Speaking at the AFA Conference on School Shootings

I'm honored to have been invited to speak at the American Freedom Alliance's conference on school shootings on Sunday, May 20. I'll be talking about shootings and "toxic masculinity."

Description below:

AMERICAN FREEDOM ALLIANCE Invites You To Our Spring 2018 Conference Sunday, May 20th 9AM - 4 PM Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel

The more we look into these horrific shootings and the media's "coverage" of them, the more we're convinced of how important and unique this conference is. Make no mistake:  The Left has created the conditions that foster these shootings, and then exploits them to make conditions even worse, in a seemingly never-ending downward spiral where we all are made more vulnerable and, of course, less free. This conference aims to STOP that spiral and turn it around, so that our children and our society as a whole can be protected, strengthened and empowered. This conference isn’t only about school shootings.  It’s about protecting our rights, protecting our kids, protecting our values, our families and our boys and the mental well-being of our children, and all of this, each and every aspect, is required for self-governance to work.  It’s just that simple. Find out more here.

Bookworm Room Talk

I spoke yesterday to the Bookworm Room blogger's lunch group in Marin County about chivalry and the war on masculinity, and it seems she very kindly (way, WAY kindly) knocked out a writeup about my talk...

Mark Tapson wages war against whole idea of toxic masculinity

The Speaker’s group that I co-chair hosted a wonderful speaker today: Mark Tapson. If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s because you’ve seen his writing on quality conservative websites such as Front Page Magazine, the now defunct Truth Revolt (which is making way for a different, even better project), Breitbart, etc.
 
As is true for me, Mark is a former Democrat who found the cognitive dissonance between his values and the modern Democrat party too difficult to tolerate. Unlike me, he is not a gadfly but is, instead, a really deep thinker and a very knowledgeable man. Today, the thoughts and knowledge he shared with us revolved around the culture war on men and ways to counter the deep damage this war is inflicting on our fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers. Moreover, if these men are the primary victims, every woman in each man’s life becomes collateral damage.

The talk was wonderful. Mark is a very engaging speaker — he has a pleasant voice and his tone walks the fine line between lecture and conversation. You know he’s standing there educating you, but it feels as if you’re just at a party listening to the most interesting man in the room. Add knowledge and passion to the mix and you’ve got a talk that flies by. I was absolutely stunned when I realized that he’d been talking for 40 minutes. It felt like half that length. If we hadn’t had to clear the room, I think my group would still be there listening to him.

So what did Mark talk about? I didn’t take notes, so the rest of this post will be a little ragged, since my memory is more surreal than photographic. Anything intelligent in this post is Mark’s. Any mistakes or stupidities are mine.

Read the rest here.

Speaking to the Bookworm Room

If you're not familiar with the always-interesting, conservative Bookworm Room blogger, do yourself a favor and check out her site, where she ruminates on politics and culture.

I'm honored to say I've been invited to speak about my forthcoming book on chivalry and the war on masculinity before her luncheon group in the San Francisco Bay Area next week.

Onward and Upward

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

After editing the David Horowitz Freedom Center website TruthRevolt for nearly three years, I am excited to announce that I now hold two brand new positions at the Center: serving as its Director of Marketing and Media, and doing weekly writing and video commentary as its Journalism Fellow on Popular Culture.

TruthRevolt.org will be shutting down to make way for big changes at the DHFC. Here is the official announcement at the site:

This is to announce that TruthRevolt will be closing up shop as of the end of today, Wednesday, March 7.

Ben Shapiro and David Horowitz created TruthRevolt with a mission to expose the leftist news media and hold them accountable for their hypocrisy and bias. Launched in October 2013, it was not just a media watchdog, but a media bulldog. TruthRevolt sought to help loosen the leftist death grip on the organs of culture: the news media, academia, and entertainment.

As the editor of TruthRevolt for nearly three years, I am proud of the fight we waged and grateful for the support of our readers and supporters. We aren’t giving up that fight, however; I want to emphasize that TruthRevolt is shuttering to enable the David Horowitz Freedom Center to focus on exciting new developments which will give us a more prominent presence and make us an even more formidable foe of the radical left.

