I open the book with an explanation of how Liberal Dave came to be Liberal Dave.  I do this for a reason: to show people how I developed my initial intolerance for conservatives and conservatism.  I hope that when liberals read the story of Liberal Dave, they might recognize similar thought patterns in themselves.  Perhaps this will make them realize, as I eventually came to realize, that the disdain that I had for conservatives wasn’t fair.  I had to overcome this before I could be open to listening to conservative points of view.  I hope to take liberal readers through this same process. This will prepare them for the rest of the book, and hopefully make them better appreciate my arguments as to why conservative policies are the best way to achieve liberal ideals.

I’m not so naïve as to think that my book will result in a mass conversion from liberalism to conservatism.  But if it starts a conversation, I’d be very happy.  So many prominent people have made the journey from left to right—David Horowitz and Peter Collier, of course, but also David Mamet, Dennis Miller, Gary Sinise, Roger Simon, Ron Silver, and millions of people who aren’t famous.  My journey isn’t exactly unheard of.  I know that many liberals can be open to what I’m suggesting in my book, and my book is designed to communicate with them in a way that will make sense to them.

FP: Ok let us get a bit more specific. How does the “Left-Hearted, Right-Minded” philosophy apply to various issues, for instance: government spending, economics, education, health care, immigration, environmentalism, the War on Terror? Give us a few examples.

Cohen: I could write an entire book on this question.  Oh, and of course I did write an entire book on this question, which is why you’re interviewing me.  But in a nutshell:  On government spending, I talk about how the debt crisis will harm the most vulnerable in society, especially in future generations.  Fiscal profligacy in the name of compassion is, in fact, heartlessly uncompassionate to our children and grandchildren.  I talk about how capitalism has been the most effective anti-poverty program in history, and explain the folly of government politicos and bureaucrats thinking that they can improve upon capitalism through their micromanagement.  I talk about how a guy struggling to feed his family would much rather have a job than the satisfaction of knowing that some rich bastard he’s never met will get his taxes raised.

I talk about how education is supposed to be the great equalizer, giving poor children the tools to overcome the disadvantages of their birth.  Instead, it’s become the great stratifier, with failing schools locking those disadvantages into place.  I talk about how school choice can help liberate poor families by giving them the power that rich parents have always had—the power to be consumers, with the ability to take their business elsewhere.  I talk about how more consumer choice, rather than more government control, is also what poor people—and the rest of us—need to make our health care system work for us.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and, of course, Big Government are leftwing angels. And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the left fear big corporations but not big government? The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

Religious Christians and Jews also have some irrational beliefs, but their irrationality is overwhelmingly confined to theological matters; and these theological irrationalities have no deleterious impact on religious Jews’ and Christians’ ability to see the world rationally and morally.

For the objective here is not just to try Breivik for his actions, but to try him for his thoughts as well.  The climax of the trial will come in June, when several writers who have written about Islam – myself included – will be hauled into court as unwilling witnesses for the defense.  As I wrote here last month, “the goal of the defense – and of the defendant, who apparently made up the list of witnesses himself – is utterly identical with the goal of the country’s leftist cultural elite: namely, to implicate all of us writers in Breivik’s actions.  Of course, Breivik wants to do this in order to mitigate his own guilt in the eyes of the court and the country; the cultural elite wants to do it in order to discredit forever the criticism of Islam.”

Among the other writers on the list of defense witnesses is Hanne Nabintu Herland, a historian of religion who’s been an outspoken critic of Western feminism, the social-democratic welfare state, “reverse racism,” Norwegian anti-Semitism, and the Norwegian cult of mediocrity.  She’s also written – and this is why she’s been summoned to testify in the Breivik case – about the importance of integrating immigrants and of preserving traditional European cultural values.  But she’s not having it.  On Monday, she made a major announcement in an op-ed for Aftenposten: she’s informed the authorities that she won’t be obeying her summons.  She simply refuses to be a part of “this twisted murderer’s show….I refuse to be dragged around the circus ring like another clown in the perpetrator’s bizarre delusions.”  She asserts that “the obligation to testify is being abused.  I was not in Norway on July 22.  My testimony has no bearing on the question of guilt or sanity.”

