The Antidote to ‘Toxic’ Masculinity

Marine veteran Terry Bagley, a 70-year-old father of five who does housekeeping at a Veterans Affairs hospital, was walking to buy items for Thanksgiving in the Pigtown area of Baltimore, Maryland, on the Tuesday afternoon before the holiday. On his way to the market, a rowhome on the block exploded—likely from a ruptured gas line.

Bagley reportedly wasted no time hurrying to the rescue of anyone who might be trapped inside the burning building. Firefighters later found him in the rubble. Bagley, in critical condition, was placed in a medically-induced coma. His injuries—including a broken pelvis, femur, and hand—will require surgery. (A GoFundMe page set up for the Vietnam vet has raised over $40,000 of a $150,000 goal thus far.) But a 16-year-old girl and 48-year-old woman who were inside the home survived in stable condition.

Amid the usual litany of disheartening news items highlighting the worst of human behavior—mass shootings, wartime atrocities, and acts of random, pointless violence—Terry Bagley’s story is one that shines a spotlight on the best of what we are capable of.

His daughter Eris Bagley later told Baltimore’s 11 News, “He thought nothing about his own life to save two women that he did not know.” Questioned about why her father entered the burning home, she replied, “Because he’s a Marine.”

“My dad endured polio as a child. He also endured the thing with Camp Lejeune with toxic water and he also served in the Vietnam War,” she added. “[He was] heroic, but I wish he didn’t do it because now I’m scared that I am about to lose him. But I’m glad he did it to save people he didn’t know.”

His son Terry Bagley Jr. told reporters:

“His heroic behavior is nothing new. … I’ve always seen this, and I think that every child should look up to their father. … Every child should be proud of their father, and I am very proud of what he did, but I am also scared as well, and I’ve got to be honest with that. But I’m praying to my God, and I believe in my God, and I just want my father to get better, and I just want his story to be out there that a 70-year-old man put his life on the line to save two people.”

A 70-year-old man put his life on the line to save two people. Even at his advanced age, which he surely knew would make his own survival unlikely, Bagley did not hesitate to take that risk in an attempt to rescue total strangers in terrible danger. He exhibited the heroic degree of selfless courage that is the hallmark of a cultural virtue that, among younger generations today, has become a dirty word: chivalry.

Institutions of Lower Learning

 

As if you needed any further evidence that even our most prestigious institutions of higher learning have degenerated into woke indoctrination mills aimed at deconstructing the moral, intellectual, and cultural underpinnings of our civilization, a new course catalog for Princeton University reveals that the Ivy League school will begin offering its students courses on BDSM and fetishism next year.

As colleges and universities all over the Western world hasten to “decolonize” their curricula in order to erase the magnificent legacy of no-longer-relevant Dead White Males™ such as Will Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, they offer, as alternatives, courses like Princeton’s “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” both of which students (or their parents) paying $57,000 in tuition can look forward to in 2023.

“Black Queer BDSM material culture resists contextualization in relationship to biographical narratives because of the underground elements of the community,” reads the jargon-bloated course description. What will students be doing in the course? Why, they will “consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” of course.

Nothing expands the mind and prepares one to become a productive citizen of society quite like surveying the personal ephemera of BDSM enthusiasts.

Students of the Black + Queer in Leather course will be required to read such classic works of scholarship as The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography by Ariane Cruz and A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young.

In “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization,” a course which impressively manages to combine the Left’s obsessions with perversion and anti-Westernism, students will be reading, among other works, On the Worship of the Fetish Gods by Charles De Brosses and “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” by Karl Marx.

With a reading load like that, who’s got time to trudge through Shakespeare?

The Right Take Podcast Episode 11: "Has Our Culture Lost its Mind?" with Dr. Chloe Carmichael

  

Clinical psychologist Dr. Chloe Carmichael and I discuss everything from gender ideology to the crisis of masculinity to COVID masking and more. She was a fun, enlightening guest. Check it out:

Here is the episode on FrontPage Mag. And Spotify. And Apple Podcasts.

This Thanksgiving, 'The Nation' Was Grateful for Abortions

 

This past Thanksgiving Day was greeted with the usual chorus of anti-American diatribes from the miserable utopians of the Left. Wealthy celebrity ingrates like Bette Midler and John Leguizamo sneered at Americans and the holiday on social media (the John Wick actor tweeted, “Happy indigenous survivor’s day! F*ck thanksgiving!”). MSNBC’s resident race-monger Joy Reid accused Republicans of wanting to portray Thanksgiving as a “simplistic fairy tale” to cover up that America was founded on “genocide.” Even the head of terrorism-linked CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, lectured Americans about “the dark history associated with this holiday” and the “unspeakable atrocities” committed against Native Americans.

