WHY HAS LEFT-WING THINKING succeeded in most of the non-Muslim world? Why, in particular, do Left-wing candidates so often win elections in center-Right America?
There are many reasons. Understanding them unravels the mystery of the appeal of something that has poisoned so many areas of life—the arts, the universities, religion, the family, the fight against tyrannies; that, in its extreme forms, has murdered more people than any idea in modern history; and that has led to the near bankrupting of the Western world’s democracies through the welfare state incurring unsustainable debt.
1. Leftism Venerates Feelings
ONE MUST FIRST RECOGNIZE that the Left is animated largely by feelings. Though it prides itself as intellectual (and most intellectuals are on the Left), Leftism primarily appeals to emotions, sometimes noble emotions (such as compassion).
That is one reason Leftist positions are young people’s “default” positions. Young people are guided by feelings, they trust their feelings, and they have neither had the time nor the inclination to think issues through. If one only emotes—for example, feels for the poor, loves peace, hates war, despises racism, yearns for equality—without sustained reflection, one is going to hold Leftist positions. It often takes many years of rethinking one’s original Leftist views to realize that if one hates poverty, loves justice, hates war, loves peace—and most important, hates evil—one will reject Leftism.
Of course, people on the Left see themselves and Leftism as the opposite of feelings-based. They see themselves as rational, as the heirs of the Enlightenment, and as intellectual. It is their ideological opponents whom they deem, and routinely label, irrational, anti-intellectual, and worst of all, as hostages to religion, the ultimate irrationality.
Before presenting the case for the Left as primarily feelings-based, it is important to emphasize that the claim that most Leftist thinking is feelings-based is not only a critique of the Left; it is also a defense of the Left in that it does not ascribe nefarious motives to all Leftists. There are, as I repeatedly note, many well-intentioned people on the Left, especially among liberals, just as there exist mean-spirited individuals on the Right.
WHY LIBERALS SO OFTEN FEEL “OFFENDED”
The feelings-based nature of liberalism helps explain a liberal and Left phenomenon—how much more likely people on the Left are to say that they feel “offended” when confronted with views with which they differ. Where other people would say, “I disagree,” many on the Left will say, “I am offended.” This is a key to understanding Leftist thinking. After all, when are people offended? When their feelings are hurt. A pro-choice woman is far more likely to say that she is “offended” when encountering a pro-life position than is an equally fervent pro-life woman when she encounters a pro-choice position. Why? Because the pro-choice position is nearly always feelings-based: A mother’s feelings, not the objective worth of a human fetus, determine whether a human fetus has any intrinsic worth.
So, too, the concept of “political correctness” revolves around not offending people’s feelings—which almost always means Left-leaning people’s feelings since there is essentially no Right-wing political correctness. Suggest that women’s brains may not be as wired for math or engineering as men’s brains are, and liberal women (and many liberal men) are offended. The question that political correctness poses is “Does this statement or position hurt anyone’s feelings (especially anyone on the Left)?” That, not “Is the statement true?” is what matters to the feelings-based.
LEFT-WING POSITIONS ARE EMOTION-BASED
Name a Left-wing position and the chances are that it is based on feelings more than reason. Take, for example, the Hollywood film industry. It is dominated by Leftists who advocate increases in taxes; yet these very same film producers routinely leave California to make films in states and countries with lower tax rates than California. In other words, they act in accord with reason—avoiding high taxes that reduce both profits and employment—but they support, with tens of millions of dollars in donations, candidates who advocate increasing taxes that reduce employment. How do they reconcile their pro-tax stands with their anti-tax behavior? They don’t (in large measure because the media never challenge them), because they can’t. They have to come to their liberal positions on taxes from emotion—compassion for the poor and resentment of the income divide—not from reason.
Of the Left’s emotions, compassion is one of the strongest—compassion for the poor, the weak, the “disenfranchised,” the minority, the hungry, the animal, and often even the criminal.
I recall being a guest on the CNN show Larry King Live the night before a convicted American murderer, Stanley “Tookie” Williams III, was to be executed. As one who supports the death penalty, I argued that despite his having written children’s books while on death row, Williams should be executed. Representing the other side was a well-known American actor, Mike Farrell, who was attending a vigil on behalf of Williams at the prison where Williams was to be executed. Farrell shouted at me, accusing me, among other things, of “salivating” at the thought of bloodshed.
Even many opponents of capital punishment would acknowledge that he offered emotions, not rational arguments. Now, of course, one could argue that this was atypical. And, indeed, in terms of raw emotion, it was atypical; I have debated articulate and calm abolitionists on my radio show. Nevertheless I believe that anti-capital-punishment positions are nearly always emotion-based: Many people simply recoil at the thought of the state taking the life of a murderer, and many Americans opposed to capital punishment are embarrassed by the fact that their country is among the only Western democracies to enforce the death penalty for murder. (It would be interesting to see what would happen to the abolitionist movement in America if nearly all European countries reinstated capital punishment.)
The one argument against capital punishment that appears reason-based is that a mistake may be made and an innocent person put to death. This is a rational position—and there are rational counterarguments. But this argument is often a rational cover for emotion-based opposition to capital punishment. One proof is that most people who offer the innocent-may-be-killed argument oppose the taking of any murderer’s life, even a murderer whose guilt is beyond doubt. Nearly all opponents of capital punishment believe that Israel was morally wrong in executing Adolf Eichmann, the man who directed much of the Holocaust and as such was the murderer of millions of men, women, and children.
As for the minority of opponents of the death penalty who, like the Israeli government, argue that only murderers such as Eichmann—mass murderers—should be executed, that argument is also entirely emotion-based. The position that mass murderers should be put to death but murderers of “only” one or two—or dozens of—people should not is pure emotion. It also happens to be immoral in that it cheapens the infinite value of the individual human.
LEFT-WING SLOGANS
The most popular slogans of the Left provide additional examples of the emotion-and feelings-based nature of Left-wing positions. We all recognize that a slogan can only rarely encapsulate all nuances of an idea, but a one-sentence slogan can still be true, rational, and even deep. “Life is not a dress rehearsal” would be such an example. But the most popular Left-wing slogans are none of these.
“A woman has the right to do what
she wants with her own body.”
This famous slogan is the decades-old liberal defense of a woman’s right to have an abortion for any reason and at any time. On its face, the statement is neither rationally nor morally objectionable—though, seemingly ironically, the people who most deny women the right to do what they want with their bodies are the very people who promote this slogan. It was Leftists, not conservatives, who sought to deny women the right to obtain silicone breast implants.
But as regards abortion, this statement is both rationally and morally untenable. It is a non sequitur. The statement has nothing to do with abortion. The human fetus, the baby, the unborn—readers can pick their own term—is not her body; it is in her body. That is why no one asks a pregnant woman, “How’s your body?” Pregnant women are asked, “How’s the baby?”
“War is not the answer.”
“War is not the answer” if the question is, let us say, “What is the square root of eleven?” But if the question is “How do we stop enormous evils in the world?” the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently “War.” Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed “war is not the answer.” Moreover, the slogan is disingenuous because those who place this bumper sticker on their car really mean to say that war is never the answer. They dare not say what they mean, however, because that would alienate the vast majority of people who understand that forswearing war means that the evil will prevail.
“Coexist.”
Another popular liberal bumper sticker reads “Coexist,” in which each of the letters is drawn to represent a religion. The C is an Islamic crescent, the x is a Jewish star, the t is the Christian cross, and so on. The problem with this message is not its sentiment; no decent person can object to it. The problem is that in America it is an essentially pointless message. It is needed less in America than anywhere else in the world. Preaching to Americans to “coexist” with other religions is akin to preaching to the French to “enjoy wine.”
No religion is persecuted in America, a fact that is all the more remarkable given that one religion, Christianity, has by far the largest percentage of adherents, and given what Muslims in the name of Islam have done to Americans. If Christians in the name of Christianity had slaughtered thousands of Muslims in a Muslim country, Christians living among Muslim majorities would have been massacred in far greater numbers than they are now. Yet after 9/11, even the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamist organization that is devoted to finding anti-Muslim behavior in America, found a total of one—needless to say, despicable—killing of someone for being perceived as Muslim (the poor man was a Sikh).
The message is morally unserious. Americans are the people who least need to be admonished to “coexist” with people of different faiths. Yes, the bumper sticker is needed, but not in America. Why then would some Americans communicate a largely irrelevant message to fellow Americans? The answer: For the Left, the combination of feeling good about oneself and denigrating America kills two birds with one stone.
“Vote no on H8.”
“Vote no on H8” was the ubiquitous slogan directed against California’s Proposition 8, the 2010 ballot proposition to retain the man-woman definition of marriage and make it part of California’s constitution. Unlike the previous examples of liberal slogans that transcend any political moment, this one was specific to a certain time and place. But it represented the Left-wing tactic of indicting the motives of opponents. Indeed, what was hateful here was not the desire to keep the man-woman definition of marriage, but the accusation that this desire emanated solely from hate. More to the point, declaring the desire to keep marriage defined as man-woman as “hate” is pure emotion. In fact, it is actually puerile: “If you don’t give me what I want, you hate me.”
“If It Feels Good, Do It.”
There is another aspect to the feelings-based attitudes of the Left. People who are guided by feelings do not develop into good people.
A good human being rarely acts on his feelings, but rather masters his feelings and acts in accord with values that transcend feelings. Since the 1960s, however, the opposite has been taught. One of the ideas ushered in by the baby boomer Left was that if you do not act in consonance with your feelings, you are inauthentic or, even worse, a hypocrite.
An example: I have devoted much of my life to studying, writing, and lecturing about the subject of happiness. In particular, I have advocated that people act as happy as possible even when they do not feel happy. This is, I believe, both a moral obligation to all those who are in our lives—it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them—and a particularly effective way to increase our own happiness, since acting happy elevates one’s mood. This is hardly controversial—in just about every area of life, human beings deeply influence how they feel by how they act.
As a rule, those who object to this idea of acting contrary to how one feels are people on the Left—because on the Left, feelings are sacrosanct.
One can only imagine, then, Left-wing reactions to two columns I wrote titled “When a Woman Is Not in the Mood.” I suggested that a woman who is married to a good and loving man might choose to have sex with him even on some occasions when she is not in the mood, given how loved most men feel when their wife says “yes” to sex. Across the Left-wing spectrum, I was not only attacked and personally ridiculed, but I was accused of advocating marital rape. Never mind that the entire premise was based on the wife agreeing to have sex. The mere suggestion that a woman not be guided solely by her feelings when it comes to having sex with her husband meant I was advocating marital rape. Perhaps the biggest Left-wing website, the Daily Kos, actually ran the headline: “Dennis Prager Endorses Marital Rape.”1
Why was I so attacked? Because I violated three Left-wing taboos. I advocated that people not act on their feelings; addressed this to women—a group the Left has labeled “victim” and therefore not to be the object of any demands; and did so regarding sex, an area in which women’s feelings are viewed as particularly inviolable.
The Leftist belief that feelings must be expressed was exemplified on July 1, 2008, in Denver, Colorado—on the occasion of the mayor’s annual State of the City address. As in previous years, the day was to begin with the singing of the National Anthem, an honor given to a black jazz singer, Rene Marie. But Marie had, by her own admission, long had other plans. Instead of the National Anthem, she sang a different song, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a song often referred to as the “Black National Anthem.”
According to traditional moral norms, Marie deceived the mayor of Denver (a Democrat, as it happened) and all others present when she agreed to sing the National Anthem. But that was of no consequence to her. She defended her deception by noting her feelings: “I want to express how I feel about living in the United States as a black woman, as a black person,” she explained.
Asked on her website, “Wasn’t this dishonest?” she responded with an additional Left-wing belief—the artist is above conventional morality: “I can see how it may be perceived that way. But I looked at it a different way: I am an artist. I cannot apologize for that. It goes with the risky territory of being an artist.”
