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.

Webinar: The Left's War on the Family

Last Thursday evening I gave a webinar for the David Horowitz Freedom Center's FrontPage Mag website, on the topic, "The Left's War on the Family." The video is now up at YouTube. Check it out here or below:

 

America at the End of Empire

In a recent monologue on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher called Americans a “silly people” for allowing themselves to be mired in culture war struggles, such as the politically correct cancelling of children’s books, while our superpower competition China is laser-focused on political, economic, and military dominance.

“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Maher asserted. He then referenced the latest “cancel culture” controversy – the woke mob’s targeting of children’s author Dr. Seuss over purported racism in his books: “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying fuck because they’re not a silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”

Maher pointed out that China has “built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals” in two generations. Meanwhile in America, “half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are a silly people,” he continued.

“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher added. “Do you think Chinese colleges are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Those are real and so is China. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”

Maher’s prescient lecture came just before the Chinese delegation ate their American counterparts for lunch at last week’s U.S.-China meeting in Alaska, telling Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his face that China does not view America as operating “from a position of strength.” With a new American President so decrepit he is shielded from the public by his handlers; with our southern border collapsing under tsunami of illegal aliens; and with Americans at each other’s throats in a not-so-Cold Civil War, China’s not wrong about that.

Trump and Reagan

It wasn’t enough for the left to cheat Donald Trump out of a second term in the Oval Office. He still poses such a threat to the Democrat Party that they are mobilized to prevent him from ever being allowed to seek political office again. But it won’t stop there. They want to erase Trump and his legacy from public memory entirely by any means possible: everything from banning him from social media, to denying him a Presidential library, to barring his name from federally funded monuments, street names, and park benches, to such petty measures as cutting his cameo appearance from Home Alone 2. If it were within their power – and it very nearly is – the Democrats would not hesitate to “vaporize” Trump (to use George Orwell’s term) and obliterate every trace of his existence from history. They would make him what Orwell called, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, an unperson.

Conservative commentator, speaker, and writer Nick Adams is determined to thwart this Democrat mission, single-handedly if necessary, and to cement the former President’s place as – in Adams’ view – the greatest in American history. Sometimes referred to as Trump’s favorite author (for having tweeted recommendations of some of his articles and books), Adams published a book last year titled Trump and Churchill, in which he expounded upon a list of ten points of similarity between the two leaders and argued that they were history’s greatest defenders of Western civilization (I reviewed that book for FrontPage Mag here).

In the same vein, Adams’ latest book, fresh off the press (Post Hill Press, to be precise), is Trump and Reagan: Defenders of America, in which he declares Trump to be “the second coming” of Ronald Reagan, only greater – a bold claim, considering the reverence in which conservatives generally hold our 40^th President. But Adams argues respectfully, without diminishing Reagan’s achievements at all, that Trump accomplished more in one term than Reagan did in two. In any case, in the course of his new book, Adams illuminates the characteristics, political successes, and even the subversive enemies they faced that make these two Presidents more alike than first glance might suggest.

Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the 15^th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur.

Leicester University management emailed the English department to notify them of these changes, stating, “The aim of our proposals [is] to offer a suite of undergraduate degrees that provide modules which students expect of an English degree.” Apparently a familiarity with Chaucer and other medieval authors is no longer what students expect of an English degree, but race-mongering identity politics is.

The new “modules” promised to be “excitingly innovative” and would cover “a chronological literary history, a selection of modules on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity, a decolonised curriculum, and new employability modules,” the email continued. Sri Lankan-born Vice Chancellor Nishan Canagarajah, reportedly at the center of the diversity push, said it was part of a long-term strategy “to compete on a global level.” And how is such wokeness, which has been in progress for some time now, working out for Leicester University? In just ten years, the school has plunged from 17th on the Guardian University Guide’s ranking of English universities to 77th.

Talking Cancel Culture on the 'God and Government' Podcast

This Wednesday marks the launch of the God and Government podcast, hosted by my friends John Steinreich and Marc Richardson. I'm honored to be their guest for the episode as we talk about the importance of the culture: engaging in it, understanding it, and pushing back against "cancel culture."