Needless to say, when you’re called to testify in a trial and refuse to do so, you may face serious consequences.  “If this means that I will be put in prison,” Herland writes, “then make me a political martyr.”

Herland doesn’t mince words.  Since the day after Breivik’s murders, she charges, opponents of what she calls “the throne of power, the Labor Party,” have been treated as suspects.  “As things stand now, it’s almost the case that if you’re critical of the Labor Party, you’re automatically put in the same category as a mass murderer….This political witch hunt is now so intense that it’s fair to speak of undemocratic, totalitarian conditions in Norway.  We’re well on the way to becoming the new East Germany….the state is developing in the direction of a totalitarian democracy.”

As readers of my recent e-book about the aftermath of the Breivik killings know, Herland isn’t exaggerating.

Has anyone in Norway been as forthright about the present situation – and as willing to publicly challenge the grim new orthodoxy – as Herland has been?  Well, there have been a few others.  In her op-ed, Herland cites a recent opinion piece by shipowner Dan Odfjell, who tells a story I haven’t yet read or heard.  According to him, when Breivik began shooting on the island of Utøya, Eskil Pedersen, the head of the Labor Party youth group which was Breivik’s target, hopped on a boat and was the first person from the island to make it to shore.  Odfjell doesn’t criticize Pedersen for saving his skin; he criticizes him for allowing the Labor Party, in the days and weeks after July 22, to try to cover up the truth and turn him into a hero – an effort, charges Odfjell, that has been only one part of a carefully orchestrated effort by the party “to deliberately blur the distinction between itself…and the nation of Norway.”

Yet sufficient resources are made available to fund an endless round of conferences, workshops, dinners, research teams, guest facilitators, visiting assessors, teachers’ union perks and “productivity” raises for chief administrators. No matter. The committees continue to proliferate, in order to promote yet another in a series of unnecessary reforms or syllabus revisions, negotiated in a bland and vacuous eduspeak that sounds authoritative but says next to nothing. And this is the real nub of the issue. It is a language that has critically devitalized us, cutting us off from knowledge of the past and insulating us from the reality of the present, let alone the future. As Uwe Poerksen tells us in Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language, (and as the administrative documents should make clear), “we are dealing with a new type of language usage—one might call it modular—and a new word type—plastic.”

The standard recipe on which the planners and functionaries rely in contriving their peculiar medium of cored and pulped pseudo-expression, shorn of nuance and showing no trace of their origins, is characterized by Poerksen as follows: (1) “take a handful of basic plastic building blocks” (‘development,’ ‘factor,’ ‘consolidation,’ etc.); (2) “combine them with the typical technical and pseudotechnical vocabulary of the planning section” (‘unit,’ ‘zone,’ ‘region,’ etc.); (3) “add sparingly colorless verbs” (‘to document,’ ‘to secure and strengthen,’ etc.); (4) “and season to taste with a few meaningless adjectives and adverbs for emphasis” (‘important,’ ‘highly,’ etc.). And presto! the lexico-syntactical gloop we know as the management style of discourse, which may be adapted and applied indiscriminately to any of the professional and sociotechnical areas of bureaucratic control, including, to our growing discomfiture, the domain of educational reform and administration. As Poerksen notes, the language of education “can often no longer be distinguished from the language of administration.” And this is one of the major reasons that nothing is ever done except further harm.

Poerksen’s most interesting suggestion is perhaps that the plastic language now universally exploited by our experts had already been foreseen and parodied as Orwell’s Newspeak, a language typified by a reduced vocabulary, recombinant terms (doubleplusuncold=very warm), binary values (old=bad, new=good), arbitrary meanings (war is peace), logical transparency (he thinked), abstraction and abbreviation—in other words, “the language of a totalitarian state completely divorced from history.” Poerksen lists some thirty-odd features of Plasticspeak which move in the same Orwellian orbit, of which I give a dozen of the most significant below. Plastic words:

• are devoid of content
• are modular and recombinant
• squeeze out synonyms
• lack a historical dimension
• dispense with questions of good and evil
• awaken needs that had not previously existed
• cannot be made clearer by tone and gesture
• are more like an instrument of subjugation than of freedom
• arrange for function to overwhelm and obliterate content
• are authoritative
• are polymorphous, elastic and abstract and so bring about unreflected consensus
• justify the existence of experts

What we are dealing with, then, is an operational or single-ply language, whose chief characteristics are the identification of the person or thing with the function and, perhaps even more damaging, the suppression of the historical dimension. In this way we become the victims of rampant bureaucratese, the language of administrative control, which remains one of the most effective techniques of totalitarian domination in any ideological camp. “With a word such as ‘development’,” Poerksen remarks, “one can ruin an entire region.”

