Holding the Thin Blue Line

 

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

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

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

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

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

• Adopt A Cop BJJ (trains officers in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu)
• National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (improves officer safety & honors the fallen)
• The National Fallen Officer Foundation (helps families of officers slain in the line of duty)

I asked Mike Baron some questions about Thin Blue Line.

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

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

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

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

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

The Islamophobia Industry

 

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

FrontPage Mag readers may recall that I interviewed Ms. Bederman here about her previous book The Serpent and the Red Thread, a unique history of antisemitism blending fiction, history and myth. She is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here.

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

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

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

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

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

MT: What is the Islamophobia industry?

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

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

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

I Can't Breathe

After a few years of the widespread tearing-down of statues honoring American heroes such as the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln, Founding Father George Washington, and anti-slavery giant Frederick Douglass, recently a few new statues went up for a change. Massive golden busts of the late, far-left Congressman John Lewis and Black Lives Matter icons George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were erected in Manhattan's Union Square.

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

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

Floyd and Taylor are only two of the police victims elevated to household names by the powerful Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. The self-proclaimed trained Marxists who founded that subversive movement exploited, and continue to exploit, those victims in order to incite a civil war in America by hyping a false narrative of the systematic targeting of blacks by law enforcement. That is the subject of I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax is Killing America, the newest book by Freedom Center founder, conservative warrior, and bestselling author David Horowitz.

America Enraged

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

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled Wrath: America Enraged. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MT:     How has anger become such a dominant factor in American politics?

The Road to Civilizational Collapse

On the cusp of the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama memorably told a crowd at Missouri University that “we are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This notion that the incoming administration intended to burn down the old, flawed America, so that a social justice utopia could rise from its ashes, was greeted with ecstatic cheers from the crowd and from Progressives everywhere.

Obama’s promise took two presidential terms to gather momentum; former President Trump temporarily stalled its course. But under new President Joe Biden, that fundamental transformation is cascading to fruition so rapidly that one is reminded of a Hemingway character’s reply about how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Indeed, “fundamental transformation” no longer sufficiently describes the accelerating chaos in our country: economy-killing pandemic lockdowns; the collapse of law and order; unprecedented racial tensions; Big Tech control of the flow of information; spiking inflation and the threat of food shortages; a tsunami of illegal border crossings; a media-driven COVID panic dividing the country; the new racism of  Critical Race Theory; rising Antisemitism (always a reliable bellwether of barbarism metastasizing in a society); “cancel culture” assaults on freedom of speech; and more. Obama’s promise of “fundamental transformation” could more rightly be considered “civilizational collapse.”

If you think that sounds like hyperbole, re-read that partial list of our current crises. But what underlies those crises is the culmination of a concerted war of attrition on the three basic pillars that keep a society grounded and stable: love of God, love of country, and love of family. Faith, nation, family.

Faith

This year’s White House Prayer Breakfast featured a proclamation from President Biden in which, for the first time since the tradition was instituted in 1952, the word “God” was not uttered. This registered barely a blip in the news media, but it symbolized an unsettling, dramatic shift from the priorities and worldview of the previous administration. By contrast, former President Trump's 2017 proclamation mentioned God five times; in 2018, five times; in 2019, seven times; and his 2020 proclamation mentioned God 11 times. 

This August, the organization of chaplains at Harvard, a university founded by Puritans to train clergy for the new commonwealth, elected its newest president – an atheist who authored a book called Good Without God. He proclaimed in a New York Times interview, “We don’t look to a god for answers. We are each other’s answers.”

In a recent article, pastor and political scientist Ryan Burge shared research highlighting what he said “may be the biggest cultural shift in our lifetimes”: the exodus of Generation Z (those born in 1996 and later) out of religion. Nearly half (44.4%) identify as atheist, agnostic, or belonging to no religion in particular. That makes them the least religious generation in U.S. history.

These are only the most recent examples confirming that the secular left has gradually and fundamentally transformed America from a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values into one in which the diminishing number of devout Christians are openly demonized by the cultural elites as our “domestic Taliban.”

Men Without Chests

 

In a 1998 interview in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden told ABC News’ John Miller that then-President Bill Clinton’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia after the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” battle in Mogadishu proved the American soldier is a “paper tiger” – a toothless threat. Muslim youth are no longer intimidated by Western superpowers, bin Laden warned.

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

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

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

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

‘Unseen’ Terror

 

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey James Higgins:     I took a strange path into counterterrorism. I wanted to be a writer since I was five years old, and after college I worked as a journalist to pay the bills. When I was between reporter positions, I took a job as a private investigator, thinking it would help my detective fiction. I became enthralled with the excitement and nobility of police work, and I joined a sheriff’s office, then DEA. That led to a twenty-five-year career in law enforcement.