Check out the details below:

Trump's '1776 Report' Goes Down the Memory Hole

 

On his very first afternoon in office, newly-installed President Joe Biden showed exactly where his priorities lie – he scrubbed from the White House website the report from the 1776 Commission his predecessor Donald Trump had established to counter the New York Times’ mendacious, anti-American 1619 Project, and abolished the Commission itself.

“Look,” Biden stated during his recent remarks on his “racial equity” agenda,

in the weeks ahead I’ll be reaffirming the federal government’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility, building on the work we started in the Obama-Biden administration. That’s why I’m rescinding the previous administration’s harmful ban on diversity and sensitivity training and abolish the offensive counterfactual 1776 commission. Unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, not ignorance, and lies.

Indeed, unity and healing must begin with understanding and truth, and with rejecting ignorance and lies. That is precisely what the 1776 Commission set out to do in its report summarizing “the principles of the American founding and how those principles have shaped our nation,” and that is precisely why the Biden administration wasted no time burying it and dissolving the Commission: because it targeted the ignorance and lies promoted in the 1619 Project, which has been slammed by hundreds of scholars for its attempt to establish the country’s founding not in 1776, but in the year that African slaves first arrived on the North American continent. The 1619 Project’s goal was to reinforce and propagate the subversive leftist worldview that the United States was founded in slavery and that, as Barack Obama put it, racism is in our very DNA.

The 40-page 1776 Report, issued on January 18, notes that the purpose of President Trump’s Advisory 1776 Commission was to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.” The 16-member Commission, led by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn and vice chair Dr. Carol Swain, retired professor of political science, urges a restoration of “authentic” American education through which we can rediscover “our shared identity rooted in our founding principles”: “It is our mission – all of us – to restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.”

Sounds innocuous enough, unless you believe American identity is rooted in white supremacy and requires a “fundamental transformation.” Scholar/historian Victor Davis Hanson, one of the Commission members, noted that “at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.” But because it promotes the belief that being an American “means something noble and good” and that “America is the most just and glorious country in all of human history,” and because it rightfully condemns Progressivism, communism, racism and identity politics as challenges to American principles, angry leftists swiftly rose to de-legitimize it.

Tragic Heterosexuality and Toxic Masculinity

What do women want? According to one University of California at Riverside professor, the answer to the mystery which haunted Sigmund Freud is: other women. What do men want? The same professor believes the answer is that men want to be freed from the straightjacket of toxic masculinity, enabling them to enjoy more feminism and gender “equity”* in their relationships.

UC Riverside’s Jane Ward, author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality and professor of – wait for it - Gender and Sexuality Studies, gave an interview with Insider last month in which she declared that surveys taken during the coronavirus pandemic have exposed the “tragedy” of lackluster heterosexual sex and the ongoing misogyny of heterosexual men. “She feels sorry for straight people, especially straight women, who typically report some of the lowest sexual satisfaction in society, Ward told Insider. But she also feels sorry for straight men, who are pigeon-holed into toxic-masculine culture that teaches them they both need, and yet should also demean, women.”

Ward’s book has been praised by The New York Times Book Review (naturally) and by something called Bitch magazine, which referred to the book as “a loving lesbian intervention.” She interviewed almost 100 men, women, and “non-binary” people of various sexual orientations about their thoughts on heterosexuality, and concluded that “from an LGBT perspective,” being straight “looks actually very tragic.” It’s unclear if Ward interviewed anyone about non-binary relationships and whether they look tragic from a heterosexual perspective.

As an example, one “queer” European white female told Ward she felt sorry for her straight female friends for having to put up with relationships with “a cruel, insensitive, self-centered, or simply boring man.” The implication is that straight men are typically cruel, insensitive, self-centered, and boring, and that their partners would be happier in “queer” relationships because women aren’t ever cruel, insensitive, self-centered, or boring.

“Straight culture is based in a presumption that men and women are really different kinds of people, that they want different things, that they have different interests, and that they are sort of opposite,” Ward claims. “And they come together sexually and romantically because opposites attract.” No, they come together sexually and romantically because they are biologically and emotionally complementary, not opposites. In any case, Ward’s view is that heterosexuality is not just tragic but also a danger to society, since “binary” traditions such as gender-reveal parties and large weddings have resulted in wildfires and coronavirus deaths.