She later added: “I don’t think it is necessary for artists to ask permission to express themselves artistically.”
Not having to ask permission to express one’s feelings publicly is why the Left also venerates graffiti, or what the arts establishment calls “street art.” In 2011, the prestigious Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles featured a major exhibition titled “Art in the Streets” honoring fifty such “artists,” people who are known to the non-Left as vandals.2
AN ACHE TO BE LOVED
Another aspect of the centrality of emotion and feelings to Leftism is an ache to be loved.
The desire to be loved has the capacity to do enormous harm in both the macro-and micro-spheres. In the macro-sphere, a leader who yearns to be loved cannot be a good leader. That is why the Left’s desire that America be loved by the world would mean that America cannot lead. If the United States were to be primarily motivated by a desire to be loved, that desire would obviously have to trump its desire to do good, and the consequences to the world would be terrifying.
This desire is also destructive in the micro-realm. A good general rule is that one should seek to be loved by one’s peers—one’s spouse and one’s friends are the best examples—but beyond that, one should first seek to be respected. Seeking to be loved is almost always destructive to non-peer relationships. Teachers, for example, should seek to be respected by their students, not loved. Likewise parents, when raising their children, should not seek to be loved; they need to do too much that may not elicit love in order to raise good and, ironically, loving children.
In the liberal world in America, the roles of parents and teachers shifted from authority figures to peers. The results have not been good for children or for society. When one seeks to be loved by those over whom one must exercise authority, one compromises the values necessary to do a proper job.
SELF-ESTEEM
It makes perfect sense that the Left would have created the very influential (and very destructive) self-esteem movement. First, the Left places great emphasis on feelings, and the self-esteem movement is about how one feels about oneself. Second, the Left has extremely high self-esteem. The Left knows it is brighter, kinder, finer, more sophisticated, more enlightened, more selfless, and more intellectual than anyone else.
The self-esteem movement is just one more way in which the Left’s emphasis on feelings has hurt society.
In 1984, the California legislature voted to fund a “Task Force on Self-Esteem and Social Responsibility.” It was initiated by a liberal Democratic state senator, John Vasconcellos, who, having worked his way from poor self-esteem as a young person to higher self-esteem as an adult, came to believe in self-esteem’s singular importance.3 He attributed his becoming a better person to this increased self-esteem, achieved through years of psychological therapy entered into well into adulthood (he explained this to me personally in an interview I conducted with him). Vasconcellos applied the therapeutic model to society,4 something the Left frequently does, and deduced that raising young people’s self-esteem would lower society’s rates of social pathology such as crime, drugs, and out-of-wedlock births.*
But self-esteem for its own sake turns out to be much worse than merely reinforcing unearned positive feelings about oneself. Not only does high self-esteem (especially when unearned) not increase “social responsibility”; it decreases it. The criminologist and sociologist Roy Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Florida State University who has spent a lifetime studying violent criminals, notes that the great majority of criminals have higher self-esteem than noncriminals. You need high self-esteem to think that rules apply to others but not to you.5
A well-known study further illustrates the lack of correlation between high self-esteem and accomplishment. As reported by, among others, Paul Vitz, professor emeritus of psychology at New York University: “A 1989 study of mathematical skills compared students in eight different countries. American students ranked lowest in mathematical competence and Korean students ranked highest. But the researchers also asked students to rate how good they were at mathematics. The Americans ranked highest in self-judged mathematical ability, while the Koreans ranked lowest. Mathematical self-esteem had an inverse relation to mathematical accomplishment.”6
As frequently happens, after great damage has been done by Left-wing positions and policies, a few on the Left begin to acknowledge this damage. Thus, a quarter of a century after the birth of the self-esteem movement, the Atlantic published a devastating article on self-esteem and children by a liberal writer, Lori Gottlieb. The title says it all: “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.” Some excerpts:
“Rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.”
“Rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem.”
“People who feel like they’re unusually special end up alienating those around them.”7
But Lori Gottlieb and a few others on the Left notwithstanding, it is unlikely that the Left will forgo emphasizing the importance of self-esteem. Feelings in general and self-esteem in particular are simply too important to the Left.
If the Left came to believe that behavior is more important than feelings (for example, maybe it is a good idea to make love to one’s husband sometimes even when not in the mood); if the Left abandoned reliance on feelings and substituted objective moral standards (for example, maybe the worth of a human fetus should not to be determined by the mother’s feelings but by a moral code); if the Left were more concerned with good outcomes than with good intentions (from the welfare state to race-based affirmative action); if the Left ceased to feel superior in every way and regarded many of those who oppose the Left as just as bright and just as kind as Leftists believe they themselves are, the Left would more or less cease to exist.
Feelings of self-esteem play a role in the world of the Left in a darker way. Because holding Leftist positions leads to self-esteem, many people on the Left—not all, but more than a few—have used Left-wing positions as a moral mask to hide personally immoral behavior. If one is decent just for holding “social justice” and environmental positions, one can easily view oneself as having been given a license to act however one wants in one’s personal life. The personal lives of many leading Left-wing intellectuals have borne testimony to this danger.8
FEEL-GOOD TEXTBOOKS
Feeling good about oneself is so central to Leftism that it is a higher value than truth. The Left has changed a generation’s worth of American school textbooks from books attempting to convey history to books attempting to make women and members of select minorities feel good about themselves. Wherever it can, Left-wing, that is, Democratic, lawmakers pass laws demanding that textbooks be rewritten to include more blacks, Latinos, women, and other Democratic Party blocs so that students who belong to those groups feel good about themselves. The Democratic legislature in the largest textbook-buying state, California, passed a law that all history textbooks used in that state beginning in first grade include gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. In an Orwellian moment, the Democratic governor of the state, Jerry Brown, signed the bill and announced, “History should be honest.”9
2. The Left-Wing Brainwash
HOW IS ONE TO EXPLAIN the support for Leftist ideas nearly throughout the world? One possible answer is that Left-wing ideas are logically and morally compelling and that the Left-wing understanding of the world is self-evidently accurate. But this explanation is most unlikely since the Leftist understanding of the world is, as shown repeatedly in this book, usually wrong both morally and as policy. Support for Communist and other Left-wing tyrannies, creation of economically unsustainable and frequently character-destroying welfare states, the disastrous self-esteem movement, the undermining of Western military strength, policies that have constantly lowered the level of public education, the politicization of the universities and the arts—these are among the Left’s many failures.
How is one to explain that the record of the more radical elements of the Left, the most murderous record in history, is so widely ignored?* And how is one to explain that, according to opinion polls around the world, America and Israel, two particularly humane, free, liberal countries, are widely regarded as the greatest threats to the world? How is such a moral inversion possible?
The support of so many people around the world for the Left and its positions is overwhelmingly a result of the influence of the Left-wing orientation that pervades school and university curricula, the news media, and other media such as film and television. In other words, Leftism is the only way in which vast numbers of people around the world are taught to view the world.
Leftism is so pervasive that if applied to any other way of looking at life, it would be widely recognized as a form of brainwashing. Imagine a person who attended only fundamentalist Christian schools from preschool through graduate school, who never saw a secular, let alone an anti-Christian, film, and who only read religious books. Most people would say this person had been “brainwashed.” Why, then, would we not use the same term to describe an individual who only attended secular liberal schools from kindergarten through college, watched and listened to only Left-of-center television, movies, and music, and had essentially no exposure to religious or conservative ideas?
I have confronted many individuals on the Left with this comparison, but they reject any equivalence. They acknowledge that an education consisting solely of Christian schooling combined with a life consisting of virtually no exposure to secular or liberal ideas constitutes a brainwash. But an equally liberal-Leftist life does not. Why not? Because, they tell me, the very definition of a liberal is to be open-minded. Therefore, “brainwashed liberal” is an oxymoron.
The irony here is that this denial shows how effective the Left-wing brainwash is. Most religious Christians (or Jews) who have rarely been exposed to secular ideas and values would readily acknowledge they are not open-minded to secularism or to other religions. They know they have been given one worldview. But those on the Left fool themselves into thinking that they have been exposed to all points of view or that there is no other view worth exploring.
This is one reason it has become increasingly apparent that the most closed-minded people in American and European society today are more likely to be on the Left than in the religious world or on the Right. The majority of fundamentalist Christians are exposed to much more secular and Left-wing thought and behavior than secular liberals are to religious and conservative thought and behavior. Virtually all religious Christians and Jews study secular subjects, have been taught by secular teachers, read secular-liberal books, and have watched secular-liberal films and television. Substitute “conservative” for “religious” and the same holds true. Virtually every conservative reads liberal newspapers, watches liberal TV shows and movies, reads liberal magazines, and has been taught in liberal schools by liberal professors. On the other hand, few liberals read conservative newspapers or magazines, listen to conservative talk radio, have studied in conservative schools, or been taught by conservative professors.
The distinguished late professor Allan Bloom, of the University of Chicago, wrote his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind, not about religious or conservative America but about liberal America as embodied by the university.
“WORLD OPINION” AS LEFT-WING OPINION
Another aspect of the Left-wing brainwash is the identification of “world opinion” with Left-wing opinion. It is probably impossible to name any difference between what the media refer to as “world opinion” and Left-wing opinion.
Examples of Left-wing positions portrayed as world opinion include: contempt for conservative American presidents and admiration for liberal ones; opposition to almost all American military endeavors and attributing them to nefarious motives (for example, the invasion of Iraq was for oil); viewing Israel, not those who wish to destroy it, as the major obstacle to peace in the Middle East; judging the American free enterprise system as morally inferior to Europe’s welfare-state systems; and deeming capital punishment “barbaric” (the term New York Times editorials use) even though majorities in almost every country that abolished capital punishment were for capital punishment when it was banned.10
Why are “world opinion” and Left-wing positions essentially all the same? The most obvious answer is that much of the world is Leftist in its views. But that only restates the question: Why are world and Left-wing opinion usually the same?
A major reason is that the world’s news media, which are Leftist in their politics, both define “world opinion” and shape it.
Of course, there are other institutions in the world—primary and secondary schools, universities, entertainment media, and religions—that shape public opinion. But except for some religious institutions, virtually none of them contravenes the Left’s views. Even Islamic institutions, which in many areas differ with the Left, and which shape the opinions of the majority of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, agree with the Left on international issues such as the villainy of Israel, support for the United Nations, and weakening American influence around the world.
Another influential non-Leftist institution is the Roman Catholic Church. But its differences from Leftist positions nearly always concern personal matters—same-sex marriage, abortion, sex education in schools—not social and political issues. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—and frequently the Vatican itself—holds Left-wing views on redistribution of wealth, capital punishment, expansion of the welfare state, reduction of American expenditures on defense, and other social issues.
UNIVERSITIES
Western universities have become Left-wing seminaries. They are to Leftism what a Christian seminary is to Christianity. The biggest difference between them, aside from curriculum, is that Christian seminaries acknowledge their purpose, to produce committed Christians, while universities deny their purpose, to produce committed secular Leftists. They portray themselves as having no political agenda.
The purpose of a university education should be to search for and teach truth, and, in art and literature, to teach the best that humans have produced. While some professors still cling to these goals, most do not. Many deny there is such a thing as truth. Rather they claim that race, gender, class—the Left-wing trinity—render objective truth impossible to determine. There is white truth and non-white truth, male truth and female truth, and poor people’s and rich people’s truth. In the arts and literature, they deny the notion of greatness because they deem it entirely subjective.
On occasion, college presidents admit they have an agenda other than truth and excellence. For example, one of the founders of progressivism in America, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University before becoming president of the United States, said in a speech in 1914, “I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.”11
In 1996, in his commencement address to the graduating seniors of Dartmouth College, the then president of the college, James O. Freedman, cited the Wilson quote favorably. And in 2002, in another commencement address, Freedman said that “the purpose of a college education is to question your father’s values.”