But nothing sank to the depth of the Left’s perverse worldview quite like a Thanksgiving Day essay in the radical rag The Nation titled, “We’re Thankful for Our Abortions,” which declared there’s literally nothing to be grateful for in our current state of the union except the endangered freedom to abort one’s own unborn children.

The essay’s author is Nikiya Natale (preferred pronouns “she/her”), deputy director of We Testify, a group created by the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) which advocates for women who have undergone abortions. Her bio on the group’s website states that Natale’s “passion” for her work “stems from her own multiple abortion experiences.” Multiple “experiences.”

Natale claims in her Nation article that many of those who have had abortions “celebrate their experience”; some of the women themselves – We Testify “abortion storytellers” – then go on to detail their infanticides in the article and why they are “thankful” for them.

Predictably, like all social justice warriors who live in a state of ceaseless discontent over perceived historical injustices, Natale felt compelled to begin her essay by wondering “why our nation celebrates the complicated holiday of Thanksgiving at all” – “complicated” because America was “founded on the unforgivable genocide of Native Americans.”

Traditional Masculinity Should Be GQ’s 'New Masculinity' -- My latest at Intellectual Takeout

 

Several years ago when I wrote cultural pieces for the now-defunct Acculturated.com, Intellectual Takeout reposted about a dozen of those articles. Last Monday they published this new one I wrote specifically for them, and I hope to contribute to them more often:

 GQ magazine held its 25th “Men of the Year” event in London last Wednesday. Talents from across the fields of culture, sports, and entertainment gathered for the glitzy gala celebrating the British men’s style magazine’s honorees for Men of the Year. Curiously, over a third of the personalities on that list were women.

Of the 26 honorees named, an eyebrow-raising nine were female, including Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney, The Batman actress Zoë Kravitz, English soccer captain Leah Williamson, and House of the Dragon star Emma D’arcy, who apparently identifies as “non-binary.” Other women were Marisa Abela, Sheila Atim, Es Devlin, Myha’la Herrold, and Sharon Horgan.

Making a feeble stab at clarification, the host Condé Nast Events wrote in a statement, “Rather than honouring people in a distinct ‘awards’ section of the issue, the entire MOTY issue will become a celebration of the people who dominated culture and shaped the zeitgeist of 2022.”

The Right Take Podcast Player

I've fallen behind in posting my latest episodes of The Right Take podcast -- I'm up to 10 now -- but it finally occurred to me to just embed the player to the upper right side of the page. So you can now just check out the latest episodes there. I'll post here whenever a new episode is up.

The latest is my conversation with Dr. Peter Wood, author of two important books we discuss in the episode: 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, and Wrath: America Enraged. Check it out in the player to the right.

All the episodes are collected here at FrontPage Mag, here at Spotify, and here at Apple Podcasts.

The Right Take podcast ep. 5: 'The Muslim Brotherhood of Death'

The latest episode of The Right Take podcast is up, this one a fascinating talk with my friend, Egyptian-American scholar and patriot Cynthia Farahat, about her new book on the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Right Take podcast: 'My Son Hunter' and Conservative Storytelling (featuring Brian Godawa)

 

Check out my latest episode of The Right Take podcast, featuring my good friend and screenwriter Brian Godawa discussing his controversial new film My Son Hunter and the state of Hollywood and "conservative" storytelling.

The Right Take podcast ep. 3: Debunking Zinn and the 1619 Project (featuring Mary Grabar)

Here is episode #3 of my new podcast, featuring my guest, scholar Mary Grabar, discussing her important books Debunking Howard Zinn and Debunking the 1619 Project. Don't miss it!

The Right Take podcast: The Devil's Pleasure Palace (featuring Michael Walsh)

 

Here is episode #2 of my new podcast, this one an interview with author, screenwriter, culture critic and pundit Michael Walsh about cultural Marxism, the state of masculinity, and much more.

The Right Take podcast: The Diversity Delusion (featuring Heather Mac Donald)

 

The first 3 episodes of my podcast "The Right Take" are up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Here's the first one, a conversation with author Heather Mac Donald about the "diversity delusion" and the social justice corruption of the medical field.

 

Please forgive the audio issues in this one -- we corrected them in later episodes -- and just enjoy her brilliance.