Again, thanks to all our readers. For now, stay with us at the Freedom Center by following our flagship site FrontPage Mag, edited by Jamie Glazov, and keep an eye out for big changes in the very near future.

Mark Tapson, TruthRevolt editor

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism

A 2015 Pew survey reported that the total number of Catholics in the United States dropped by 3 million since 2007, now comprising about 20 percent - or one-fifth - of the total population. Catholicism is losing more members than it gains at a higher rate than any other denomination – a recent development which the radical progressives at Salon celebrate. Why is this an issue that should worry Americans and the Western world at large?

One key reason is that the fastest-growing religion in the country and around the world is Islam – something Salon radicals also no doubt celebrate. But the fundamentalist brand of Islam that is once again on the rise is antithetical, indeed openly hostile, to the values of Western civilization, and for many centuries Catholicism as a central component of European identity was a bulwark against its spread. But for various reasons the West has lost confidence in its cultural identity and moral authority in recent decades, and the result has been submission to decadence, to cultural Marxism, and to Islam. If we are to reverse a civilization in rapid decline, we must undertake a resurgence of Western exceptionalism with a militant Christian ethos at its core.

For Catholics who have backslid or grown apathetic, that means waking up to what is at stake, and then making a renewed commitment to understanding and manifesting the tenets of their own religion, a religion that has been steered toward emasculation, socialism, and interfaith suicide by the radical left. For non-Catholics as well – even atheists – it means acknowledging how crucial a revivified Christianity is to a defense of Western civilization, and educating themselves about the myths and realities of Catholicism.

Enter John Zmirak’s timely book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, published by Regnery. Zmirak is an editor, teacher, screenwriter, political columnist, and the author of the popular Bad Catholic's Guides and The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture of Life. His work has appeared in First Things, The Weekly Standard, USA Today, and FrontPage Magazine, among other venues.

The book’s cover declares Catholicism to be “the most politically incorrect institution in the world!” and features a trinity of grinning nuns with guns – itself politically incorrect enough to trigger leftists who prefer a less militant, more social justice-oriented, and submissive Christianity. The cover also features such triggering bullet points as:

• Catholic teaching favors gun rights, capitalism, and a strong defense
• Catholic “social teaching” isn’t liberal, it’s conservative
• Catholic doctrine doesn’t require open borders

and perhaps most politically incorrect and offensive:

• The Crusades are something to be proud of

The Fight of Our Lives

“Civilizations, empires, great powers, can fall apart very fast. Collapse can come suddenly, like a thief in the night. And we should be very wary of assuming that our civilization, the civilization of the early 21^st century West, will oblige us by declining gradually.”

That warning from noted historian Niall Ferguson is the opening and the theme of the vital new documentary The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West from filmmaker Gloria Z. Greenfield.

Greenfield’s previous work includes Body and Soul – The State of the Jewish Nation in 2014 (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here), Unmasked Judeophobia in 2011, and The Case for Israel – Democracy’s Outpost in 2009. She is the president of Doc Emet Productions, the simple and powerful motto of which is “Truth in film.” Unlike, say, propagandist Michael Moore’s front-and-center, demagogic presence in his films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, director Greenfield gets out of the way and crafts her narratives about anti-Semitism, history, Judeo-Christian values, freedom, and democracy from the authoritative, articulate arguments of the many intellectuals who lend their expertise to her projects.

Such is the case with her latest documentary, which features compelling observations and insights from well-known historians, journalists, and thinkers such as Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Alan Dershowitz, Melanie Phillips, Bruce Thornton, Raymond Ibrahim, Brooke Goldstein, Ibn Warraq, Alan West, and many more respected commentators from academia, human rights organizations, and think tanks. [Full disclosure: I am included among the featured speakers, as are David Horowitz Freedom Center Fellows Thornton and Ibrahim.]

The Fight of Our Lives addresses the various internal and external threats facing Western civilization today, and cautions that if we don’t recognize these grave dangers now and rouse ourselves to resist and overcome them, then it is no hyperbole to say that the West as we know it will come to – as Ferguson warned – a swift and inexorable end.