For Wilson, Freedman, and countless other university presidents and professors, the purpose of a college education is to question one’s father’s values, not to seek truth. Fathers represented traditional American values. The university is there to undermine them.
Here is a sampling of the Left-wing values that permeate American and other Western universities:
The behavior of universities reflects the Leftism they espouse.
Northwestern University School of Law kept an unrepentant radical ex-terrorist on its faculty, former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn. As the Wall Street Journal commented, Dohrn “could not pass a character and fitness test and could not be admitted to the bar,” but she teaches at a law school.12 Needless to say, an unrepentant ex-terrorist member of the Ku Klux Klan would find no employment at an American law school.
In 2006, a black stripper accused—falsely, it was soon revealed—white members of the Duke University lacrosse team of gang-raping her. The university (and most of the liberal media) immediately assumed that the accusations were true and went into a frenzy about white racism at Duke and other elite campuses. Eighty-eight members of the Duke faculty signed a letter strongly suggesting the lacrosse players were guilty and accusing the university of widespread racism. Those who signed this now infamous letter included 80 percent of the African and African-American Studies Department, 72 percent of the Women’s Studies faculty, 60 percent of the Cultural Anthropology Department, 45 percent of the Romance Studies faculty, 41 percent of the Literature, 32.2 percent of the English, 31 percent of the Art and Art History, and 25 percent of the History Department faculty.
In 2009, Yale University Press published a book on the Danish Muhammad cartoons that led to worldwide Muslim riots. Right before publication of the book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, Yale announced that the book would not contain pictures of the cartoons nor would it allow any picture of Muhammad, even those painted or drawn by Muslims through the ages. As the shocked author, Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born professor of politics at Brandeis University, pointed out, even “Muslim friends, leaders and activists thought that…the cartoons needed to be reprinted so we could have a discussion about it.”13
The author went on to note that Reza Aslan, a well-known Iranian-American scholar of Islam, was so incensed with Yale that he withdrew the supportive blurb that he had supplied for the book. “To not include the actual cartoons is to me, frankly, idiotic,” he said. But it was not idiotic. It was cowardly—and the greater the influence of the Left in universities, the greater their cowardice. This has become one of the dominant features of modern universities, which should be the first line of defense of liberal Western civilization and freedom of speech.
The extent to which universities influence students in a leftward direction extends to personal sexual practices. An example was an article written by a female student in the McGill University newspaper. She wrote: “It’s hard to go through four years of a Humanities B.A. reading [Michel] Foucault [a major French ‘postmodern’ philosopher] and [Judith] Butler [a prominent ‘gender theorist’ at the University of California, Berkeley] and watching ‘The L Word’ [a popular TV drama about glamorous lesbians] and keep your rigid heterosexuality intact. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but it seems I no longer have the easy certainty of pinning my sexual desire to one gender and never the other.”
I interviewed the twenty-two-year-old woman on the radio. She verified that prior to attending McGill, she only wanted to be with males sexually, but the university had taught her how limiting, how heterosexist, that was. Therefore, she was now sexually involved with both men and women.14
Another student whose life was turned around by Left-wing professors attended UCLA. At the time of Israel’s Independence Day in May 2003, she wrote a blistering attack on Israel’s origins in the UCLA newspaper, the Daily Bruin. I was particularly intrigued by the column because the author’s last name sounded Jewish. So I invited her onto my radio show. She confirmed that not only was she a Jew, but that she had been raised in Britain in a Zionist home, had visited Israel on a number of occasions, and had had a Jewish education.
“So what happened?” I asked, somewhat incredulous at the 180-degree change in her views on Israel.
“I attended university,” she responded.
From a Zionist upbringing to writing in a university newspaper about Israeli Jews’ “annihilation of Palestinian society,” “ethnic cleansing,” “rape,” “war crimes,” and “Israeli terror”—all thanks to the university. There are many like her.
Universities are the most anti-Israel mainstream institutions in America. And anti-Israel campus rallies, demonstrations, and classes not infrequently express anti-Semitism. As Harvard president Lawrence Summers said in a 2002 address to the Harvard community: “Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”15
Many in the university are not even intellectually open in the natural sciences if an idea may clash with Left-wing opinion. In a talk before fellow economists, the same Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard University (he had been secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton), addressed the issue of why there were so many fewer women than men in some areas of science, in math, and in engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains. More than one hundred Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, Left-wing alumni threatened not to give any more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize. In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced by the then-dominant Catholic Church to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University, an institution whose motto is Veritas (“Truth”), was forced by the now-dominant Left to recant observable facts about men and women.
On February 21, 2011, the six hundred Northwestern University students enrolled in the popular Human Sexuality course taught by Professor John Michael Bailey were told that if they wished to stay after class, they would see a live demonstration of female ejaculation, the subject of that day’s class. A naked young woman would demonstrate the use of a motorized sex toy to orgasm in front of the students. About 120 of them stayed. When word got out about this, Northwestern’s official spokesman, Al Cubbage, released this statement: “Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines. The university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”16
It is very difficult for many people to acknowledge the low intellectual and moral level to which many professors and universities have sunk. The belief that the university—like, for example, the United Nations—is necessarily a force for good dies hard. But the breaking of a functioning moral compass at Western universities did not begin with the baby boomer Left—though that generation has radicalized the universities beyond anything that preceded it. Like most other bad ideas, the Left-wing ideas of the universities came originally from the European universities. Europe’s post-Christian, thoroughly secularized universities regularly incubated nihilistic ideas. According to Professor Michael Mann—whose book, Fascists, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, was declared by the American Historical Review to be “by far the best comparative study of interwar fascisms”—“All fascist movements during the interwar period appealed disproportionately to the well-educated, ‘to students in high schools and universities and to the most highly educated middle-class strata.’”
In other words, if you were well educated, not only were you more likely than the less educated to support Communism, but you were more likely to support the various fascisms as well. And, contrary to what many people believe about Nazi atrocities—that they were perpetrated overwhelmingly by rural ignoramuses—they were in fact led and perpetrated by the well educated. To cite one of many such examples, of the four Einsatzgruppen—mobile murder units of the SS—sent into Russia, “Three of the four commanders held a doctorate, whilst one was a double Ph.D.”17 These Nazi mass murderers “included many high-ranking officers, intellectuals and lawyers. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded Einsatzgruppe D, had earned degrees from three universities and achieved a doctorate in jurisprudence.”18
If you are a serious student, you can learn a great deal at a university. But its primary purpose remains graduating secular Leftists. As the Left-wing takeover of the universities continues, this agenda overshadows all other university concerns. Take the University of California, San Diego. Instead of hiring people to actually teach, it spends millions of dollars a year on promoting “diversity.” This one university campus has allocated millions to fund:
The vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion
The Chancellor’s Diversity Office
The associate vice chancellor for faculty equity
The assistant vice chancellor for diversity
Faculty equity advisors
The graduate diversity coordinators
The staff diversity liaison
The undergraduate student diversity liaison
The graduate student diversity liaison
The chief diversity officer
The director of development for diversity initiatives
The Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity
The Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues
The Committee on the Status of Women
The Campus Council on Climate, Culture, and Inclusion
The Diversity Council
The Cross-Cultural Center
The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center
The Women’s Center
That is a Left-wing seminary, not a university.
Examples of Left-wing damage to learning, to moral inquiry, to historical truth—in short, to every noble goal of the university—abound. Yet, like the damage done by the Left just about everywhere else, it goes largely unnoticed—except when a professor has a young woman masturbate in front of students, and then the media pay it attention for a day or two. After all, who will point out the terrible impact of the Left on academia—the Left-wing media, nearly all of whose members spent their formative years at these universities?
THE MEDIA
A Morally Upside-down World
In 1982, Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London held a vote for the most hated people of all time. The winners: Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.19
How is that possible?
In 2003, the Europe edition of Time magazine asked readers which of three countries was the greatest threat to world peace—North Korea, Iran, or the United States. Seven hundred thousand people responded, of which 86.9 percent voted that the United States was the most dangerous in the world.
How is that possible?
In the same year, as reported in the Guardian, “Israel has been described as the top threat to world peace, ahead of North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran, by an unpublished European Commission poll of 7,500 Europeans, sparking an international row. The survey [was] conducted in October, of 500 people from each of the EU’s member nations…”20
How is that possible?
In 2004, “BBC World asked 1,500 viewers of its news and international channel for the biggest problems in the world with 52% saying the US and globalisation. Respondents from Europe, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia, ranked the power of the US and large corporations as the biggest worry (52.3%).”21
In 2005, “A poll released…in Australia, long known for friendly relations with America, found that only 58 percent of the population had a positive view of the United States. That put the United States behind China (69 percent positive), and not even in the overall Top 10 countries, regions or groups that Australians respect. They have a more positive opinion of…the United Nations…”22
In another 2005 poll, a “survey was carried out by polling group GlobeScan and the University of Maryland with some questions provided by the BBC World Service. Of the 23,518 people polled, 47% said the US had a negative effect on the world, with US neighbours and allied countries being among its biggest critics. Overall, 15 of the 23 countries surveyed said the US had a negative influence in the world. Disapproval for the US was highest in Argentina, Germany, Russia, Turkey, Canada and Mexico.”23
According to a 2005 U.S. State Department report, “For what can be heard around the world, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the controversy over the handling of detainees at Bagram [Afghanistan] and Guantanamo Bay, is that America is less a beacon of hope than a dangerous force to be countered.”24
In 2006, 87 percent of British voters believed that Osama bin Laden was a great or moderate danger to peace, while 75 percent believed this of President George W. Bush.25
“CanWest News Services, owners of several Canadian newspapers including the National Post…commissioned a series of polls to determine how young people feel about the issues that were facing the country’s voters…. In one telephone poll of teens between the ages of 14 and 18, over 40 per cent of the respondents described the United States as being ‘evil.’ That number rose to 64 percent for French Canadian youth.”26
“British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”27
How are all these possible? How could the greatest force for good in the world, the protector of the free world, the United States of America, be so widely perceived—in friendly democratic countries, no less—as evil?
The answer is, largely, the world’s media.
People perceive the world as the world is reported to them. How could they do otherwise? And the reporting is Left-wing. It is not a conspiracy. But it is a fact. The world’s news media—newspapers, newsmagazines, radio, and TV news—are, with few exceptions, Left-wing. The greatest producer of films that are seen around the world is Hollywood, which is almost uniformly Left-wing. Therefore, to cite two of countless examples, America and Israel are almost relentlessly portrayed negatively. Their flaws are exaggerated and their decency ignored or minimized. That explains the polls cited above.
One only has to recall the months-long fixation of the world’s media on the rogue U.S. soldiers who sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Or the media’s coverage of Israel’s attack on Palestinian terrorists in Jenin in the West Bank in 2002, which the BBC so hyped that it labeled it—falsely, it soon turned out—“the Jenin massacre.”
BBC News headline, April 18, 2002: “Jenin ‘massacre evidence growing’”
BBC News headline, April 18, 2002: “Jenin camp ‘horrific beyond belief’”
BBC News headline, August 1, 2002: “UN says no massacre in Jenin”
Favored Groups Are Rarely to Blame
While the media are quick to blame America and Israel and seek to focus as much negative attention on them as possible, they do the opposite vis-à-vis violent members of groups with whom the Left has more sympathy. The media routinely try to deflect attention from their crimes—either by ignoring the crime or by equally blaming the victims of their crimes—and when that is impossible, to deny that their being a member of the Left-favored group played a role in their crime. The examples are dramatic and compelling.
First, some Islamic examples: The world’s liberal media regularly attempt to minimize Muslim responsibility for violence.
In 2002, there was widespread Nigerian Muslim opposition to the Miss World pageant scheduled to take place that year in Lagos, the Nigerian capital. In defense of the pageant, a young Nigerian female reporter wrote a column in which she said that not only are the contestants not whores, as alleged by the Muslim protestors, but they are such fine women that “Muhammad would probably have taken one of the contestants for a wife.”