 

As of this coming Monday 9/12, you will also be able to hear my podcast episodes directly at FrontPageMag.com.

The Movie Conservatives Have Been Waiting For is Here

The movie that conservative audiences have been waiting for is here. And by that I don’t just mean that yesterday was the eagerly-anticipated premiere of My Son Hunter, the Robert Davi-directed dark comedy about Joe Biden’s wayward son and his laptop from hell. I mean that this is the political film that finally sets a new bar for conservative filmmaking, far above the heavy-handed messaging and awkward acting that right-leaning audiences have generally had to settle for in the recent past.

You have never seen a conservative film quite like this. Produced by Phelim McAleer and Anne McIlhenny (FrackNation, Gosnell, The Obamagate Movie) and written by screenwriter/novelist Brian Godawa (To End All Wars, The Obamagate Movie), My Son Hunter careens – like a drunken Hunter himself – from comedy to tragedy, from family drama to high-level political corruption, from moral brokenness to moral courage. Surprising stylistic quirks abound, including word balloons onscreen and characters breaking the “fourth wall” to address the audience directly. And yes, just like Hunter’s life, there is an almost nonstop parade of hookers, drugs, and shady deals – hence the R rating that sadly may discourage some conservative moviegoers (Movieguide gives My Son Hunter an “Excellent” rating but advises “extreme caution” due to “immoral carnal behavior, images of women in skimpy outfits, and strong foul language”). The Daily Mail reported overhearing one viewer at a private screening describing the film as “Not your mother's conservative movie.”

The plot centers on Teflon Addict Hunter Biden, played by British actor Laurence Fox (Gosford Park, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Frankenstein Chronicles), and his terrified realization that the personal laptop he carelessly forgot to pick up from a repair shop could derail his father’s presidential campaign. A hooker who has captured Hunter’s heart offers to help him spin the publicity, but in order to do that, she needs to know all the potentially damaging material on that computer. As the sordid contents reveal the depth and breadth of Biden family corruption, the hooker comes to a slow political revelation.  

The Bullies of Woke

Totalitarian Cancel Culture, the bullying trans lobby, and the race-mongering indoctrination of Critical Race Theorists, among other leftist assaults on society, have turned daily life into everyday battlefields for normal Americans who stand in the way of Progressive social engineering.

To address this ubiquitous, corrosive phenomenon, Canadian author Diane Bederman has written Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health just published by New English Review Press. Ms. Bederman is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, and The #IslamophobiaIndustry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West, all of which I have either reviewed or interviewed her about (see links) for FrontPage Mag.

Bullies of Woke documents the serious damage that bellicose leftist activists are wreaking upon the mental health of our children, who are subjected in schools and in the culture at large to unrelenting pressure to conform to, if not actually celebrate, woke ideology. In many cases our children are literally being bullied to death – committing suicide because they are unable to handle the aggressive bullying from the fanatical proponents of Progressive-driven movements such as Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and Cancel Culture. Bullies of Woke is simultaneously a guidebook to the modern woke movement and a call to action for the silent majority to push back and restore common sense and bedrock Judeo-Christian values in our homes, our schools, and our nations in the West.

I asked Ms. Bederman some questions about her new book.

Mark Tapson:           Diane, your book covers a lot of ground and many questions come to mind, but let me just begin by asking what inspired you to view the left’s ideological assaults of Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory, and the like through the lens of its impact on the West’s mental health?

Finding Hope Amid Global Persecution

In a recent FrontPage Mag article, Shillman Fellow Raymond Ibrahim noted that a new study found that more than half (54%) of the Americans surveyed believe religious freedom is eroding in the United States, and an even larger number (59%) believe that the treatment of Christians and intolerance for their beliefs are getting worse. This echoes the warnings of journalist Rod Dreher, author of Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, who insists that the “soft totalitarianism” already here in America will inevitably lead to increasingly harsh persecution of the Christian community. That community, Dreher urges, needs to prepare itself accordingly, even for the possibility of martyrdom.

Unfortunately, many Christians in America suffer from an “it couldn’t happen here” naiveté and the sort of complacency that generally afflicts the affluent, free West. Too many of us are unaware – because the overwhelmingly secular mainstream media largely ignores this crisis – that Christianity is the most-persecuted religion worldwide. The shocking reality for Christians in regions where the powers-that-be are violently hostile to them should not only galvanize us into taking action to help those victims, but also wake us up to the growing threat here at home. It must be stressed that this is an issue that impacts all of us who value the right of religious freedom, not just Christian believers.