Ironically, I’m libertarian and believe in legalizing most drugs, so during my career with DEA, I focused on violent offenders. I started in NYC and investigated transnational criminal groups who were killing and abducting people—then 9/11 changed everything. I was in the first group of people to arrive at the collapsed north tower of the World Trade Center, where I carried bodies out of the rubble. Standing in the remains of those glorious monuments to capitalism, I swore I’d hunt down the monsters behind the attacks.

I assisted the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force with the PENTBOMB investigation of the al-Qaeda attacks, and when my partner and I identified a man who allegedly conspired with the hijackers, I knew DEA’s drug enforcement tactics were effective against terror cells. As a DEA liaison to Department of Homeland Security Operations Center, I advocated for DEA’s inclusion in counterterrorism operation, despite pushback from bureaucrats who wanted to keep DEA as a single-mission agency.

I volunteered for DEA’s nascent office in Kabul, Afghanistan, and there, I battled bureaucrats to go after the people I’d vowed to hunt on 9/11. I wrestled a suicide bomber, accompanied the military on a terrorist raid, and fought a Taliban operative. Our office trained the Afghan Counter Narcotics Police and led them on their first mission out of Kabul, where we arrested Taliban drug traffickers and freed a sex slave. As the first DEA undercover in Afghanistan since before the Russian invasion, I negotiated with a Pakistan drug trafficker for the delivery of 500 kilograms of heroin to NYC. I clashed with the military, intelligence community, and diplomats who refused to acknowledge the nexus between drugs and terrorism. Even DEA tried to stop me from investigating terrorism, but I persisted.

I joined DEA’s new FAST team, a foreign-deployed tactical team, and returned to Afghanistan. Finally, in 2006, congress passed 21 USC 960 (a), the narco-terrorism law, and I made the first arrest and conviction under that law and cemented DEA’s involvement in counterterrorism. I also investigated Haji Bagcho, a Taliban supporter and drug trafficker responsible for at least 19.7% of the world’s heroin supply. When I transferred to DEA’s Narco-Terrorism Group, I took Haji Bagcho to trial, and he became the most prolific heroin trafficker ever convicted in the United States.

I also investigated many other interesting cases, including the arrest and conviction of an Iranian operative who tried to purchase surface-to-air-missiles. I was extremely fortunate to serve my country, travel the world, and conduct historic investigations.

Surviving Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

UFC Fighters Take Down 'Marxist Ideologies'

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

But there is one sport that hasn’t been sabotaged (yet) by social justice activism, and likely won’t be: mixed martial arts (MMA), perhaps because it’s difficult to lecture your 0pponent about racial equity when you’re losing consciousness in a triangle choke.

After the lightweight bout at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 262 in Houston on May 15, for example, in which 32-year-old Beneil Dariush destroyed former champ Tony Ferguson, Dariush took the mic to deliver an unusual victory speech to the crowd.

“I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that’s number one,” the Iranian-born Darish began. Calling for calm from the crowd, he continued: “Number two, I want to dedicate this fight to all the people who’ve been hurt by Marxist ideologies. There are millions of you. I know it’s just a fight. I know it’s not much, but I want you to know that I love you. I understand the pain.”

Get Vaccinated – or Else

 

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

At the end of June, the propaganda rag The New York Times published an opinion piece whose title signaled the left’s growing frustration with the vaccine skeptics: “Vaccine Mandates Are Coming. Good.” Last weekend, The St. Louis Dispatch posted a letter that captured the mood of the totalitarians even more honestly. It was titled, “Enough already. Punish those who refuse the vaccine.”

Last Saturday on CNN, Leana Wen, former president of Planned Parenthood, tried to make the coercive case that life should be made difficult for those deplorable holdouts who still haven’t caved in to the increasing social and governmental pressure to receive a vaccine shot. “It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated,” Wen stated baldly. “Right now, it’s kind of the opposite. Basically, we need to make getting vaccinated the easy choice.”

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

WaPo Promotes the Sexual Grooming of Children

 

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

In the article titled, “Yes, kink belongs at Pride. And I want my kids to see it,” freelance writer Lauren Rowello declared her support for the presence of “kinksters” – practitioners of sexual fetishes – in parades during so-called “Pride Month,” the thirty days a year officially devoted to the compulsory celebration of LGBT narcissism. More specifically, she called for it in order to expose children as young as toddlers to “the scope and vitality of queer life.”