That one sentence led to Muslim rioting, the beating and killing of Christians, the burning of churches, and the razing of the newspaper’s offices.
This is how the New York Times article reported the events:
First the headline: “Fiery Zealotry Leaves Nigeria in Ashes Again.”
Notice that no group is identified as responsible. Reading the headline one would have no idea that it was Muslims who burned churches, killed Christian bystanders, and razed newspaper offices. But putting the moral responsibility on the Muslims who actually started the rioting would violate the media doctrines of moral neutrality between good and evil when the evil is anti-Western. Therefore, for the New York Times headline writer the culprit is “fiery zealotry,” not murderous Muslims.
It gets worse. The article then begins:
“KADUNA, Nigeria, Nov. 28—The beauty queens are gone now, chased from Nigeria by the chaos in Kaduna.”
If this is not a direct lie, it surely is an indirect one. The beauty queens were not chased out of Nigeria by “chaos,” but by Muslim rioters. Would the New York Times write that American Indians were often chased from their homes by “chaos” or by white Americans?
Lest the reader miss the point that no group is morally responsible, the article’s next sentence develops this idea: “But there are no celebrations in this deeply troubled town, which has become a symbol of the difficulty in Nigeria—and throughout Africa—of reconciling people who worship separately.”
So, the problem is not Islamic intolerance and violence in Nigeria, nor is it Islamists attempting to violently spread Islamic religious law (as in sentencing a non-Muslim Nigerian woman to death by stoning for giving birth out of wedlock). No, the Times assures us, what happened in Kaduna is merely another example of Africa’s “difficulty in reconciling people who worship separately.”
Nigeria’s and Africa’s Christians and Muslims are equally guilty, as the next sentence makes clear: “Kaduna is too occupied burying its dead, some of whom followed Jesus and others Muhammad…”
Two paragraphs later the paper moves on to the one thing—religion—the paper can blame: Nigeria’s population “has shown itself to be devoutly religious but also quick to kill.” Fanatical Muslims are not the killers—“devoutly religious” people are.
Everyone-is-responsible is the trademark of virtually all reporting from the Middle East. Take this typical Reuters report: “A suspected Palestinian militant tried to ram a car laden with explosives into a crowded Tel Aviv nightclub Friday…. The apparent suicide attack was the latest in a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat violence…”28
“Cycle of violence” is the culprit—meaning that Israel is just as responsible for violence as are the terrorists. Moreover, as in this Reuters report, Westerns journalists nearly always use militant or gunman to describe Islamist terrorists. For Reuters, BBC, the Associated Press, CNN, and nearly all newspapers, it violates moral neutrality to label even a man attempting to smash a bomb-laden car into a nightclub a terrorist.
On the other hand, when Israel unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan, after a series of Hamas-directed terror attacks against Israeli civilians, a Washington Post editorial did use that word—to describe Israel: “[Israel] is revealed again as a practitioner of cross-border state terrorism.”29
And, of course, virtually every news source lists the greater number of Palestinians killed in Arab-Israeli wars in order to depict the Israelis as guilty (of “disproportionate response”). Had similar reporting taken place during World War II, the Western Allies would have been deemed the villains since Germany and Japan lost far more civilians than America or Britain.
It is one thing to argue that Islamist terror has no basis in normative Islam. But Western and Muslim defenders of Islam also frequently argue that Islam plays no role in Islamists’ actions.
In 2009, commentators on the Left told Americans that we could not know the motive or motives of Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major who fired more than one hundred shots at fellow American soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas—while yelling, “Allahu Akbar!” He ended up murdering thirteen people, but government and army spokesmen (also infected by the Left-wing politically correct virus) and the mainstream media claimed that they could not figure out why Hasan did this. They were only certain that it was not an act of terrorism.
Following the shootings, the Sunday New York Times “Week in Review” article about Nidal Hasan was titled “When Soldiers Snap.” The gist of the article was that Major Hasan had snapped. Even though he had never been in combat, he snapped in advance of going into combat. A mere two sentences of the article were devoted to the possibility that his motives were in any way relatable to his Muslim faith.
NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten echoed this novel “snapped-in-advance” explanation. Though Hasan had never been in combat, Gjelten opined that Hasan may have suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder” because he anticipated having traumatic distress: “Was he an example of these soldiers who are literally freaked out by what they are likely to face when they are deployed?” Listeners to Gjelten on NPR’s Morning Edition were also reassured that “we know he was a devout Muslim, took his faith very seriously. We can’t say, of course, that that was relevant, here.”30
Likewise, the liberal TV commentator Chris Matthews said, “It’s unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting.” For Matthews, not only was it unclear if Hasan’s Islamic faith was the factor; it was unclear if it was a factor. And on FoxNews, correspondent Geraldo Rivera—not every commentator or correspondent on FoxNews is a conservative—said, “I don’t know what motivates him…. As far as I know…he’s a sociopath; he’s a criminal. He could have had a toothache and gone off because of that.”
In 2010, after the Pakistani-American terrorist Faisal Shahzad tried to mass-murder people in New York’s Times Square, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote: “You of course don’t want to speculate on why someone ‘really’ did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex. But it’s a reminder that foreclosures [on homes] generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors…”
Widely ridiculed—in the comments section of the Washington Post itself—for what he wrote, the next day, Klein tried to undo the damage to his credibility: “In case there’s actual confusion…I do not believe that foreclosure leads to terrorism.”
Most observers would argue that the “actual confusion” was on Klein’s part. But, in any event, even in his explanatory column, he made no reference to Shahzad’s religious beliefs as a possible motivation for the Muslim terrorist’s attempted act of terror. Instead, he reemphasized that it was impossible to even speculate what Shahzad’s motive might be: “Speculating about why a terrorist commits a terrorist act is a mug’s game…. People who desire the murder of innocents qualify, I think, as pretty disturbed.”
Evan Thomas, editor at large at Newsweek, said on PBS’s Inside Washington, “I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label [Muslim] attached to him, it will get the right wing going…”
In 2004, a young American businessman was kidnapped by Islamists in Iraq and slowly beheaded on video, a video that much of the world was able to see on the Internet. The monsters who did this claimed that they were avenging the American army abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. As beheading innocent people is a way of life for Islamist killers, who would believe that revenge was the reason for the ritual murder?
The Left did and reported it as such.
The vast majority of America’s and the world’s news media reported the claim of Nick Berg’s murderers that they were avenging American abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison as if it were a fact:
“American beheaded in revenge for abuses”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Grisly Vengeance”
—Hartford Courant
“Militants avenge abuse with taped beheading”
—Des Moines Register
“Vengeance on Video”
—Arizona Republic
“With a Vengeance”
—Newsday (Long Island)
To prove the point that this was Left-wing reporting, contrast those headlines with the headlines of the few nonliberal newspapers in America. They made no mention of the “revenge” claim, and called the act what it was:
“Terrorists Behead American”
—New York Sun
“Pure Evil”
—New York Daily News
“Savages”
—New York Post
“Bastards”
—Philadelphia Daily News
In Canada, too, the headline in the liberal Globe and Mail was “Murderous revenge: U.S. hostage dies in wake of Iraq prison abuse,” while the headline in the conservative National Post was “Al-Qaeda Beheads American.”
Revenge? Islamists slaughtering innocents is not revenge. Was the slaughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan “revenge”? The terrorists called Berg’s murder “revenge” in order to justify their savagery and because they know that the world press is so malleable and so anti-American that it will print their justification.
The denial or rationalization of Muslim violence against non-Muslims is not the only example of the predominantly Left-wing media filtering news and commentary to defend select groups. They do this with regard to black violence against whites as well, since the only American racism the Left acknowledges—and wildly exaggerates—is white racism.
In the summer of 1991, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, the seven-year-old child of Guyanese immigrants was killed when a car driven by a Hasidic Jewish driver accidentally hit him. The driver, who had left his car to try to save the child (and the boy’s cousin, who survived), was immediately set upon by four blacks who beat him.
Days of black-on-Jew rioting ensued during which a young Hasidic Jew was stabbed to death, many Jews were injured, and mobs of blacks screamed, “Heil Hitler!” and “Death to the Jews!” and carried signs that featured messages such as “Hitler didn’t finish the job.” A Brandeis University historian who wrote a book on the events characterized them as “the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.”31
Yet the New York Times refused to characterize the riots as anti-Jewish, let alone as a modern-day pogrom. As Ari Goldman, a New York Times reporter who covered the riots, wrote twenty years later, “Journalists framed the story as a ‘racial’ conflict and failed to see the anti-Semitism inherent in the riots”—just as Muslim riots against Christians are “interreligious” conflicts.
Now a professor of journalism at Columbia University, Goldman wrote, “When I picked up the paper, the article I read was not the story I had reported. I saw headlines that described the riots in terms solely of race. ‘Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood,’ the Times headline said. And, worse, I read an opening paragraph, what journalists call a ‘lead,’ that was simply untrue: ‘Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday.’
“In all my reporting during the riots,” Goldman continues, “I never saw—or heard of—any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions.”32
And the New York Times editorial followed suit: “The violence following an auto accident in Crown Heights reminds all New Yorkers that the city’s race relations remain dangerously strained.”
This is how the mainstream media report news: few outright lies, just filtered to support the Leftist view of reality.
On August 3, 2010, in Manchester, Connecticut, a black man murdered eight whites at his place of work because they were white.
The New York Times headline later that day read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: he had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”
Four days later, the Washington Post headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.” The same day, the Associated Press report, reprinted in the Washington Post and throughout America, read in part:
To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken…. But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself…. “I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,” said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah…. “He always felt like he was being discriminated (against) because he was black,” said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. “Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person…” “Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises,” Brocuglio said.
The mainstream media all focused on the murderer being a victim of whites. But the one indisputable, and the most pertinent, pre-murder fact was that Thornton had been fired for stealing. There was video proof of him doing so. But this fact got lost within the larger context of the media reporting Thornton’s defenders, who claimed he had been a victim of white racism. Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives to Muslim attacks on Americans—until there was no possibility of denying those motives—no major liberal media in America called these Connecticut murders what they were: racist.
Finally, nine months later, on May 13, 2011, the Associated Press reported, “There is no evidence to support a man’s claim that he was a victim of racism before he fatally shot eight co-workers at a beer distribution company last year, police said Thursday.”
Needless to say, the police report’s conclusion was not widely published, and no liberal media apologized for their original reporting.
In August 2011, at the Wisconsin State Fair, mobs of black teens attacked whites, including pulling some whites out of their cars and beating them. As far as the mainstream media were concerned, these racist mob attacks never happened. Only local news and conservative news sources reported them. The only exceptions I could find were the Christian Science Monitor, which covered the topic accurately, and NPR, which headlined the attacks this way: “Wis. State Fair Latest Target Of Violent Flash Mobs.”
One more example was the kid-gloves treatment Bill Moyers of PBS gave the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Jewish black clergyman, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who had been the longtime pastor and friend of Barack Obama. This was after, among other revelations about the reverend, the recordings of his “God damn America” sermon were released and the public became aware of his charges that the American government had deliberately developed the AIDS virus and inflicted it on blacks.
But beyond one line in his introduction about “Wright repeating the canard heard often in black communities that the U.S. government spread HIV in those communities,” Moyers never raised the subject. However, Moyers did ask Wright these questions:
“When did you hear the call to ministry? How did it come?”
“What does the church service on Sunday morning mean in general to the black community?”
And this is how Moyers dealt with Wright’s “God damn America, God damn America!” sermon: “One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about God damn America.”
Wright’s response was to deliver a three-hundred-word indictment of America for its violence against the world.
How did Moyers respond?
“What did you mean when you said that?”
To which Wright then delivered another, 174-word indictment of America for its evils. But instead of challenging Wright or defending America, Moyers’s third question was:
“Well, you can be almost crucified for saying what you’ve said here in this country.”