Even if we take a less alarmist view of the issue, we see the outcome of this linguistic takeover all around us in the denaturing of serious thought and the destruction of healthy discourse. This bureaucratese is a dialect that spreads like tent caterpillars on a cherry tree, feeding in the sheltering embrace of folios before it finally devours its host. It is a species of mental infestation that applies across the entire cultural spectrum, but is most devastating when it afflicts the formative institution of education.

The wave of violence unleashed by the Obama-endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement and other elements of the activist Left in recent weeks is part of what left-wingers are calling the “99% Spring.” The actions, which are being cheered on by small-c communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, are designed to foment civil unrest and prompt change.

Occupy Wall Street and the satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of serious crimes, including murder, assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, and robbery.

Around the NATO summit at least four police officers were assaulted by radical activists and around 45 protesters were arrested by police on Sunday. The city of Chicago’s official website may have been targeted by computer hackers on Sunday when it went offline for part of the day. City and federal authorities are investigating.

Former anarchist activist Brandon Darby warned of the approaching violence weeks ago. In an exclusive interview Sunday, Darby said, “I told you so.”

“When an entire movement does nothing but convince young people that America is evil and must be stopped by any means necessary it makes it inevitable that some of them will take actions like the ones we’ve seen over and over again involving police officers, conservatives, and Molotov cocktails,” said Darby.

Darby has been targeted by the Left ever since it was publicly revealed that the former community organizer saved the lives of innocent Americans by thwarting the planned fire-bombing of the 2008 Republican Convention by two anarchists. (The plot was revealed in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.)

Also on Sunday, two Chicago-area men were arrested on terrorism-related charges.

Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, has been charged with falsely making a terrorist threat by claiming that he possessed homemade explosives concealed within a hollowed-out “Harry Potter” novel. He allegedly claimed the device could destroy a highway overpass. Prosecutors said they did not find explosives at Senakiewicz’s home. 

Mark Neiweem, 28, was charged with “solicitation for possession” of explosives or incendiary devices. The accused allegedly talked about making a pipe bomb and wrote out a list of the ingredients he believed were needed to make the device.

Neiweem is a convicted felon with a history of violence. At the time of his arrest he was already on probation for “aggravated battery to a police officer.” He was previously convicted in 2009 of “aggravated assault to a police officer,” a misdemeanor, and in 2005 of “criminal damage to property,” according to newly filed court documents.

Editor’s note: The cartoon above is the creation of our cartoonist Amir Avni. To see his work for Frontpagemag.com, click here.

“I have long wanted to make a film about the Dreyfus Affair, treating it not as a costume drama but as a spy story,” said Polanski. “In this way one can show its absolute relevance to what is happening in today’s world – the age-old spectacle of the witch-hunt of a minority group, security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, governmental cover-ups and a rabid press.”

He may want to make the story of Dreyfus into a leftist parable, but it was a real event with a real underlying cause. But Polanski has a history of ignoring real anti-Semitism in his films, despite the fact that he is a Holocaust survivor. The Pianist had several soft stereotypes of Jews in it, including guests in a café checking whether their gold coins are genuine; meanwhile, the film soft-pedals the brutality of the Germans – in the film’s climactic scene, the main character is let go by a German officer who is converted to kindness by the character’s piano-playing.