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

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

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

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

Tom Hanks: Great Actor, Nice Guy, White Supremacist

In a guest essay for the New York Times earlier this month, actor Tom Hanks apologized for his contribution as a filmmaker to erasing black history from American consciousness. Referencing the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, he wrote, “History was mostly written by white people about white people like me, while the history of Black people — including the horrors of Tulsa — was too often left out. Until relatively recently, the entertainment industry, which helps shape what is history and what is forgotten, did the same. That includes projects of mine.”

Those projects of his include producing numerous outstanding films and TV shows based on American history, including Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon. In addition, as one of America’s most beloved and successful living actors, the two-time Oscar winner has starred in some of the most memorable history-based movies of the last few decades, including Saving Private Ryan, Forrest Gump, and Apollo 13.

But in an essay last weekend titled “Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist,” National Public Radio (NPR) TV critic Eric Deggans griped that Hanks’ confessional “is not enough.” His film work has too often “focused on the achievements of virtuous white, male Americans,” making it “tougher for tales about atrocities such as Tulsa to find similar space.”

Deggans, who ironically is the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, concedes that Hanks is a consummate actor and “all-around stand-up guy” who has advocated for gay rights and environmentalism. Though Deggans did not note this, Hanks also backed the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Last year, he and wife Rita Wilson supported Michelle Obama’s “We All Vote” initiative, which aggressively pushed voting-by-mail during the 2020 presidential election. Hanks also ranks among Hollywood’s most charitable celebrities, supporting AIDS research, clean energy, and arts education. It’s fair to say he has contributed quite a bit to the progressive cause.

That’s wonderful, writes Deggans, but again – not enough. What matters to Deggans is that Hanks “is a baby boomer star who has built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men ‘doing the right thing.’” It’s unclear how this is a bad thing; it’s also unclear how a man who makes a living as an entertainment critic is unaware that approximately 99% of contemporary TV and movie villains are white males (the remaining 1% are space aliens or the living dead). Hollywood depicting white men doing the right thing is a refreshing change, not the norm.

Betraying America

 

by John Perazzo, David Horowitz, and Mark Tapson

No institution in America – from government offices to schoolrooms to corporate boardrooms and beyond – is safe today from the poisonous racism of Critical Race Theory and the “1619 Project” which posit that United States history is rooted in slavery and white supremacy, and that “whiteness” is an incurable disease. The institution whose subversion poses the greatest threat to our national security is the military, now overseen by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a determined advocate of these repulsive anti-American views.

Austin has required both Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project as core elements of the Pentagon’s military training programs – concealing their sinister agendas under the innocuous-sounding “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” label. He has ordered a purging of the military ranks of what he calls “extremists,” defined as opponents of these noxious views and supporters of Donald Trump and the Capitol protest of January 6^th. This transformational focus of our military forces is the Biden administration’s answer to the growing threat of a heavily-militarized China - a purging of “whiteness” and patriotic pride from the ranks of our frontline defenders.

Lloyd Austin III, nominated in late 2012 for CENTCOM commander by President Barack Obama, who openly sought the “fundamental transformation” of America, spent his eight-year tenure politicizing the military command. When Austin retired from active duty with the U.S. military in 2016, he was a four-star general. He spent the next few years in the private sector as a founder and/or board member of various corporations until last December, when President Biden nominated him for the position of U.S. Secretary of Defense. The Senate subsequently confirmed Austin on January 22 by a vote of 93-2, making him the first black Defense Secretary in American history, and also the most radical – even though most black Americans are patriots and not radical.

Austin was a natural choice for an administration that seems to value the skin color, gender and politics of its appointees over all other characteristics, and – like the President, the Vice President, and the Democratic Party generally – views America as a nation so scarred by its racist history that nothing short of a radical transformation would make it worthy of celebrating and defending. Like Obama, Austin is intent on transforming the American military with dangerous consequences for the 330 million Americans whose mission it is to defend.

During Austin’s Senate confirmation hearing on January 19, he vowed to rid the U.S. military of the many “racists and extremists” that allegedly have infiltrated it. “The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies,” he said. “But we can’t do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks.”

Or, if they preside over those ranks. When the military command divides its soldiers along racial and gender lines, demonizing some and making permanent victims out of others, the divisive effects of such guidelines can have a devastating impact on unit cohesion and troop morale. When this training includes videos lionizing Democrat presidents like Obama and Clinton as civil rights heroes but omits the gains made by black, Asian and Hispanic Americans under Trump, further seeds of division are sewn in the ranks. And when a maliciously false history of America as a nation born in slavery in 1619 is presented as truth, and the true American founding in 1776 as an avatar of equality and freedom is erased, the consequences for morale are destructive and dangerous.