Moyers transformed Wright, the racist America-hating giver of the “God damn America” sermon, into Wright, a black victim of America. For the Left-wing media and the Left-wing generally, the only blacks who may be portrayed negatively are black conservatives, whom it is permissible to degrade, humiliate, and vilify—as was done to Justice Clarence Thomas.*
While black racists are almost never labeled racist, the Left and the media depict whites as racist when they are not. Conservative attacks on President Barack Obama were frequently labeled racist, and the Tea Party—as well as conservatism generally—was routinely presumed to be animated by racism.
Quite understandably, vast numbers of people believe media news reports. Only when one knows the truth—from the New York City black attacks on Jews to the Wisconsin State Fair to the lack of racism in conservative America—can one begin to appreciate how profound the Left-wing brainwash has been.
America’s Poor Health Care System
If you are an American who believes that America has a poor health care system, it is probably not because you have experienced inferior heath care, but because the Left and the Left-wing media have repeatedly told you that America has inferior health care.
Here are major news media headlines on this subject from the last week of June 2010:
Reuters: “U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study.”
Los Angeles Times: “U.S. is No. 1 in a key area of healthcare. Guess which one…” (The answer was spending.)
NPR: “US Spends The Most On Health Care, Yet Gets Least.”
The Week: “US health care system: Worst in the world?”
Now let’s delve into one of these examples, the widely reported headline as written by Reuters. For those who rely on a headline to get their news—and we all do sometimes—the issue was clear: America is rated as having the worst health care “again.” For those who read a sentence or two, an even more common practice, the Reuters report begins this way: “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday. The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries—Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.”
The claim of the headline and of the first two sentences is then commented upon by the head of the group that conducted the study: “‘As an American it just bothers me that with all of our know-how, all of our wealth, that we are not assuring that people who need healthcare can get it,’ Commonwealth Fund president Karen Davis told reporters…”
Only later in the Reuters report is the discerning reader given a clue as to how agenda-driven this woman, this organization, this study, and therefore this Reuters report are: The otherwise unidentified Karen Davis, president of the never-identified Commonwealth Fund, is quoted as saying how important it was that America pass President Obama’s health care bill.
Could it be that Davis and the Commonwealth Fund are Left-wing?
Of course they are, but Reuters, which is also on the Left, never lets you know. The study is reported as if it is fact, rather than an agenda-driven report by an agenda-driven organization. How agenda-driven? Here is how the Commonwealth Fund’s 2009 report from Davis, its president, begins: “The Commonwealth Fund marshaled its resources this year to produce timely and rigorous work that helped lay the groundwork for the historic Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in March 2010.”
In addition to marshaling her group’s resources to help pass what became known as “ObamaCare,” Karen Davis had served as deputy assistant secretary for health policy during all four years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. And in 1993, speaking to new members of Congress, she advocated a single-payer approach to health care.
Yet I could not find any mainstream news report about this study that identified the politics of Karen Davis or the Commonwealth Fund. If they had, the headlines would have looked something like this: “Liberal think tank, headed by single-payer advocate, ObamaCare activist, and former Carter official, says America has worst health care.”
How would the average American have then reacted to a news story about how inferior American health care is?
We have here four major developments of the last fifty years:
The same thing happened in 2000 when the world press reported that the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) ranked America thirty-seventh in health care, behind such countries as Morocco, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Greece. This WHO assessment was reported throughout the world and regularly cited by critics of American health care. Yet few people were told that the UN report ranked Cuba thirty-ninth—essentially tied with the United States.
But who in his right mind thinks Americans and Cubans have equivalent levels of health care? How many world leaders travel to Greece or Morocco instead of to the United States for health care? The answer is that WHO, like the Left generally, doesn’t assess health care quality; it assesses health care equality. And since the world’s and America’s news media are on the Left, they report a Leftist bogus assessment of American health care as true.
Imagine if the headlines around the world read: “World Health Organization declares America and Cuba tied in health care.” Of course, only Leftists would believe that. But since non-Leftists would realize how absurd the claim was, that is not what anyone was told. Instead, the world and American media all announced, “America rated 37th in health care by World Health Organization.”
These two reports illustrate why so many people in America and around the world think America’s health care is inferior and why they support movement toward nationalized health care.
These reports are examples of the larger problem—the world’s thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.
3. Demonization of the Right
AS IMPORTANT TO THE LEFT’S SUCCESS as any other factor—and often the single most important factor—is its ability to demonize ideas and especially people it opposes. From Stalin’s labeling Leon Trotsky, the father of Russian Bolshevism, a “fascist” and continuing right up through to the present day, the Left has labeled its opponents as evil. And when you control nearly all news media and schools, that labeling works.
When I was in high school, one of the first books I bought was titled “Danger on the Right.” While I was never pro-Left, I stayed a Democrat until the 1980s because of how effective liberal and Left-wing demonization of the Right was. However much harm the Left did, I and multitudes of other non-Leftists were certain about there being a “danger on the Right.”
For the past fifty years there has been almost no conservative leader who has not been labeled by the Left—by universities, on television, in newspapers and magazines, by Hollywood, and by Left-dominated professional organizations—as stupid, mentally imbalanced, quasi-fascistic, mean-spirited, a tool of big business, dangerous, and worse.
In 1950, four professors at the University of California, Berkeley, published what became a highly influential book, The Authoritarian Personality. Its primary message was that to be on the Left is to be mentally healthy and to be on the Right is to have a pathologic authoritarian personality.
This equation by psychologists and other professionals of Right-wing with psychopathology reached its nadir in 1964 when a Left-wing magazine published a survey in which 2,417 psychiatrists declared the Republican presidential candidate for president, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, psychologically unfit to be president of the United States. Though not one of the psychiatrists had ever treated Senator Goldwater, they nevertheless assessed him as having a severely paranoid personality.*
In 1963, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Left attributed the assassination to the Right-wing racism and hate that, the Left alleged, permeated Texas specifically and America generally. Even though Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Soviet, pro-Castro Marxist, the Left used the assassination to demonize the Right. The Left learned an important lesson: With its dominance in the media, every crisis makes it possible to demonize the Right.*
A generation later, in 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, a man named Jared Loughner attempted to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and he did in fact kill six people. The entire world of the Left immediately announced that the murders were a result of Republican and conservative hate-filled rhetoric. The day after the shootings, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman already knew it was Right-wing hate that had provoked Loughner to murder: “It’s the saturation of our political discourse—and especially our airwaves—with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right…. So will the Arizona massacre make our discourse less toxic? It’s really up to G.O.P. leaders. Will they accept the reality of what’s happening to America, and take a stand against eliminationist rhetoric? Or will they try to dismiss the massacre as the mere act of a deranged individual, and go on as before?”
As it turned out, the Tucson massacre was entirely “the mere act of a deranged individual.” But the Left, beginning with a New York Times columnist, used the tragedy to demonize the Right, as it did with the Kennedy assassination.
Krugman and the New York Times blaming the Right for Loughner was so premature and so wrong that, in a rare moment in American journalism, one major newspaper attacked the morality of another. The Wall Street Journal attacked the New York Times under the heading “The New York Times has crossed a moral line.” And Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer responded to Krugman in a column titled “Massacre, then libel,” with this sentence: “The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”
The same Left—led by the New York Times—that had warned against making any quick assumptions that Islam had played any role in Major Nidal Hasan’s murder of thirteen people and wounding of thirty others at Fort Hood now immediately made the assumption that the Arizona murders were a result of a “climate of hate” induced by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and other conservatives.
It is a seminal contributor to Left-wing success: The only way the Left can succeed—anywhere, but especially in America, which is a center-Right country—is by libeling the Right. Only 20 percent of Americans label themselves liberal, let alone Left. How, then, do Leftists get elected? The answer is that, through its dominance of the news media, entertainment media, and educational institutions, the Left is able to successfully demonize the Right. The Left rarely convinces Americans to adopt its views. Rather, it creates a fear of the Right.
For example, at least until 2012, wherever it was put to a vote, most Americans, even in liberal California, voted to retain the man-woman definition of marriage. The Left was not able to convince the voters of any state to redefine marriage to include members of the same sex. So what the Left did was demonize as “haters” all those who merely sought to retain the man-woman definition of marriage.
Granting for exceptions that all generalizations allow for, conservatives believe that those on the Left are wrong (and foolish and naive and therefore destructive). But those on the Left believe that those on the Right are evil.
Examples are innumerable.
Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic Party, on Republicans: “In contradistinction to the Republicans, we [Democrats] don’t believe kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.” 33
Princeton professor Cornel West: “…a morally insensitive period from Reagan to the second Bush, when it was fashionable to be indifferent to the suffering of the most vulnerable.”34
Former Florida Democratic congressman Alan Grayson: “I want to say a few words about what it means to be a Democrat. It’s very simple: We have a conscience.”35
In an interview in 2001, retiring New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis lumped then attorney general John Ashcroft, a conservative Republican, together with Osama bin Laden: “Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.”36
Have conservative spokesmen of the same stature as these liberals ever said anything analogous about Democrats not caring about the suffering of children or not having a conscience? I am not familiar with any.
Why this liberal belief in the demonic nature of conservatives?
One reason is that Leftism, as we have seen, is largely based on good intentions. The Left is certain that it has good intentions—compassion, love of social justice, concern for the environment, and so on. Therefore, its opponents must have bad intentions—they must, by definition, lack compassion, not care about social justice, and not care about clean air and clean water, the poor, or the downtrodden.
A second reason is that when you don’t confront real evil, you hate those who do. During the 1980s, the Left expressed far more loathing of Ronald Reagan than of any Soviet Communist dictator. Those who refused to confront Communism hated those on the Right who did. They called the latter “warmongers,” “hawks,” “cold warriors,” charged them with “missile envy,” and with loving war.
The Left has had similar contempt for those who take a hard line on Islamism. The liberal and Left-wing media routinely place quotation marks around the phrase “War on Terror.” Indeed, the Obama administration actually forbade use of the term “Islamic terror.” America was at war with a nameless enemy.
Third, fulfillment of the Left’s utopian visions is prevented by the Right. How could a utopian not hate a conservative? To put it another way, the famous 1960s Left-wing motto “Make love, not war” expressed the problem as the Left sees it: The Left makes love and the Right makes war. How could one not hate the Right? The Right, with its belief in the need for a strong military; its opposition to the nurturing state; lack of faith in the United Nations; and in its policy of punishing criminals is the anti-Love, the Leftist equivalent of the Antichrist.
Demonization of their opponents is, therefore, not just a Leftist tactic. It is a bedrock Leftist belief. Given that those on the Left are certain that they are kinder, finer, smarter, and more compassionate than those on the Right, demonization of conservatives, for a Leftist, is merely describing reality.
LABELING OPPONENTS “RACIST”
With regard to any issue that involves blacks, or even non-race-based conservative-liberal differences, the Left will label the Right “racist.”
What were Blow’s examples? He provided two. The first and presumably most important was that “racially offensive images of the first couple are so prolific online that Google now runs an apologetic ad with the results of image searches of them.”
Having never seen a racially offensive image of the first couple, I was curious what Blow was referring to. I had somehow missed this alleged flood of racist images on the Web. Luckily, Blow provided a URL, an Internet link. I clicked on the link, and I came upon a statement by Google titled “An explanation of our search results,” in which Google noted, “Sometimes Google search results from the Internet can include disturbing content, even from innocuous queries. We assure you that the views expressed by such sites are not in any way endorsed by Google.”
The statement continued along those lines, but there was not a word about racism, blacks, the first couple, or anything related. It was a generic apology, and one that I had never in fact encountered. So not having had any luck corroborating Blow’s accusation of “overt racism on a scale to which we are unaccustomed” on the Internet, I searched “first couple,” clicked on “images,” making sure that the Google filter was turned off. All I saw were hundreds of beautiful images of what was in fact a handsome-looking first couple and first family. I then searched on “Michelle and Barack Obama pictures” and got similar results. One must conclude that Blow wildly exaggerated, if not made it all up, when he wrote that America is “inundated” with “overt racism” on the Internet (or anywhere else).