To gain an eye-opening understanding of the dire circumstances for Christians around the world, the Family Research Council has released a necessary new book by my friend Lela Gilbert, Arielle Del Turco, and retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin titled Heroic Faith: Hope Amid Global Persecution.

Lela Gilbert is a prolific and award-winning writer who has authored or co-authored more than sixty books, including the critically-acclaimed Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner, which was listed as one of the 20 best non-fiction Jewish books of 2012, and more recently, Baroness Cox, Eyewitness to a Broken World, released in November 2021. She serves as Senior Fellow for International Religious Freedom at Family Research Council and as a Fellow at the Hudson Institute, working with the Center for Religious Freedom. She writes for Newsweek, Jerusalem Post, Fox News, and elsewhere.

I posed some questions to Lela about the new book.

Inside the Horror of Islamic Sex Slavery - and the Real War on Women

Last week marked the seventh annual commemoration of the Yazidi genocide, though you wouldn’t know it from watching establishment media. Nor would you know that there is an ongoing genocide of Christians taking place in Nigeria, nor that throughout the Islamic world countless women and girls are enduring kidnapping, forced marriages, forced conversions of Christians to Islam, genocidal rape, and/or widespread sex trafficking even in countries that are supposedly our allies in the War on Terror.

To keep abreast of these crises, one needs to seek out the work of such concerned journalists as the Freedom Center’s own Raymond Ibrahim or Dutch journalist Sonja Dahlmans, who work desperately to bring international attention to the plight of the victims of an actual war on women.

I recently interviewed Ms. Dahlmans about these issues. She currently writes (in Dutch only) for the conservative political news site PAL NWS, and is studying Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology, where she will be starting her thesis.

For those readers who would like to help make a change - and to participate in the effort to protecting and liberating the victims of Islamic Jihad, sex slavery and rape, please contact Sonja on her Twitter at: @SonjaDahlmans.

Mark Tapson: Sonja, please tell us what the focus of your journalistic work has been in recent years, and why you’re passionate about it.

Sonja Dahlmans: I focus mainly on Christian persecution, but I have also written about persecution of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria and of Hindu girls in Pakistan. Women and girls from these groups are often targeted in Islamic countries or regions. The abduction, rape, forced marriage and forced conversion (to Islam) of non-Muslim women and girls is a widespread problem. This is the subject I write about the most, because I am afraid it is still underestimated, although lately there has been more attention to it. Unfortunately not often in the mainstream media, the subject is almost only discussed on Christian (or other religious minority) pages or reports.

MT: This past week was another annual commemoration of the Yazidi genocide, but it’s not over, is it? Western media give this little attention, but there are still literally thousands of women and girls missing today, aren’t there?

SD: No, it is not over at all. First of all, ISIS is still active in Iraq and Syria as we have seen for example in Syria (last February) when they helped jihadists within al-Sina prison to escape. There are so called sleeper cells too and they still carry out attacks. With regard to the Yazidi women and girls that they took captive, there are still around 2.700 of them in the hands of ISIS, or at least they are missing and we don't know where they are. This is devastating for them and their families, as you can imagine. While there is only a little attention to this, the Yazidi women and girls that are probably still in the hands of ISIS, let's not forget that there are also Christian women and girls who were taken by ISIS and are still missing. That is a subject you hardly hear anything about, but it does not mean it doesn't exist. 

I still hear and read that women and girls are being bought back, sometimes for a lot of money, and brought back to their families. This is really gruesome; these men, jihadists, have already earned money by trading these women, sexually exploiting them, and now earn money by selling them back to their own communities. There should be a lot more media coverage on this; it is not over, not by far for these victims and their families. 

Defenders of the West

Historiography has been dominated in recent decades almost exclusively by leftists determined to take a wrecking ball to the glorious edifice of Western civilization in the name of social justice and multiculturalism. New York Times propagandist Nikole Hannah-Jones of the widely-debunked but nonetheless influential 1619 Project comes to mind. The coordinated mission of such activists has been to pervert and subvert the grand narrative of our culture into a sordid tale of oppression, exploitation, and white supremacy, and to brand all our flawed heroes as racists and knock them off their pedestals, both figuratively and literally.

This is one reason why the new book Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam, by historian Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, is such a refreshing, even thrilling read. As if the title alone weren’t guaranteed to inflame Progressive sensibilities, the book is unabashedly dedicated to “all the Past, Present, and Future Defenders of that which is Good, Right, and True.” Standing up for the Good, the Right, and the True (capitalized, no less) in our postmodern, post-Christian era? That’s a bold, increasingly rare position for any historian and publisher (Bombardier Books, in this case) to take today.