This is typical Hollywood. Anti-Semitism can never be treated as an actual phenomenon – instead, it is a metaphor for other suffering. No doubt; Emile Zola,  who exposed the Dreyfus prosecution as a fraud, will be portrayed not as an enterprising truth-teller, but as a synonym for today’s modern leftist press.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is supported by 100,000 individual donors, which is more than three times the number of its supporters ten years ago. Conservatives who have spoken at events the Center has hosted include four of the contenders for this year’s Republican presidential nomination (Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann and Cain) former president George Bush, his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, his Attorney General John Ashcroft, Senator Marco Rubio, and his colleagues, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions and others, Speaker John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Victor Davis Hanson. A recent pamphlet I wrote called Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution has sold half a million copies and has been distributed to another two million. Contrary to the Tablet’s description of the Center as a declining institution it has doubled its revenues in the last ten years and its influence in the conservative movement through its websites Frontpagemag.com and DiscovertheNetworks.org is greater than ever.

I obviously made a serious mistake in judgment, in agreeing to be interviewed by someone who misrepresented what I told him and ignored the evidence that contradicted his distortions. For being so unguarded, I owe an apology to my friends and supporters, several of whom expressed their dismay to me after reading the article. It is partly their concern that has prompted me to set the record straight. But, in a perverse way, I am also appreciative of the opportunity provided by the author of this tedious and hostile piece of writing because he has caused me to look at how embedded in the conservative movement I and my colleagues at the David Horowitz Freedom Center are, and how deeply we are indebted to it as well.

When I received the Tablet request for an interview, I was inclined to say yes because it came from a magazine with which I had a history, and which did occasionally published first-rate conservative writers such as Bret Stephens and Lee Smith. They even published a defense of Nonie Darwish that I submitted when she was attacked by one of their writers. I was also disarmed by the author himself who sent me an email about his intentions:

I am a leftist, though not a dogmatic one, and I usually don’t write directly about politics. For The Nation, I write mostly for the Books and Arts section, which isn’t nearly as ideologically-driven as the magazine’s editorial page…. So, we may not find much common ground politically, but that may make for a more stimulating piece. I’m less interested in debating Islamo-fascism than exploring your work’s position at the intersection of autobiography, politics, history, manners, and polemic. I think I can do so fairly.

In the past, my work has been attacked by leftists who will take a phrase from a fund-raising letter, or a heated polemic and omit its context or distort its meaning to discredit my work. The prospect of a leftist writer distinguishing the intellectual from the polemical in my work looked to me like an opportunity to break through the censorship that leftists had imposed on it.

I could not have been more mistaken. When the article “David Horowitz Is Homeless” appeared, it was apparent that none of its author’s assurances — interested in the intersection of styles of thought, not interested in scoring political points, will do it fairly — were sincere. Here is an illustrative example: “If what was once labeled extremism is now mainstream GOP boilerplate,” the author wrote, “then Horowitz deserves at least some of the credit.”

Not only was this a political attack, it was wildly inaccurate in both of its claims. The Republican Party today finds itself defending policies that were once the province of liberal Democrats like John F. Kennedy, specifically capital gains tax cuts, balanced budgets, strong defense budgets, color-blind racial standards and aggressive anti-totalitarian foreign policies. Only an extremist of the left could so mis-label a party that just nominated a former Massachusetts governor as its presidential candidate.

But the author isn’t done. He also wants to pin Republican “extremism” on me – the man whom conservatives have allegedly abandoned:

In a widely distributed 2000 pamphlet called The Art of Political War, praised by Karl Rove and endorsed by 35 state Republican party chairmen, Horowitz wrote: “In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy’s fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate with the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different. … Politics is war. Don’t forget it.” If you can remember a time when conservative discourse sounded like an Oxford lecture hall, then you have a sense of how far Horowitz has helped to steer this ship off course.

The missing context in this presentation is that the little pamphlet I wrote twelve years ago argued that it is Democrats – not Republicans — who have transformed the political arena into a combat zone. The pamphlet then urged Republicans to stop behaving as though it wasn’t.

The kernel of truth in the description is that I did remark to the author that Republicans haven’t really heeded my advice. It is true that 35 state party chairman endorsed the pamphlet, but none of them acted on its recommendations. Republicans have come a long way since then – thanks in the main to the emergence of the Tea Party. But they still have a long way to go.

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FP: Dr. Robert Zubrin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin by you telling us what you mean by “the cult of antihumanism.”

