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Wednesday, June 16, 2021

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 6th. 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?

Friday, June 4, 2021

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.