If your military commanders tell you that your country was a racist nightmare from its inception, how does that affect your calculation as a 19-year-old when you are considering risking your life to defend it?

The Left's Urgent Mission to Sexualize Children

 

During a speech at Joint Base Langley-Eustice in Hampton, Virginia last Friday, listless President Joe Biden drifted into a strange reverie addressed to a female child in the audience, daughter of guest Brittany Bean, the wife of a soldier currently deployed in Afghanistan.

“I love those barrettes in your hair, man. I tell you what, look at her. She looks like she’s 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed,” Biden mused breathlessly. The little girl looked to be no older than perhaps seven years old.

This deeply disturbing behavior is not atypical of the 78-year-old Biden, who has a long, well-documented history of cringe-worthy touching and sniffing of girls and women in public. It is so typical, in fact, that this leering in the middle of his speech didn’t even raise an eyebrow among his fellow Democrats, particularly in the activist news media, who did not report on it. Imagine the apoplectic outrage if Biden’s comments had been made instead by former President Donald Trump, whom the media routinely demonized as a sexual predator for a boastful comment he made about grown women, not little girls, in a private conversation ten years before he was president.

But then, why should the left find Biden’s apparent sexualization of a child inappropriate? After all, sexualizing little children ranks very high on their anti-family agenda.

* * *

Right on the heels of the one day a year devoted to American patriots who gave their lives in military service to this country, comes an entire month designated for the compulsory celebration of a small segment of society simply for their sexual identity, which bullying activists have weaponized for vastly disproportionate political and cultural power.

For the cultural Marxists in the Biden administration, “Pride Month” is a time for raising the LGBT rainbow flag at embassies around the world to virtue-signal America’s commitment to divisive identity politics and to Karl Marx’s dream of abolishing the nuclear family.

Defeating 'The Enemy Within'

“Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War,” writes bestselling author David Horowitz, the radical left’s most hated apostate, in his new book from Regnery Publishing, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America. “The two parties are now guided by outlooks so divergent that their supporters seem to inhabit different universes.”

In The Enemy Within, the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center paints a painfully clear diagnosis of this schism. Dedicated to the millions of American victims of the left’s policies and “woke” bigotry, the book elucidates the roots of our division, beginning with an explanation (and condemnation) of identity politics – the racist, collectivist ideology that “forms the core conviction of America’s political progressives and the Democrat Party.” This “factually baseless and politically destructive” worldview, powered by a raging hostility to white Christian males and America’s founding principles, promotes the demonstrably ludicrous notion that “America is actually governed by racial and gender ‘hierarches’ that keep non-white, non-male citizens down,” Horowitz observes.

Identity politics, or cultural Marxism, is at heart an anti-American creed, he writes, that has metastasized throughout our K-12 schools (both public and private) and academia, replacing basic educational principles and scholarly inquiry with an historically ignorant activism that inculcates anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian bigotries. With the kind of factual, reasoned arguments that are the Kryptonite of today’s left, Horowitz proceeds to demolish such “dangerous fictions” of the left as “systemic racism” and “white privilege,” before eviscerating the left’s intellectual darling Ta-Nehisi Coates and his call for slavery reparations – or rather, racial extortion.

A section of the book called “Storm Troopers” begins with an examination of the Marxist revolutionaries of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization, “a racist and violent vigilante group” which has surged to political and cultural power in America by exploiting identity politics and centering itself within a network of hundreds of similarly anti-American leftist organizations. Many of those organizations, Horowitz notes, are funded by America’s largest corporations and philanthropies, such as billionaire agitator George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the ice cream magnates’ Ben & Jerry’s Foundation.

Netflix's Ugly Racial Propaganda Wins an Oscar

If, like most of America, you don’t care about Hollywood’s Academy Awards anymore and you missed its recent all-time lowest-rated broadcast, then you likely haven’t heard about an ugly bit of Black Lives Matter agitprop that scored an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

The woke propagandists at Netflix, the streaming service that made multi-million dollar deals with the Obamas and with former British royals Meghan and Harry to create social justice content, produced the half-hour film titled Two Distant Strangers. It was written and directed by Travon Free, whose credits as a writer include leftist political comedy for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Daily Show. It centers on a young, black graphic novelist named Carter who is trapped in a time loop somehow and, Groundhog Day-style, is forced to re-live deadly encounters with a police officer named Merk.