‘Deplorable’ Professor Fights Back Against Campus Totalitarians

“In the fall of 2016,” New York University professor Michael Rectenwald recently told The Daily Caller, “I was noting an increase of this social justice ideology on campuses, and it started to really alarm me. I saw it coming home to roost here at NYU, with the creation of the bias reporting hotline, and with the cancellation of the Milo Yiannopoulos talk because someone might walk past it and hear something which might ‘trigger’ them.”

Rectenwald, himself a leftist, created an initially anonymous Twitter account, @antipcnyuprof, to speak out against that ideology and the “absolutely anti-education and anti-intellectual” classroom indoctrination he was witnessing, as well as the collectivist surveillance state that the campus was becoming, as students were urged to report each other for the sin of committing microaggressions.

In October of that year, he outed himself as the man behind the controversial Twitter account, and “all hell broke loose.” He swiftly found himself the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. In true Cultural Revolution fashion, several colleagues in his department in the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group published an open letter declaring him guilty of incorrect thinking. “The thing that is interesting here is that they were saying that because I don’t think like them, I am sick and mentally ill,” Rectenwald said to the Daily Caller.

Instead of kowtowing to the campus totalitarians, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left in a February 2017 tweet (“The Left has utterly and completely lost its way and I no longer want anything to do with it.”) and has gone on to be an even more fervent defender of free speech and academic freedom. He has appeared often in conservative media to discuss those issues and the harassment he has received from the Left.

Recently Rectenwald even filed a lawsuit against NYU and four of his colleagues for defamation. He consented to answering some questions for FrontPage Mag about his conflict with the NYU ideologues.

Mark Tapson:  A year ago on Twitter you wrote, “Goodbye to the Left, goodbye.” Can you describe your intellectual journey from “left-liberal activist” to outspoken “deplorable” and what drove that seemingly sudden transition?

Michael Savage at the Four Seasons

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is hosting another Wednesday Morning Club luncheon this Thursday at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. I'll be introducing the speaker, radio talk show host and bestselling author Michael Savage.

Savage's new book is a very personal rumination on God, Faith, and Reason.

Check out the event details here.

Next month's WMC luncheon speaker will be the fearless journalist Melanie Phillips.

Confessions of an Islamophobe

With the possible exception of freedom fighter and European political party leader Geert Wilders, there is arguably no critic of Islam more despised and feared by the Religion of Peace’s apologists than the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s own Robert Spencer, director of the indispensable Jihad Watch website and the author of nearly twenty books.

Spencer is routinely labeled a so-called Islamophobe by those who conflate criticism of Islam with bigotry toward Muslims. This makes him the target of an astonishing amount of hatred and even threats of violence because our media and political elites have inflated the purported danger of “Islamophobia” to a degree of cultural concern greater than the danger of actual Islamic terrorism.

The George Soros-funded smear organization known as the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the “extremist” Spencer “one of America’s most prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists” (note the use of the inflammatory terms “propagandist” and “anti-Muslim,” the latter of which falsely paints him as a hater of Muslims themselves rather than as a critic of the ideology).

His speaking engagements, when they are not disrupted by protesters or cancelled by those who refuse to debate him or even hear him out, require personal security to protect him from the violence of those who accuse him of inciting violence. After a presentation in Iceland earlier this year, Spencer was actually poisoned by a suspected opponent who wanted to silence him permanently.

Robert Spencer is certainly not alone in being branded an Islamophobe; he is simply one of the most prominent because he is the best-educated about Islam and the most relentless thorn in the side of those who would whitewash it. Any public critic of Islam’s demonstrably hateful, violent, and supremacist tenets risks being smeared by the ugly label.

The Fight of Our Lives

I'm very excited about this documentary that the David Horowitz Freedom Center is premiering in Santa Monica in 2 months. The Fight of Our Lives: Defeating the Ideological War Against the West features luminaries such as Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others on the internal and external threats to western civilization. I'm honored to be among the lineup as well, discussing the war on masculinity.

Documentary filmmaker Gloria Greenfield (Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation and The Case for Israel - Democracy's Outpost, among other films) has put together a riveting discussion of the crucial fight we face today.

I'll have more news about this as time goes on. Meanwhile, if you'll be in the SoCal area on February 19th, do your best to attend this event in Santa Monica.