Zubrin: Thanks Jamie.

Antihumanism is a belief system which holds that humans are destroyers, essentially vermin whose activities, aspirations, and numbers must be severely constrained, and that therefore someone must be empowered to do the constraining.  Essentially it is an argument for tyranny, oppression, and ultimately genocide.

FP: Why would anyone choose to embrace such beliefs?

Zubrin: Well, you must understand that such arguments have always been gratifying to those seeking to enhance their power or justify their oppression of others. Therefore they use their positions of influence in society to make them fashionable, or “politically correct,” to use an originally Stalinist term that is now all the rage.

FP: It appears that much of modern-day environmentalism is antihumanist, as you’ve defined it, but antihumanism has been around for some time, right?

Zubrin: Yes. In the book I trace it back 200 years, starting with Malthus, the seminal founding father of the theory of limited resources, and then trace it forward through its subsequent development through numerous interrelated forms, including Darwinism, eugenics, German militarism, Nazism, xenophobia, the population control movement, environmentalism, technophobia, and most recently, the incredibly demented climatophobic movement, which seeks to justify mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control.

There was a time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for—indeed, worth liberating. But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, human beings are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core of antihumanism.

FP: Tell us about Al Gore’s antihumanism.

Zubrin: Al Gore is trying to turn antihumanism into a global cult. Just have a look at this quote from his book An Inconvenient Truth:

“The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.”

In short, the purpose of the global warming crusade is not to change the weather, it’s to organize a mob in support of totalitarian policies.

It is revealing that Gore chose the words “An Inconvenient Truth” as the title of his book. That phrase could be the virtual chorus line for all the antihuman movements for the past 200 years who used pseudoscientific arguments to demand that people harden their hearts to the human misery the purported to be necessary. I.e.

Thomas Malthus: It is an inconvenient truth that “the Irish must be swept from the land.”

Charles Darwin: It is an inconvenient truth that “the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

General Friedrich von Bernhardi (German General Staff, author, Germany and the Next War, 1912): It is an inconvenient truth that “war is necessary because it eliminates the weak.”

Madison Grant (Author, The Passing of the Great Race, 1916): It is an inconvenient truth that “indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury to the race…It is an inconvenient truth that “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”

Henry Fairfield Osborn (1932): It is an inconvenient truth that “overpopulation and underemployment mat be regarded as twin sisters…the United States [with 112 million people in 1932] is overpopulated at the present time.”

Rudolf Hess (1933): It is an inconvenient truth that “National Socialism is simply applied biology.”

Adolf Hitler (1941): It is an inconvenient truth that “the law of existence prescribes uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live.”

Fairfield Osborn (author, Our Plundered Planet, 1948): It is an inconvenient truth that “the problem of the pressure of increasing populations…cannot be solved in a way that is consistent with the ideals of humanity.”

Paul Ehrlich, (author, The Population Bomb, 1968): It is an inconvenient truth that “the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from the treatment to the cutting out of the cancer.”

John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, (authors Global Ecology, 1971): It is an inconvenient truth that “when a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.”

The Club of  Rome (authors Mankind at a Turning Point, 1974): It is an inconvenient truth that “the world has cancer, and the cancer is Man.”

Alexander King, (founder, The Club of Rome, 1990): It is an inconvenient truth that “DDT…has greatly added to the population problem.”

All: “It is an inconvenient truth that humanity must be crushed. Science requires it. So harden your heart and join with all enlightened people in support of those doing the crushing.”

FP: Share with us some of the worst crimes perpetrated by the antihumanist movement.

Zubrin: I discuss many of them at length in the book. They include denial of food aid and imposing crushing taxes and rents on Ireland and India during the great famines of the 1800s, promoting the ideologies that led to World War I, World War II, and the Nazi genocide programs, the forced sterilization of tens of millions of people by the prewar eugenics movement and the post war population control movement, the killing of hundreds of millions of people through denial of vital life-saving technologies including pesticides and vitamin-enriched crop strains to the third world, and assisting in the impoverishment of billions by blocking the development of new energy resources.

FP: Most people don’t know how the first Green Party was actually founded. Please enlighten us.