His second proof of an increasingly racist America: “And it’s not all words and images; it’s actions as well. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2008 hate crimes data released last week, anti-black hate crimes rose 4 percent from 2007…”
A 4 percent increase in anti-black hate crime: Was that an indication of a major increase in anti-black racism in America? According to the FBI hate crime statistics, in 2007, 3,434 blacks were victims of a hate crime, and in 2008, the number rose to 3,596—an increase of 162. Given that there are about 40 million blacks in America and about 260 million non-blacks, to charge America with ever-increasing racism based on an increase of 162 incidents of racism is as morally indefensible as it is absurd. To put it statistically, the increase, as a proportion of the black population, was .0004 percent.
Moreover, the number itself, 3,434, is negligible for such a large population. And we should bear in mind two additional factors: We have no way of knowing how many of those 3,434 incidents were committed by whites and how many by non-whites (such as Latinos). Moreover, of those 3,434 hate crimes, one was for murder, not one was a rape, a tiny 386 were aggravated assaults, and 1,257 were “acts of intimidation,” not acts of violence.
Only to blacks and whites on the Left do these statistics describe a racist, let alone an increasingly racist, society. What they really describe is the least racist multiethnic, multiracial society in human history.
The fact is that there is much more racism on the Left than on the Right. The very notion that race is a significant human characteristic—a basic Left-wing tenet—is racist. The notion that whites and blacks should not be judged by identical moral standards—or even taught similarly—is also racist. Yet both are basic liberal attitudes. Take, for example, a widely used 2011 teachers’ manual, The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change. It asserts that teachers must “reject the ‘color-blind’ approach to teaching,” in which teachers treat all children the same. A teacher who teaches students of all colors in the same color-blind manner is condemned by the Leftists who administer America’s schools.
The very existence of the Congressional Black Caucus (or any other race-based caucus) is also racist. The CBC is so color-based that even a congressman who represents a majority-black district, unless he or she is black, is not allowed to be a member. Democratic representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, representing a majority-black district, applied for membership and was refused solely because he is white.
The myriad professional black-only associations are racist (and, of course, Leftist). Why is there a National Association of Black Social Workers? This organization is so race-preoccupied that it made national headlines when it condemned white adoption of black children as “cultural genocide.” Why is there an Association of Black Psychologists? Or a National Association of Black Journalists? Aside from its implied racism, is such an association good for journalism? If there is any profession that should be free of racial and other biases, shouldn’t it be journalism?
LABELING OPPONENTS “HOMOPHOBIC”
The Left declares “homophobic” anyone who believes that marriage should continue to be defined as the union of a man and a woman. Indeed, any difference with the Left on any matter concerning gays is ascribed to conservative “homophobia” and bigotry. In 2010, during a national debate over whether to drop the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy regarding gays in the military, New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a column titled “Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet.” As the title proclaimed, anyone who was for continuing DADT was a bigot.
The article contained seventy-one sentences. Twelve of them contained an insult of conservatives.
Some examples:
Conservative spokesmen expressed “old homophobic clichés.”
“Such arguments…are mere fig leaves to disguise the phobia that can no longer dare speak its name…. [T]he flimsy rhetorical camouflage must be stripped away to expose the prejudice that lies beneath.”
“Those opposing same-sex marriage are just as eager to mask their bigotry.”
“The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see…”
“…the deep prejudice at the root of their [Republicans’] arguments.”
Conservatives who oppose repeal of DADT are “attack dogs.”
Likewise, anyone who supported California Proposition 8—to amend the California Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman—was not only homophobic but a “hater.”
To those on the Left, one cannot be a decent person and oppose redefining marriage—in a way no civilization has ever defined it, one might add.
Marc Shaiman, the Tony Award–winning composer of the film and stage musical Hairspray, composed a three-minute musical piece against California Proposition 8. Viewed more than 2 million times on the Internet, it featured major Hollywood talents playing the roles (through song) of two groups on a beach—gay men and women in beach clothes and a stuffy, formally dressed church group. Its message begins with a religious man and woman reacting to the cheerful gay group by singing these words:
Look! Nobody’s watching
It’s time to spread some hate
And put it in the constitution
Now, how? Proposition Hate!
Great!
The “hate” consisted of this one sentence: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
As is usually the case, nearly all the hate on the marriage definition issue came from Left-wing activists like Shaiman.
“Jesus, doesn’t the Bible say these people are an abomination?”
Jesus responds, “Yeah.”
It was quite audacious to put a falsehood into the mouth of Jesus. The fact is that nowhere in the Bible are homosexuals called “an abomination”—male-male intercourse is labeled an abomination, not those who engage in it, let alone gays who do not. Nor has any normative conservative spokesman referred to gays as “abominations.”
Shaiman and his fellow Left-wing activists could not acknowledge what conservatives regularly acknowledge, namely that there are good people on both sides of this issue. Why not? Because once the Left acknowledges that their opponents can be decent people, the Leftist edifice crumbles. Leftism is based on the Left’s self-image of moral superiority.
LABELING OPPONENTS “ANTI-WORKER”
From Greece to the United States, suffocating government debt is, aside from entitlements, in large measure a result of governments hiring far too many employees. In the United States, more than 20 million people work for federal, state, and local governments. That is about one in seven workers in America, and their salaries and benefits total approximately $1.5 trillion of taxpayer funds each year—about 10 percent of gross domestic product. Yet any Republican or conservative who wishes to decrease the number of federal, state, and municipal employees is labeled “anti-worker,” among other awful things. For example, in August 2011 it was reported that “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday hammered Republicans for what she labeled their ‘anti-worker agenda.’…”42
Conservatives are not depicted as opposing policies, but rather as opposing people—blacks, workers, teachers, women, Muslims, etc.
LABELING OPPONENTS “ANTI-EDUCATION”
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States spends an average of $91,700 per student between the ages of six and fifteen. That is the second most in the world, and by far the most for a large country. Only Switzerland, a country of 7.6 million people, spends more. The United States population is over 313 million, forty-one times larger than Switzerland. Moreover, the results are worse than many of the countries that spend far less, and since President Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education in 1979, the costs have soared while the results have declined. Consequently, many Americans believe that vast sums of money are wasted on education—especially on the federal and state bureaucracies that have become a deeply entrenched part of the education system. What does the Department of Education do, exactly? But to the Left, such a position is “anti-education” and “anti-teacher.” As one newspaper headline put it, “Democratic Video portrays GOP as anti-education.”43 And any attempt to weaken teachers unions’ control of education is depicted as “anti-teacher.”
LABELING OPPONENTS “FASCISTS” AND “NAZIS”
From The Authoritarian Personality to today, the equation of conservatives with fascism or even Nazism has been a recurring theme on the highest levels of the Left.
The argument that spokesmen on the Right call people on the Left fascists and Nazis just as often is not true. It is not true in frequency nor, more important, in the stature of the accusers. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges wrote a book titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, one of many books by Left-wing writers whose theme is that conservative Christians are fascists. The New York Times reviewer of the book began his review with these words: “Of course there are Christian fascists in America.”44
Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee said on the House floor on January 19, 2011: “[Republicans] say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie and eventually, people believe it…. That’s the same kind of thing the Germans said enough about the Jews and the people believed it—and you had the Holocaust.”
Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote that Tea Partiers engaged in a “small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.”45 Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass,” is considered the opening act of the Holocaust. In November 1938, in the course of two days, tens of thousands of German Jews were arrested and deported to concentration camps; scores of Jews were beaten to death; 267 synagogues were destroyed; and thousands of Jewish-owned businesses were vandalized—often by having their windows smashed. Had an equally prominent conservative columnist written the same thing about a large group of Democrats, he would have been forced to resign, given how intense the attacks by Jewish defense organizations and liberal media would have been.
Democratic Georgia congressman John Lewis, on the floor of the House on March 21, 1995, paraphrased the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemoller’s timeless speech about the Nazi takeover: “They came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews…trade unionists…Catholics…Protestants…” And then he said, “Read the Republican contract. They are coming for the children. They are coming for the poor. They are coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.”
Not only was there no outcry from the news media, which largely ignored Lewis’s comments, but when reported, they were related in an almost sympathetic manner. The next day on ABC’s Good Morning America, ABC correspondent Bob Zelnick emphasized the social programs the Republican wished to cut, and then cited the Lewis comments this way: “At times, the floor debate became emotional—one Democrat invoking the memory of Nazi Germany…”
Jesse Jackson on the newly elected Republican Congress in December 1994: “In South Africa, we call it apartheid. In Nazi Germany, we’d call it fascism. Here in the United States, we call it conservatism.”46
Jesse Jackson on Republican plans to repeal the Obama health care bill: “A kind of creeping genocide.”47
Julian Bond at the NAACP convention said of President Bush: “He has selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”
And, finally, longtime Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman wrote: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers…”
LABELING OPPONENTS “SEXIST”
For decades any person who suggested that men and women are basically different—psychologically and mentally, not just physically—was labeled sexist. Though some on the Left now acknowledge some inherent differences between the sexes, when a man makes this claim, he is still dismissed as sexist.
Arguing that, in general, men derive more satisfaction and more self-worth from a career than women do is sexist.
Advocating all-girls schools is progressive. Advocating all-boys schools is sexist.
Opposition to any aspect of feminism is sexist.
And, of course, opposition to abortion is not morality-based; it, too, is labeled sexist.
LABELING OPPONENTS “ISLAMOPHOBIC”
Why is it that one can criticize every religion—and mock as well as criticize Christianity—except Islam? Because the Left sets the rules of discourse in America and much of the rest of the world. There is no other reason.
Take, for example, how the Left treated all opposition to a Muslim leader’s plans to build a $100 million Islamic center in New York City within blocks of Ground Zero, where nearly three thousand Americans were killed on September 11, 2011, by Muslims acting in the name of Islam. All opposition was labeled Islamophobic. I did not come across a mainstream Leftist description of opponents of the mosque/Islamic center who did not describe all opponents as hate-filled, intolerant, bigoted, xenophobic, or, most of all, Islamophobic.
Michael Kinsley, editor at large, the Atlantic: “Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn’t bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I’ve heard or read.”
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: “The far right wing has seized on the issue as an occasion for fanning hatred against Muslims.”
Peter Beinart, associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York: “Republicans are clawing over each other to demonize Muslims.” And he warned “fellow Jews” who opposed the building of the mosque near Ground Zero: “It’s never crossed your mind that the religious hatred you have helped unleash could turn once again against us.”
New York Times editorial: “Republican ideologues, predictably…spew more of their intolerant rhetoric…. Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can…”
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, columnist at Salon.com, and the author of Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics: “The argument against the proposed Park 51 community center is necessarily and definitively grounded in bigotry…. The right-wing campaign…is a classic case of that warped mentality; indeed, this campaign is one of the ugliest this country has seen in some time…. toxic demagoguery…”48
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute: “Shame. Your bigoted appeals to fear and intolerance disgrace us all and put our country at risk in the world.”
In the Huffington Post, foreign policy analyst Michael Hughes: “Even more hideous is the way in which these bigots try to hide their overt prejudice in the emotional guise of love and caring, purportedly because they believe we must be ‘sensitive’ to the families of the victims of 9/11.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof: Republican opponents of the mosque are “just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings…. Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance.”
New York Times columnist Frank Rich: “This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing….. So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right—abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League…. The Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation…”
Responding to these attacks on opponents of the mosque, Washington Post conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are.”49
Presumably Krauthammer, too, is Islamophobic.
As in virtually every instance of Left-Right difference, the Left demonized the Right. In this case, however, it was particularly ugly. Even the relatives of men and women who were incinerated on 9/11 and who opposed a giant mosque and Islamic center two blocks away were demonized. On the other hand, virtually every conservative acknowledged that there were good people on both sides of this issue.