Defenders is a sort of follow-up to Ibrahim’s essential 2018 book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. That book centered on decisive battles in the clash of civilizations, while the newer one zeroes in on the profiles of eight decisive men in that ongoing conflict, between the 11^th and 15^th centuries, from Spain’s El Cid and England’s Richard Lionheart to lesser-known but no less heroic figures such as France’s Saint Louis and the “Albanian Braveheart” Skanderbeg.

As in Sword and Scimitar, the foreword to Defenders was written by renowned historian Victor Davis Hanson, who actually served as Ibrahim’s Master’s thesis advisor in the late ‘90s. Hanson says of the men in Ibrahim’s latest, “In what now may seem an archaic sensibility, they were fighting for a unique way of life—or often a restoration of it—against a rising challenge completely foreign to everything in their experience, from the aspirations voiced on the Sermon of the Mount to Classical traditions of individual liberty.” Ibrahim himself explains that the book is about “eight men who, driven by something greater than themselves, devoted much of their lives and went to great lengths… to make a militant if not desperate stand against Islamic aggression.”

Guns and Masculinity

In opening comments Wednesday for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on so-called “assault weapons,” Democrat Senator and gun-confiscation enthusiast Dick Durbin threatened that it is “time to name and shame” the makers of AR-15s, the rifle Democrats have demonized as “weapons of war.” Gun manufacturers aren’t the trigger-pullers behind mass shootings, but they are a much easier and more politically useful scapegoat to target than the criminally insane minds of the actual shooters. Democrats aren’t interested in ending gun violence anyway; if they were, they would be holding hearings on the shootings perpetrated by gang members in Democrat-run inner cities, by terrorists, and by the criminally insane. What they want to end is not gun violence but gun ownership.

Sitting with posters of AR-15 advertisements placed prominently behind him, Durbin claimed hyperbolically that there have been “309 mass shootings” in the United States so far in 2022. “Why are these killing machines flying off the shelves after they were banned for a decade, until 2004?” he asked rhetorically. "Maybe it’s the ads that market the ‘assault weapons.’ Symbols of independence, freedom, or the promise that owning an AR-15-style-gun will make you more of a man. Or could it be the enticing prospect of toting around the same style of weapon that soldiers and Marines use to defend our country in combat?"

Let’s break down this sneering statement, because it is very revealing of the Left’s perspective on guns and masculinity, both of which the Left would like to eradicate.

First of all, there is the obvious propaganda of the loaded (pardon the pun) terminology like “killing machines” and “assault weapons” to refer to tools that are more often used to stop or prevent killing and assaults. Second, what's wrong with an advertisement and a product that appeal to one’s desire for independence, freedom, and the capability to defend one’s home and community? Nothing to the average American patriot, but they run against the grain of the average leftist’s totalitarian impulse for control.

As for owning an AR-15 making you “more of a man,” Durbin meant it as a taunt to suggest that male gun owners are insecure about their masculinity. But in fact – and this assertion will cause the heads of feminists and proud non-binary types to explode – owning a firearm actually does make one more of a man. One of the universal duties of manhood is to fulfill the role of protector. Having the capability (such as a firearm), the training, and the will to stand up and protect your life, your loved ones, your property, and your community is a clear marker of moral masculinity. Not in the swaggering way of someone looking to pick a fight, but in the quiet strength and confidence of a man who understands, respects, and is capable of wielding the power of righteous force. In that sense, owning a firearm and being trained and ready to use it when necessary does indeed make you more of a man than someone who willfully abdicates that responsibility.  

Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom

When COVID-19 first reared its ugly head a mere couple of years ago (seems like much longer, doesn’t it?), the Trump-hating Left recognized that here was a crisis too good to waste, to paraphrase Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. As Cheryl Chumley observes in her new book Lockdown: The Socialist Plan to Take Away Your Freedom, “Democrats, progressives, globalists, collectivists, socialists, and Marxists saw opportunity to reshape an entire world.” Lockdown, from Humanix Books, is her damning overview of how the power-lusting Left manipulated and exploited the pandemic to kickstart their Great Socialist Reset.