Zubrin: The German Green Party was founded by August Haussleiter. A former SS officer and member of the Nazi Party since 1923, when he stood by Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. It was based on such previous works as Ludwig Klages’ 1913 proto-Nazi German “Volkisch” youth movement tract Man and Earth (republished by the Green Party, without comment, as one of its founding documents in 1980) and future Nazi Agriculture Minister Richard Darre’s 1931 book A New Nobility Out of Blood and Soil.

These writers popularized a cult ideology celebrating the natural “authentic” qualities of the good old-fashioned German country people, or Volk (literally “folk,” but also carrying the meaning of “tribe”). According to these and allied writers, the Volk derived their deep and “genuine” souls from their “rootedness” in the land, shared ancestral kinship, and connection to nature. In contrast, Jews, representing corrupt urban modernity and lacking in landed rootedness, were soulless and thus could never be part of the German Volk. Christianity, science, technology, industry, progress, “mechanical and materialistic civilization,” and all else that proposed to raise man above nature, were also to be abhorred. Popularized widely in prose works, fiction, and drama, these ideas formed the basis of the huge back-to-nature Volkisch and related Youth movements that arose in Germany during the late 19^th Century.

When, in the 1920s, the new Nazi party raised the pagan swastika flag celebrating the power of irrational animal nature over civilization and reason, the Volkisch Greens flocked to the cause. In the 1970s, as environmentalism became fashionable again, Haussleiter seized the time to organize a political renaissance of this constituency. The result was the Green Party, which true to its origins in “pure race on pure soil” ideology, has taken the lead in the campaign to stop modern agriculture worldwide.

As a result of their activity, the European Union has banned farm imports from third world countries using genetically modified crops. Since the third worlders cannot afford to give up the European market, this has blocked them from implementing vitamin-enriched cereals like golden rice, which could prevent the blinding or deaths of millions of poor children every year.

FP: Crystallize please the major flaws of Darwinism.

Zubrin: Evolution is a fact. However natural selection is a radically false theory of human social development because unlike animals, humans can inherit acquired traits, such as new technological abilities. Not only that, can inherit such valuable acquired traits from people they are not related to. Furthermore, such beneficial acquired traits, which become available to all, are created by human effort during life. Therefore human existence is not a struggle of all against all. Humans benefit from the existence of other people, nations, and races, exactly the opposite of what a Darwinian view would maintain. Darwin says that it is “from this war of nature, from famine and death,” that progress in nature occurs. But this is simply untrue for humans. Human progress is driven by creative activity during life, not by elimination through death.

FP: What is really behind the climate change/global warming movement?

Zubrin: In the 1970s there was a global cooling trend going on. So the antihumanists said “look, there is global cooling, which is being driven by industry, which is being driven by out of control economic growth and population growth. They have to be put under control. Put us in control.” Then in the 1980s the climate began to warm, so they said “look, there is global warming, which is being driven by industry, which is being driven by out of control economic growth and population growth. They have to be put under control. Put us in control.” The problem is always different, the solution is always the same – put them in control. Its not about weather, it’s about power.

Enter David Suzuki, Canada’s leading climate guru, who predicted some 20 years ago that we had only 10 years remaining before environmental collapse. In the meantime what has collapsed is Dr. Suzuki’s objective credibility—though his prophetic authority persists among the naïve and impressionable. Abetting the strategy of endlessly renewable computation is the complementary trick of selective disinformation. A good example of this technique is provided by the controversy over the discovery of a “mutant” fish near Lake Athabasca which, as University of Calgary economist Frank Atkins wrote, was jumped all over by “the David Suzuki crowd” (NP Posted, March 12, 2009). Of course, the presumed “find” was immediately blazoned in the media and among environmental groups as indisputable evidence of oil sands pollution. Unfortunately for the proponents of this factoid, the “mutation” was nothing of the sort but a natural development that follows on decomposition (Fort McMurray Today, the only news source to report on the scientific reassessment of the canard).