No one escapes the Left’s demonization of critics of Islam. Not even Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who, as an African woman who fights for women and gays, should be a Left-wing hero. Newsweek senior writer Lorraine Ali reviewed Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s autobiography, Infidel. It is the extraordinary story of Hirsi Ali, born and raised a Muslim in Somalia, who fled to the West, where she learned Dutch and mastered a new civilization so well that she was elected to the Dutch Parliament, and then eventually moved to America. But to Newsweek’s Lorraine Ali, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a “bombthrower,” and her book is “reactionary,” written to appease “right-wingers.”
To characterize Hirsi Ali, rather than the bomb-wearing people she is fighting at the risk of her life, as a “bombthrower” is to truly invert morality and reality. As is Lorraine Ali’s use of the words right-wing and reactionary to describe Hirsi Ali, a feminist, atheist, pro-gay activist who combats the greatest religious extremism of our time.
THE CHARGE THAT “BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED”
For most, if not nearly all, Americans on the Left, the invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein was explained in four words: “Bush lied, people died.”
But Bush did not lie. At worst, he was mistaken about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and about invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. At the time of the American and allied invasion of Iraq, leading Democrats,50 most Western intelligence services, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair—of the Labor Party—also believed that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. That is why Britain was America’s strong ally, sending the next-largest commitment of troops to Iraq after America’s. It is highly unlikely that a British prime minister—especially one from the Labor Party—would have sent forty-five thousand British soldiers to war unless his own intelligence agencies had independently assessed a very serious, perhaps imminent, threat. As the prominent liberal commentator, Fareed Zakaria of CNN, wrote at the time, “We cannot abandon our policy of containing Saddam Hussein. He is building weapons of mass destruction.”51
Did Zakaria lie?
In good conscience, along with many others, with good reason (Saddam Hussein had already used WMD against his own people), George W. Bush believed that Saddam Hussein had or was building such weapons. But saying Bush was mistaken violates the Left-wing need to demonize its opponents. Bush had to be portrayed as lying, and doing so for another liberal characterization of conservatives: greed. This time for oil and in order to enrich his friends at defense contractors such as Halliburton.
NOTHING BETTER SUMMARIZES THE Left-wing demonization of conservatives than a question posed to the father of modern conservatism, the late William F. Buckley Jr., in an interview with the New York Times Magazine on the occasion of Buckley’s taking leave from National Review, the magazine he founded fifty years earlier. Given the Left-wing views of the New York Times and its interviewer, the questions were nearly all challenging. But nothing quite prepared a reader for this one: “You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?”52
That one statement summed up the liberal view of conservatives: “indifferent to suffering.”
4. The Left’s Manufacture and Use of Crises
WITHOUT CONSTANT CRISES, the Left has no raison d’être, and, even worse, is not needed. The Left needs crises; and crises need the Left to solve them.
The Left is both prone to hysteria—expressing exaggerated and/or irrational fears—and to producing hysteria for tactical reasons. As the list below—which is not exhaustive—shows, for the Left there is always an imminent calamity, a looming great disaster. Additionally, those threats must be solved immediately and they must be solved by government action.
These are the means by which hysteria and fabricated crises work for the Left:
Let’s start with a nonpolitical issue—bullying.
Every normal, not to mention decent, person decries bullying in schools (or anywhere else). Therefore, given that there are more conservative parents than liberal ones (because more Americans identify as conservative than liberal), and no parent wants his or her child bullied, one would assume that conservatives would be equally if not more represented among politicians, educators, and parents in clamoring for something to be done about the alleged epidemic of school bullying.
Yet, as the following Associated Press report in March 2011 shows, that is not the case. Indeed, this story provides a fine example of nearly each element in Left-wing hysteria:
BISMARCK, N.D.—North Dakota senators on Thursday approved requiring schools to take new steps to prevent bullying, despite arguments that the effort was a time-wasting example of the “nanny state…”
The measure, which the Senate approved, 36–10, mandates that school districts adopt anti-bullying policies by July 2012, and make training available to teachers and school aides in bullying prevention.
North Dakota is one of only a handful of states that doesn’t have an anti-bullying law for public schools, said Sen. Richard Marcellais, D-Belcourt.
Sens. Oley Larsen, R-Minot, and Margaret Sitte, R-Bismarck, spoke against the measure.
Larsen said children need to be taught how to handle bullying, rather than ordering schools to focus on bullying prevention. The legislation “rewards kids for thinking and acting like victims. It will promote a victim mentality and handicap kids for life, not just after the school bell rings,” Larsen said.
Sitte said anti-bullying instruction and training would waste valuable school time and called it “just another example of nanny-state government run amok.”
“From the beginning of time, people have picked on each other. Call it bullying, call it what you will,” Sitte said. “People do need to learn to stand up for themselves.”
A reader of this news story will readily note that the most vocal voices against the bill were those of Republican, presumably conservative Republican, legislators. Their concerns, typical conservative concerns, were that preoccupation with bullying and the outlawing of it by the state were (1) an example of the “nanny state” and (2) would create a sense of victimhood among many students.
On the other hand, Democratic state senator Marcellais was perturbed that North Dakota was one of only a handful of states that did not have an anti-bullying law. To the liberal mind, knowing that any other state (or country) has banned something undesirable while one’s own state or country has not is a moral failing.
When I was a summer camp counselor at an eight-week sleep-away camp, there was no bullying in my cabin of eight thirteen-year-old boys. The major reason was that my campers knew from day one that, if necessary, I would have physically overpowered a bully. In those days, counselors, like teachers, could use physical force if necessary. Thanks to the Left, that is now considered child abuse and therefore illegal. In the Left’s view, it is better for a young student to be taken away by the state police in handcuffs to jail (see the story in Chapter 3 about the young boys in an Oregon school who “butt-slapped” a girl) than to be smacked by a teacher or a camp counselor—or by a parent.
As the Left has undermined teacher and parental authority, it has increasingly transferred such authority to the state. Thus, according to the North Dakota bill, “School districts would need to involve parents, school employees, volunteers, students, law enforcement, domestic violence and sexual assault organizations and community representatives when developing the policy.” One wonders why the fire department was not involved.
School bullying and the North Dakota legislators’ reaction provide an excellent example of Left-wing hysteria because the Left and the Right both detest bullies and because parents on both sides equally love their children. Yet, their views about what should be done about it—and even whether this is an epidemic—completely differ.
FRIGHTENED CHILDREN AT THE
DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION
The Democratic National Convention in 2000 provided an example of the primacy of its hysteria, and of its desire to instill its irrational fears in others—especially children, whose innocence Leftism often robs for ideological purposes.
On August 16, 2000, the third day of the convention, the Democrats introduced five young people—by my best guess, from five to eleven years of age: “Ladies and gentlemen,” the convention’s official voice announced, “we are pleased to welcome five special young people…for ‘When I Grow Up.’”
First child: “When I grow up, I wonder if people will be more afraid to cry than they are to die. Will I be able to see a rainbow in a smog-filled sky? Will there be any trees alive? If not, how will the planet survive? Will the Internet have a website at www.lifetime-air-supply?”
Second child: “When I grow up, if I got bored, and had nothing to do, and me and my son build a canoe, would water that used to be blue be so polluted it would give us the flu? Will a thousand dollars be enough for a shoe? Will I have to be like you—letting money make every decision for everything that I do?”
Third child: “When I grow up, will the existence of dolphins and whales just be a story I tell—starting with ‘Once upon a time…,’ ending with ‘Where did we fail?’ Will adults be the hammer and nail? Will schools be next door to jails? Will the truth be illegal to sell?”
Fourth child: “When I grow up, will anyone be on the news for anything besides killing? Will those drug dealers still be standing in front of my building? Will they ever learn how to love, or stay afraid of the feeling? Will TV and music videos still raise America’s children?”
Fifth child: “When I grow up, will innocent kids still be wrongfully touched? Will students go home from school in a bulletproof bus? What if children don’t have anyone to trust? That would hurt me so much. And I want to be happy…when I grow up.”
Kids who should have been playing ball or taking a summer trip with their family or church group were instead reciting lines expressing (adult liberals’) fears of growing up in an America that might choke them environmentally or abuse them sexually—lines written for them by America’s Left-wing party.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT
According to the Left, the great majority of girls and women in America frequently experience a nightmare of sexual harassment. While sexual harassment is real and sometimes truly vile, this has largely been another example of Left-wing hysteria, resulting, as always, in far more laws, far bigger government, and therefore less liberty for Americans.
On the CBS Evening News on May 29, 2008, anchorwoman Katie Couric reported this alarming news:
“A new study on teens and sexual harassment should give every parent pause. Most teenage girls report they’ve been sexually harassed…. In a study that appeared in the journal Child Development, 90 percent of teen girls say they’ve been harassed at least once.”
Millions of American parents and their daughters were told on one of the most widely watched evening newscasts that nine out of every ten American girls aged twelve to eighteen are sexually harassed. Suspecting that at least two elements of Leftism were at play here—hysteria and Left-wing feminist victim ideology—far more than some real crisis of sexual harassment, I decided to take a closer look at the report cited by Couric.
There was a summary of the report on the Ms. magazine website:
A study released this month reports that 90 percent of girls between the ages of 12 and 18 reported experiencing sexual harassment. The study found that girls who had a better understanding of feminism from the media, their parents, or teachers were more likely to recognize sexual harassment.
Campbell Leaper, professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the authors of the study, said in a press release, “Sexism remains pervasive in the lives of adolescent girls. Most girls have experienced all three types of sexism—sexual harassment, sexist comments about their academic abilities, and sexist comments about their athletic abilities.”
Science Daily reports that the study found Latina and Asian American girls reported less sexual harassment than the other girls who participated in the study. The most commonly reported forms of sexual harassment were unwanted romantic attention, demeaning gender-related comments, teasing based on their appearance, and unwanted physical contact.
This confirmed my suspicions.
First, “The study found that girls who had a better understanding of feminism were more likely to recognize sexual harassment.”
There is no question that this is true. Girls subjected to feminist indoctrination are undoubtedly more likely to interpret largely innocuous behavior as sexual harassment. In order for the American Left to achieve its political goals, and because many on the Left sincerely believe it, virtually every group in America except white, male, heterosexual Christians must be portrayed as—and constantly told it is—oppressed. Women are oppressed by men. Blacks and Hispanics are oppressed by whites. Gays are oppressed by straights. Non-Christians are oppressed by Christians. The poor are oppressed by the wealthy. This helps the Left gain and retain these groups’ votes and it is also part of the Left’s race-gender-class explanation of how the world works.
American women have more opportunity and more equality than just about any women in the world today and certainly ever in history. In fact, if either sex is more “oppressed” today, it is more likely to be males. If women were incarcerated, let alone murdered, as disproportionately as men are; if only 40 percent of those getting a bachelor’s degree were female; if girls dropped out of high school at the rate males do; if females committed suicide as often as—let alone considerably more often than—males do, there would be a national outcry. But for feminists, academics, and CBS News, it is women who are “oppressed.” And that is what they are taught in high school and college by feminist-oriented teachers.
Second, “sexual harassment” is a term that includes utterly trivial acts and non-acts: “Sexist comments about their academic abilities, sexist comments about their athletic abilities, unwanted romantic attention, demeaning gender-related comments, teasing based on their appearance, and unwanted physical contact.”
If a girl’s bra is snapped in elementary, junior high, or high school; if a girl is told she should learn to throw a ball “like a guy”; if a boy pursues a girl and doesn’t know exactly when to stop pursuing her—these are all instances of sexism and sexual harassment. This leads to—as acknowledged by the Ms. report itself—girls and women seeing themselves as victims of sexual harassment.53
If you deem all these things sexual harassment, there really is a plague of sexual harassment. And if there is a plague of sexual harassment, then the Left is not only vindicated; it is empowered—because only an expanded state guided by the Left can cure it.