Chumley is the online opinion editor for The Washington Times, an Army vet, a journalist, and author – most previously (2020) of Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise or America Will Fall. If you are unfamiliar with her writing, Ms. Chumley pulls no punches in her takedowns of the Left, and makes no apologies for her Christian perspective on political events. She is not reticent about identifying as “evil” the forces wreaking ruin in the world today; nor is she vague about their aim: leftists “want total and complete lockdowns of individual freedoms, individual rights, individually held liberties so they can stage their reset and reshape a new America, a new world, more in line with their collectivist and elitist beliefs. It’s called destroy, then rebuild. What they’re destroying is the Constitution; what they’re trying to rebuild is cultural Marxism and communist control.”

Along those lines, she bluntly states that, in the COVID pandemic, “Democrats saw opportunity to control. To expand power. To rule. To crush. To subjugate. To usher in political reforms, economic changes, and societal shifts of such magnitude that even a Trump term two couldn’t undo.” This agenda, Chumley correctly writes, is “shameless, despicable, and outright evil.”

After that forceful opening, Chumley goes on to break down the Left’s pandemic strategy in chapters devoted to: the media-driven fear-mongering that herded Americans into lockdowns and mask mandates; the targeting of children to mold collectivist thinking in impressionable young minds; the narrative that true patriotism means conformity to government command; the takeover of the health care field; the push to expand climate change legislation and a “green” economy; and more. Along the way she slams billionaire globalist technocrats like subversive philanthropist Bill Gates and evil mastermind Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, men who are funding the collectivist reshaping of every aspect of our society.

A Conservative Professor Fights UCLA's Bias - and Wins

It is a given today that our so-called institutions of higher learning are hostile to political conservatives, not only students but the minority of professors who openly lean Right. Even Progressive academics can find themselves targeted by Cancel Culture for minor or accidental transgressions against woke dogma. The punishment can range from “mere” ostracization, to a hopelessly smeared reputation, to the loss of one’s job – usually a combination thereof. It’s ugly and totalitarian, which is why any moral victory against the Left’s ideological intolerance is a blow for freedom of speech and political balance in the classroom.

Keith Fink – a successful attorney, legal commentator, academic, and author –was a Communications Studies lecturer at the University of California Los Angeles from 2008 until his forced departure in June 2017. His courses on “Race, Sex & Politics: Free Speech on Campus;” “Free Speech in the Workplace;” “Entertainment Law;” and “Arguing Contemporary Social Issues” were among the students’ most popular ones at UCLA. But Fink is politically conservative and an ardent, fair-minded advocate for truth, so a confrontation with the school’s Progressive administrators was inevitable.

In early 2017, Professor Fink found, for the first time in his experience, that his Department of Communication Studies was beginning to deny his PTEs (“permission-to-enroll” forms for students whose attendance in a class, for a variety of reasons, requires a professor’s approval). And it was clear he was being singled out. Even the school paper The Daily Bruin acknowledged that other professors in the department had no difficulties getting their PTEs approved. Fink, his TAs (teaching assistants), and even some students suspected the source of the problem was the reportedly leftist new Chair of the Department of Communication Studies, Kerri Johnson, who also arbitrarily decided to cap the size of the conservative Fink’s overflowing classes.

Austin Kaidi, a UCLA alumnus who has served as Fink’s TA, noted at the time that the room in which Fink taught “Communications Studies 167” held 292 seats, yet only 200 of the 241 students who attempted to join the class that year were able to enroll. Kaidi told The College Fix, “For the past five years, Professor Fink has been able to educate large numbers of students without any problems. However one quarter after the Communication Studies appoints a chairwoman with incredibly left-leaning ideals, Professor Fink, the only outspoken conservative in the department, is singled out, his PTE’s are revoked, and his future classes are limited.”

The 20 Dumbest Hollywood Hatemongers - The Top Five (written with David Horowitz)

 Top Tier: 5-1

“He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullshit artist, a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, thinks he’s gaming society, doesn’t pay his taxes. He’s an embarrassment to this country.”

5. Jim Carrey

Rubber-faced comedic actor Jim Carrey, 60, has been a star ever since the early ‘90s, going from the sketch comedy TV series In Living Color to starring roles in films such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But as his career peaked and waned, he remained relevant, as many other actors have, by becoming a virtuoso of self-righteous venom aimed at Republicans who disagree with him.

In November 2017 he tweeted, “The GOP and WH have become sinister conclaves of souless traitors, liars and thieves – a gangrene we must remove so democracy can live.”[1] A few months later he tweeted about President Trump, “If we allow this one-man Gomorrah and his corrupt Republican congress to continue alienating the world we are headed for suffering beyond all imagination.”[2]

In a November 2018 interview he declared about the Trump administration, “These are not people you can deal with. You cannot be bipartisan with a criminal. A rapist needs to be removed, not negotiated with. These people are raping our system, they’re destroying it right in front of us. These people have to be removed from our system because they’re bad for us.”[3] Bye-bye, two-party democracy. Hello, one-party state.