Spoilers follow:

The officer – a white man, of course – is a caricature 0f racist evil (“merk” is slang for committing violence, usually killing). Carter, by contrast, is polite, affluent, and intellectual. Over and over in a sort of living nightmare, he experiences being rousted by the cop on the street for no reason, in confrontations that always end with the unarmed Carter being killed – first suffocated to death in a chokehold while complaining “I can’t breathe” (sound familiar?), then shot to death by the trigger-happy Merk in subsequent run-ins.

Carter finally realizes both he and Merk are caught in some kind of endless cycle of lethal police brutality. When they manage to postpone the inevitable long enough to discuss their situation, Carter asks why Merk became a cop. “I guess I got sick of being bullied,” he confesses, and Carter counters, “So you became one.” This is a disgusting smear of hundreds of thousands of law enforcement personnel in this nation who chose for noble reasons to put their lives on the line every day to serve and protect.

But it gets worse. Carter goes on to lecture Merk about black victimhood: “You guys over-police our neighborhoods, over-punish us, lock us up for life, for some shit that white boys joke about in their memoirs. And then we’re stuck in a cycle we can’t even break.” Everyone’s responsible for their own choices, Merk retorts, including criminals. Carter shoots back: “What choice do they have when white people are born on third base and niggas outside the stadium?”

What outrageous dishonesty. In Travon Free’s race-mongering worldview, blacks are all given a raw deal at birth and whites are all given a backstage pass. In this patently false narrative, there is no thriving black middle class or wealthy blacks rewarded for talent and hard work, just as there are no poor, unsuccessful whites. There is only white privilege, black oppression, and mass incarceration.

“If we’re being really real here,” Carter continues, “the system rewards you with the best possible prize for the only thing you had nothin’ to do with – bein’ white.” Actually, if we’re being “really real,” the only systemic racism is in the Democrat Party, and the only privilege in today’s America is black Democrat privilege. But there’s no room for the truth in this short film; only propaganda.

Eight-Time President of Hollywood Foreign Press Association Shares Freedom Center Article, Gets Cancelled

In a panicked move to signal its commitment to racial justice, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a gaggle of Los Angeles-based, international journalists, has booted 88-year-old member Philip Berk from its ranks. The South African-born Berk was not just a run-of-the-mill reporter in the association; he had belonged to it for 44 years and was an eight-time president there. His unforgiveable transgression? Last weekend he shared an email with HFPA members, staff, general counsel, and COO containing a cut-and-pasted article which slammed the powerful Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as “a racist hate organization.”

Berk reportedly did not cite the source or add the link in his email, but the Los Angeles Times identified the article in question as “BLM Goes Hollywood,” written by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and posted at FrontPage Mag on Monday, April 12. The piece centers on Hollywood’s embrace of the BLM co-founders, particularly Patrisse Cullors, who has stirred controversy and even angered some BLM supporters recently by making her fourth home purchase, a $1.4 million compound in an affluent white neighborhood in Southern California. Cullors has also been signed by the powerful CAA talent agency and by Warner Bros. studio in a lucrative deal to develop scripted dramas and comedies, docuseries, and animated programming for children, young adults and families.

Typically for Greenfield, his article pulled no punches, condemning BLM as a “hate group” whose “race rioters burned buildings and terrorized communities” nationwide in 2020, and skewering its self-proclaimed Marxist leaders for their big-spending hypocrisy and cynical exploitation of white racial guilt.

One triggered HFPA member labeled Berk’s email “racist,” another “vile,” and a third called him “a thundering disgrace.” Member Rui Coimbra reportedly replied to Berk, “As a former HFPA President and still a strong and influential voice in the group, this is not the [type] of information you should be disseminating to HFPA members. Please remove me from any racist email you wish to send to the membership.”

Prior to Berk’s official expulsion from the HFPA, the organization released a statement damning Greenfield’s article: “The views expressed in the article circulated by Mr. Berk are those of the author of the article and do not — in any way shape or form – reflect the views and values of the HFPA. The HFPA condemns all forms of racism, discrimination and hate speech and finds such language and content unacceptable.”

The statement did not identify anything racist, discriminatory, or hateful in Greenfield’s article – but then, it didn’t need to; the mere fact that the article dared castigate the untouchable BLM was sufficient cause for the HFPA to hurriedly discredit it and distance itself from it. They must have found the article especially galling because the left regularly (and falsely) uses terminology like “racist hate group” to smear pro-American organizations like the Freedom Center, but they are unaccustomed to having it thrown back in their faces to describe anti-American radicals like BLM.