Similarly, one recalls Suzuki’s comrade-in-arms Al Gore who, in Earth in the Balance, blames the Antarctic ozone hole for causing blindness in animal populations: “hunters now report finding blind rabbits; fishermen catch blind salmon.” Reality check: not only has the Antarctic ozone hole begun to close (NASA Science, December 12, 2000; Nature, May 16, 2011), but Chilean scientists investigating the phenomenon had already accounted for the blight as owing to an epidemic of pink eye disease (NewScientist, August 21, 1993).

So it goes: bad math, wrong predictions, the application of a Bozo filter to disagreeable facts, and profitable indoctrination. There can be little doubt that, like aspiring carbon billionaire Gore, David Suzuki is a master in the lucrative field of environmental exploitation. Ezra Levant of Sun News Network has uncovered evidence that Suzuki is allegedly stuffing his coffers with money from multi-national organizations that finance his campaigns against Canada’s oil sands production (The Source, February 7, 2012). Suzuki received a million dollar gift from Canada’s Power Corp, which operates in totalitarian China, one of the world’s leading carbon emitters. This may explain why Suzuki, lecturing by video feed to two hundred Canadian schools, has praised China as a nation “committed to developing a green economy.” Indeed, Suzuki, as Levant has shown, grosses $10 million per annum for his mega-Corporation, apparently only a fraction of which is spent on hands-on environmental concerns.

In an informative talk at the National Archives in Ottawa on March 19, 2012, independent researcher Vivian Krause confirmed the details of Suzuki’s windfall from the U.S. based Moore, Hewlett and Packard foundations. Writing in the Financial Post for April 21, 2012, Krause goes on to state that Suzuki’s American funding was for many years “underreported or not reported at all.” This is rather telling, especially when one considers that since 2009, the Canada Revenue Agency “requires nonprofits to report the total amount of funding that they receive from foreign sources.” For 2009 and 2010, the Suzuki Foundation reports “accounted for 5% or 6% of total revenue.”

I responded that the more appropriate and correct name for Israel’s security fence is the “Leftists are Idiots Fence.”  Indeed, I would urge everyone to adopt that name for it and insist that no other be used in polite company.

The security barrier should be dubbed the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” because the very need for its construction was as a countermeasure to the countless acts of murder and other violence triggered by the imposition upon Israel of the Left’s political agenda with regard to making “peace” with the “Palestinians.”   The building of the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” became necessary because of the “recognition” of the PLO by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and all the fruits of that poisonous tree that followed.  The consequential series of agreements to allow the PLO to import its army of assassins and terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza (never mind that the Hamas later evicted the PLO from Gaza) produced so many massacres of Israelis that the only way to reduce the level of violence was with large fences and barriers that prevented “Palestinians” from getting close enough to Jews to murder them.

The “Leftists are Idiots Fence” was only the latest bi-product of the long-time theology of the Left concerning how to make peace with Arabs.  The Left believes that Israel can appease its way to peace by making endless concessions to the Arabs.  The fact that every single round of appeasements and concessions to date has produced escalation of terror never persuades the Left that something is flawed with its approach to peace or in its political theology.  The universal explanation by the Left for the utter and complete failure of its “ideas” has always been to insist in totalitarian unison that they fail because Israel does not make enough appeasements and concessions.

The Israeli Left has been wrong about absolutely everything for at least 20 years, and it would be very difficult to uncover anything about which it was not wrong going back even 60 years.  The Israeli Left of the 1950s believed in Soviet-style economic central planning.  Under David Ben Gurion, it built and then preserved a command-and-control economic mechanism that resembled that of Soviet regimes in many ways.  It was designed to place near totalitarian control of the economy in the hands of the MAPAI socialist party (later renamed the Labor Party).   Israel was essentially a one-party state until 1978, and that single ruling party was MAPAI.

Thanks to that command-and-control structure, Israel remained an impoverished, underdeveloped Third World country until well into the 1980s, complete with Third World levels of corruption, primitive technology, and tax rates sometimes exceeding 100% of earnings.  By the late 1980s, the command-and-control regime was largely although not completely dismantled, this thanks to a complex set of causes, and Israel quickly morphed into a developed wealthy First World country, to the chagrin of its socialists.  The Far Left yearns to restore the semi-bolshevik planning and control structure, and has now managed to co-opt much of the “Social Justice” protests in Israel and recruit those protesters behind this goal.