Carrey took his anti-GOP derangement to a whole other level by painting garish, crude images demonizing Trump and other conservative figures, and posting them to Twitter. He painted Melania Trump as a brainwashed robot,[4] Senator Ted Cruz as a vampire,[5] Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh forcing himself on a woman,[6] Trump sons Eric and Donald Jr. gruesomely gored by elephant tusks,[7] and psychotic portraits of Vice President Mike Pence[8] and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.[9]

But Trump, of course, was the primary target of Carrey’s demented visions. In 2017 he scrawled a lewd drawing of Trump kissing Putin’s bare butt.[10] He tweeted another infantile cartoon drawing of Trump with bloodied fangs, writing that the President would “EAT A BABY” onstage at an upcoming rally “to the delight of his zombie base.”[11]

In June 2018 he depicted Trump as an angry Roman soldier crucifying Jesus Christ.[12] In August he painted Trump being burned at the stake as a witch.[13] He also painted Trump dangling from a flagpole over a bustling cityscape, trussed in a straightjacket, his ankles tied to the pole with an American flag. Caption: “Can the Great Spewdini spew enough lies to escape the straight-jacket of his un-Presidented criminality?”[14] Funny you should mention a straightjacket, Jim.

The 20 Dumbest Hollywood Hatemongers Part III (written with David Horowitz)

Tier 2: 10-6

10. Michael Moore

“This is a nation founded on genocide
and built on the backs of slaves!”

Cinema propagandist Michael Moore, 68, is arguably one of the Left’s loudest and angriest voices of anti-American bile and anti-white racism. He is best-known for his 2002 anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine which depicted America as a violent, gun-crazed culture. It won the 2003 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. He is also known for Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the top award at Cannes and became the highest-grossing documentary of all time. Both are packed with what Spinsanity.org charitably described as “deceptive half-truths and carefully phrased insinuations.”[1]

Typical of Moore’s work, Bowling for Columbine was found to be “replete with staged, concocted, or deceptively edited content,” as the Freedom Center’s John Perazzo puts it.[2] That includes, for example, a scene in which Moore walked out of a bank with a rifle he claimed to have received as a reward for opening a new account – a staged event that involved a six-week clearance process for real customers.

A wealthy sycophant of communist dictators (he once characterized himself as a “fanboy” of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez,[3] for example, and has tweeted about his great admiration for Karl Marx[4]). Moore never tires of smearing America as a nation of gun-happy racists (“This is a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves!”[5]). He even complained that the SEAL team killing of Osama bin Laden was an “execution”[6] – as though the mass-murdering terrorist deserved a mere fine and probation.

Moore called Trump an “evil genius”[7] and “mass killer”[8] on the scale of Bin Laden for allegedly causing every COVID-19 death, and smeared Trump supporters as “legal terrorists.”[9] He even devoted a documentary to Trump’s political ascendance, Fahrenheit 11/9 (the title is a wordplay on both his earlier 9/11 documentary and the date Trump was elected to office). In it he made the predictable mindless comparison of Trump to Hitler.

Among his innumerable grotesque lies about America, the author of Stupid White Men has condemned our electoral system for being rooted in “racism,” “white supremacy,” and a desire to “stop black and brown people from voting.”[10] A more accurate name for his book would have been Stupid White Man. Naturally Moore sees no hypocrisy in his desire to keep his political opponents from voting. “Fuck the Republicans,” he stated after Joe Biden won the Presidency in 2020 amid accusations of widespread voter fraud. “Stop listening to them. They have nothing to do with what the majority of this country wants... We are the majority. We are the majority.”[11] False – more Americans identify as conservative than as liberals, or more to the point, pro-Castro leftists.

The 20 Dumbest Hollywood Hatemongers Part II (written with David Horowitz)

Tier 3: #15-11

15. Alyssa Milano

“The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.”