But in the long term, the more harmful segment of leftist ideology was the belief that the bulk of Arabs are good and decent people who truly want peace and co-existence.  That belief happens to be false.  The vast majority of Arabs want a genocidal resolution to the “problem” of the existence of Israel and its Jewish population.

But the Left is so passionately wedded to this part of its political theology that it has dominated everything the Left has done or said for decades.  And since the Left has been in office in Israel more often than it has not been (while the Likud has itself often behaved in many ways like a party of the Israeli Left), most of the most destructive decisions and errors Israel has made stem directly from this theology.

To arm concerned Americans with the facts about this agenda, the Freedom Center has created an essential pamphlet, written by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, detailing the Occupy movement, its radical origins and its goal to produce massive social upheaval.

View “Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn” below or order it here.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

This is the Rodney King case. And it’s worth remembering because the similarities between it and the Trayvon Martin case are far too eerie to ignore.  And its worth remembering too that the King case ended with a major American city in flames.

On March 2, 1991, Rodney King and two of his friends, Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms, were driving through Los Angeles. King was driving drunk – probably twice the legal blood-alcohol limit. At 12:30 in the morning, two officers saw King speeding. They pursued King through the streets of Los Angeles, with King’s pedal to the metal and the speedometer hitting upwards of 80 mph in residential areas. King admitted later that he was trying to get away from the cops because a DUI would put him back in prison for violating parole on a robbery charge.

Eventually, officers surrounded King’s car. Allen and Helms surrendered quietly and were not harmed. King, however refused to emerge from the car. When he did, he reached for his waistband; one of the cops drew her weapon and told King to get on the ground. He complied. But when four cops – Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Rolando Solano – went to subdue him, he lashed out at them. Officer Stacey Koon then tasered King. But King refused to go down. The officers, recognizing that tasers should immediately lay low those struck with them, believed that King was on PCP.

That’s when the famous taping began. Powell, Wind, and Briseno began beating King, who continued to try to get up. After 56 blows, King finally lay still.

Initially, the police dismissed the video; the person taping then gave it to the media. The outcry was deafening. The full facts of the case weren’t made available to the public – the public was left with the impression that the officers simply decided to beat up a slightly uncooperative black man.

Koon, Powell, Briseno and Wind were charged with use of excessive force. The original jury trial was supposed to take place in a heavily minority area, but was transferred to Simi Valley, a heavily white area. The four officers were essentially acquitted.

And riots broke out. Huge riots across South Central Los Angeles. Stores were looted. Asian-owned stores in particular were targeted and burned to the ground.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

She continued, “It’s an amazing experience – one that could change your life while shaping this country for decades to come.” Change again! But it’s the mode of change that was interesting  in Michelle’s pitch: “If you take a position as a fellow, you’ll help more people to step up at the local level, where there are so many opportunities to make so much change. You’ll register voters, recruit and train volunteers, run phone banks, have conversations with people on their front porches, and build the relationships that will bring your community together to fight for progress.”

That’s a busy summer. Let’s take these elements one at a time. First, Michelle wants me to help people step up at the local level. She doesn’t really define that. Somehow, I doubt she wants me to give job training that would encourage people to support their families. She probably isn’t interested in me filing LLC papers for folks so they can get a business started. She also doesn’t want me passing the hat for charitable causes or getting socially disorganized kids into church groups that might help them. “Stepping up,” according to Michelle, means shilling for her husband.  After four long years, change has come down to getting her husband getting a second term. What kind of change is this?  The king in the familiar aphorism, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

But there’s more. I can register voters, too. Now, as a general matter, I’m not much for registering voters. That’s because if people don’t care enough to have registered, I don’t want them voting. It’s not difficult to register to vote – you can do it quickly and easily. It’s your civic duty to figure out how to make yourself eligible for the vote. In fact, you can even walk into a library or post office and pick up a form. That’s part of citizenship. If you haven’t bothered to register, I’m not enthused about your vote cancelling mine out. I’m fine with fewer voters – too many voters already vote based not on the positions of the candidates, but on whether they “seem like a nice guy.” The last thing I want is more ignorant voters.