Alyssa Milano, 49, has gone from child star in Who’s the Boss? to TV roles in Melrose Place and Charmed, to tireless activism on issues such as AIDS, health care, gun violence, abortion, and of course, the #MeToo movement, which she helped launch. A supporter of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden, Milano revealed in 2019 that she had had two abortions when she was young, and she didn’t regret them because otherwise “I would not have my career.”[1]

She campaigned against the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, dressing up as an oppressed Handmaid’s Tale character and urging her followers to “bang down” their senators’ doors in protest. She warned that Kavanaugh would “affect everything we know to be true as American citizens.”[2] Later she told CNN she was “filled with rage” that conservatives like Trump and Kavanaugh were “institutionalizing sexual abuse.”[3] (Perhaps she confused them with the gender-fluidity crowd in America’s K-12 school administrations.)

Milano proclaimed at an October 2021 abortion rally in Los Angeles, “I cannot believe how fucked up America is right now. I can’t believe how a handful of men are successfully taking 50 years of rights away from women, and how a Supreme Court packed with abusers [sic] is just going to sit by and let it all fucking happen.” She called on men to “use your privilege to destroy your own privilege.”[4]

Claiming that this is the most dangerous time women have ever faced, she told attendees at a January 2019 rally in Washington, D.C., “I do not have equal rights in the Constitution. That’s right, because I have a vagina I do not have equality and justice.”[5] Of course, the Constitution does not contain the words “male” and “female” – precisely because its equal rights are afforded to all citizens, not genders. She also later lamented that giving birth was “very reminiscent of being sexually assaulted.”[6] A woman who equates rape with giving life is what you might call a perfect spokesperson for the crowd that wants to abort the unborn up to the moment of birth.

In early 2019 she sparked controversy for tweeting that “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood. Without white boys being able to empathize with other people, humanity will continue to destroy itself.”[7] After drawing backlash for this racist assault she doubled down:

I am sorry. I’m sorry for the decades and decades of oppression and abuses people of color have faced in this country. I’m sorry that as part of a privileged white majority we did not stop this Administration from happening. I’m sorry to those who have suffered at the hands of the Red Hats and the policies their leadership implements. See, I’m not apologizing to the Red Hats. I’m apologizing for them.[8]

Even though Milano wrestled in February 2021 with the dawning realization that hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett was not the victim of MAGA Trumpers but faked the attack on himself,[9] she tweeted: “Police exist to uphold white supremacy and have been empowered by laws and the courts to inject themselves into Black life for any reason…”[10] A brazen lie – and not a white one.

The 20 Dumbest Hollywood Hatemongers (written with David Horowitz)

On March 27, 2022, during a live television broadcast of the 94th Academy Awards, popular actor Will Smith hijacked the ceremony by storming onstage to slap comedian Chris Rock for a tame joke about Smith’s actress wife, Jada Pinkett. Then Smith returned to his seat and, in an epic explosion of Hollywood narcissism, spewed profane threats at Rock, which were broadcast around the world, sucking all the air out of an event designed to showcase the achievements of his fellow artists. Some speculated that Smith’s meltdown stemmed not from a chivalrous defense of his wife’s honor, but from the pent-up humiliation of being wedded to a woman who publicly insisted on having an “open marriage.”[1]

Instead of being ejected from the event and arrested for the assault, Smith was given the Best Actor Oscar moments later and received a standing ovation from the celebrity colleagues whose showcase he had just hijacked and trashed. As composer Oscar Levant once quipped in regard to Hollywood’s moral spinelessness: “Beneath the Tinsel of Tinseltown is … tinsel.”

Not long after Smith’s shocking performance, the world tuned-in to the pathetic spectacle of actor Johnny Depp’s anti-defamation lawsuit against his abusive ex-wife, actress Amber Heard. Trial testimony included such sordid revelations as: rampant drug and alcohol abuse (Heard reportedly drank two $500 bottles of wine a night, while Depp himself regularly spent as much as $30,000 a month on wine); mutual accusations of physical abuse; and the allegation that Heard defecated on Depp’s side of the bed when he tried to break up with her.

These are just two of the most recent examples of the moral bankruptcy of the Hollywood elites. For all their glamorous parading on red carpets, and their self-righteous posturing about social justice, Tinseltown is teeming with permanently damaged children and spoiled brats.

These are the same poseurs who powered the #MeToo movement but still defended and even honored the depraved director Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl in 1977[2] – prefiguring the exploits of “America’s Dad,” comedian and TV star Bill Cosby.[3] They turned a blind eye to disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults[4] while he was making them stars until the avalanche of accusations rendered him unable to boost their careers anymore. At the same time they were engaged in moral preening, they were fighting tooth-and-nail to deny one of Hollywood’s greatest directors, Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, East of Eden), an honorary Oscar because he was anti-Communist and they weren’t.[5]