Thanks to the Left’s hysteria about sexual harassment, little boys are now deemed sex offenders for doing what little boys have done since little boys were first invented.
In Woodbridge, Virginia, officials at an elementary school called in police to arrest a six-year-old boy for slapping a six-year-old girl on her bottom. The boy was then labeled a sex offender, a charge that will permanently remain in his school records. And he was hardly alone among elementary school students. As related in the Washington Post: “The Virginia Department of Education reported that 255 elementary students were suspended last year for offensive sexual touching, or ‘improper physical contact against a student.’ In Maryland, 166 elementary school children were suspended last year for sexual harassment, including three preschoolers, 16 kinder-gartners and 22 first-graders, according to the State Department of Education.”54
Another example, in which my radio show and I came to be directly involved: At Patton Middle School in McMinnville, Oregon, students started something called “slap butt day.” On one such day in February 2007, according to the Oregonian: “Two boys tore down the hall of Patton Middle School after lunch, swatting the bottoms of girls as they ran—what some kids later said was a common form of greeting. But bottom-slapping is against policy in McMinnville Public Schools. So a teacher’s aide sent the gawky seventh-graders to the office, where the vice principal and a police officer stationed at the school soon interrogated them.”55
A police officer interrogated them.
“After hours of interviews with students,” the Oregonian continued, “the day of the February incident, the officer read the boys their Miranda rights and hauled them off in handcuffs to juvenile jail, where they spent the next five days.”
Two seventh graders were read their Miranda rights. And hauled off to jail. And kept in jail for five days. For butt-swatting.
It gets worse. The seventh graders were not permitted contact with their parents for twenty-four hours, they were brought into court in shackles and jail garb, and they were strip-searched four times during the course of their incarceration. All because the Yamhill County district attorney, Bradley Berry, brought felony sex charges against the two boys. When he finally explained himself under pressure from the media, Berry told the Oregonian, “From our perspective and the perspective of the victims, this was not just horseplay.”
Berry’s explanation was not only absurd—it was false. The girls involved did regard it as horseplay, and they claimed virtually from the outset that they had been pressured into making a case against the boys.
I appealed to my radio show listeners to donate to a legal fund for the boys, and due to the legal help they received the charges against them were eventually dropped.
There is real sexual harassment. And there is real hysteria about sexual harassment, which has the usual benefits for the Left: a victim group, more laws, which in turn mean more lawsuits and bigger government, and the Left as savior.
NUCLEAR POWER
Though strongly opposed to fossil-based sources of energy, the Left in America has been just as opposed to clean nuclear energy. The stated reasons? Nuclear energy is not safe because it can leak radiation and because we do not know how to safely dispose of nuclear waste.
This is another Left-wing hysteria that emanates from Leftists being prone to excessive fears and/or making up such fears in order to push a different agenda—in this case “green” energy such as windmills and solar panels.
The Left has made a meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in March 1979 synonymous with terrible danger from nuclear reactors. As coincidence would have it, the nuclear-power-is-dangerous film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon, was released just days before the Three Mile Island accident. The film, the news media, and Fonda’s antinuclear activism all created a fear of nuclear power among many Americans.
The antinuclear Left rapidly organized demonstrations throughout America. In May 1979, sixty-five thousand people, including California governor Jerry Brown, attended a march and rally against nuclear power in Washington, D.C. In September, the largest demonstration was held in New York City, where two hundred thousand people listened to anti-nuclear-power speeches given by Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader. The rally was held in conjunction with a series of nightly “No Nukes” concerts given at Madison Square Garden from September 19 to 23 by Musicians United for Safe Energy. And, of course, various companies had to pay out tens of millions of dollars thanks to class-action suits.
The number of reactors under construction in the United States consequently declined every year from 1980 to 1998. And between 1980 and 1984, orders for fifty-one American nuclear reactors were canceled.
Why did all this happen?
Solely because of Leftist hysteria and activism.
Not one person died as a result of Three Mile Island; in fact, exposure to radiation was next to zero. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “Estimates are that the average dose to about 2 million people in the area was only about 1 millirem. To put this into context, exposure from a chest x-ray is about 6 millirem. Compared to the natural radioactive background dose of about 100–125 millirem per year for the area, the collective dose to the community from the accident was very small. The maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem…. Comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well-respected organizations have concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, most of the radiation was contained and that the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.”56
Even the worst nuclear power disaster in history, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Ukraine, which was entirely a result of Soviet incompetence and lack of concern for its citizens, was far less injurious than the drama around it suggested. As of 2006, twenty years after the disaster, according to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation:
There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident….
For the most part, they were exposed to radiation levels comparable to or a few times higher than annual levels of natural background, and future exposures continue to slowly diminish as the radionuclides decay. Lives have been seriously disrupted by the Chernobyl accident, but from the radiological point of view, generally positive prospects for the future health of most individuals should prevail.57
Regarding deaths from Chernobyl, as of twenty-four years later, the Guardian reported the “UN’s World Health Organisation [WHO] and the International Atomic Energy Agency claim that only 56 people have died as a direct result of the radiation released at Chernobyl…”58
The article also notes that WHO predicts that “about 4,000 will die from it eventually.” But “Michael Repacholi, director of the UN Chernobyl forum until 2006, has claimed that even 4,000 eventual deaths could be too high.”59
Each of the fifty-six deaths is a human tragedy (as well as negligent homicide on the part of the Soviet government). But fifty-six is not the number that anyone would have expected given the amount of attention and the severity of nuclear radiation released—four hundred times more radioactive material, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, than from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.60
As for the Left, such numbers are unacceptably small. They do not lead to hysteria and therefore do not lead to sufficient antinuclear sentiment. Thus the Left-wing environmentalist group Greenpeace rejected the United Nations numbers and released a report at the same time declaring that many tens of thousands of people will have died from the Chernobyl accident.61
For much of the world’s media, Greenpeace is the source to go to for such figures. The Associated Press began its report on April 18, 2006: “Greenpeace said Tuesday in a new report that more than 90,000 people were likely to die of cancers caused by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, countering a United Nations report that predicted the death toll would be around 4,000.”
And Greenpeace is acting responsibly here compared to the world’s best-known antinuclear activist, Dr. Helen Caldicott, who said in 2011 that “nearly a million” people were killed by Chernobyl.62
Nuclear power, after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, and after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, remains extraordinarily safe.
ANOREXIA
Two prominent feminist writers, Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf, wrote in their bestselling books, Revolution from Within and The Beauty Myth, respectively—and the news media reported—that 150,000 girls and women die every year from anorexia nervosa.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 1991, the year before the Steinem book was published, fifty-four American girls and women died of anorexia. Steinem and Wolf, two feminist icons, exaggerated by a factor of 30,000. Moreover, the impossibility of the number the two authors gave is easily demonstrated. In 2009, fewer than 50,000 females between the ages fifteen and forty-four died in America of all causes.
Why did they write something so mendacious? First, because of the animus against men that has pervaded Left-wing feminism. As Wolf put it, every female who dies from anorexia is killed not by nature, but by men. And second, if the true numbers are given, there is no crisis. And the Left without a crisis is like a fish without water.
SECONDHAND SMOKE
My brother and I grew up with two parents who regularly smoked inside the house. My mother (who lived in excellent health until her death at age eighty-nine) smoked cigarettes and my father (who is in excellent health at age ninety-three) smoked cigars. My brother and I have been blessed with excellent health all our lives. Our generation of baby boomers has been the longest-living, healthiest generation in American, if not world, history, and most of us grew up with daily secondhand smoke. Yet much of this generation has bought the notion that secondhand smoke is a major killer. Or, to be more precise, those Left of center have bought it, just as those Left of center have sold it.
The genesis of this hysteria is easy to identify. Antismoking activists—people for whom abolishing tobacco use (cigars and pipes as well as cigarettes) is a religious calling—saw that Americans did not respond as the activists wished they would. No matter how much the activists attempted to strike fear in smokers’ hearts, many people continued to smoke. So they devised a far more effective tactic—they told nonsmokers that smokers were killing them.
Of course, they could rarely point to people who died as a result of being exposed to what became known as secondhand smoke. So they used epidemiological studies—defined by the WHO as “the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states or events including disease”—to “prove” their contention. Fifty thousand Americans a year, we are told, are killed by secondhand smoke. This is hysteria masquerading as science. First, because it is not science as much as it is interpreting statistics, and second, because it is animated in almost every case by an extrascientific impulse—the desire to end smoking. One highly regarded epidemiologist, Dr. James Enstrom of the UCLA School of Public Health, disputed the mainstream epidemiological studies on secondhand smoke. His findings, printed in the British Medical Journal, were that “[t]he results do not support a causal relation between environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality…. The association between exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may be considerably weaker than generally believed.”63
As a result of his studies on secondhand smoke and other studies that went against the dominant positions of the Left that permeate even some of the sciences—especially public health—Enstrom was denied tenure at UCLA.64 All the academic politics and virtually all the government funds for academics on this particular issue are devoted to “proving” secondhand smoke kills fifty thousand Americans a year.
Concerning the nonscientific basis of concern with outdoor smoke, Michael B. Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, wrote in a column published in the New York Times: “Not only can people move around and thus avoid intense exposure, but smoke quickly disperses in the open air…. [N]o evidence demonstrates that the duration of outdoor exposure—in places where people can move freely about—is long enough to cause substantial health damage…. [F]rom a public health perspective, [the outdoor ban is] pointless.”
Siegel, a longtime proponent of indoor bans on smoking, concluded his column thus: “In trying to convince people that even transient exposure to secondhand smoke is a potentially deadly hazard, smoking opponents risk losing scientific credibility…. New York’s ban on outdoor smoking seems to fulfill its opponents’ charge that the movement is being driven instead by an unthinking hatred of tobacco smoke.”65
Let me make clear that I do not deny that asthmatic children, for example, may well have an increase in asthmatic episodes as a result of being around secondhand smoke. And secondhand smoke may cause or exacerbate other conditions in some people. But that is far from the claim that secondhand smoke kills fifty thousand Americans a year.
Moreover, it is worth pondering—since presumably just as many individuals on the Right dislike smoke as do individuals on the Left—why people Left of center are so much more likely to believe that any exposure to secondhand smoke can seriously hurt their health and even kill them, and why it is that liberal cities governed by liberals are so much more likely to ban outdoor smoking, and even smoking in cigar shops, than conservative cities are.
There are actually three answers. One is that when people on the Left hear the words “studies show” or “experts say,” they often cease thinking critically. They cease to live by their own motto to “question authority.” The second is that they panic easily. The third is that they hate big companies, and none more than tobacco companies.
HETEROSEXUAL AIDS IN AMERICA
In the 1980s, American media featured cover articles about the looming epidemic of heterosexual AIDS in America. They made sure to feature white heterosexual women—members of the second-least-likely demographic group in America to contract AIDS (the least likely were lesbians)—in order to illustrate that, in the politically correct phrase of the day, “AIDS doesn’t discriminate.” Or as a Life magazine cover put it, “Now, No One Is Safe.”
Though not true, the belief that heterosexual AIDS was developing into an epidemic in America was fostered by the Left, including more than a few physicians.* Why? One reason was that the Left desired to destigmatize AIDS by deflecting attention away from (male) homosexuals, who, along with intravenous drug users and their partners, were the largest groups of AIDS carriers. Another reason was to further increase spending on AIDS research. The Left believed, probably correctly, that if the American public associated AIDS almost exclusively with small subgroups, it would balk at spending enormous sums of money on AIDS research to the detriment of funding for other, much more prevalent, deadly diseases. But if the American public were led to believe that AIDS threatened all Americans equally, it would readily acquiesce to spending much more money on AIDS research.
SWINE FLU
In 2009, an outbreak of a strain of influenza called H1N1 that came to be popularly known as “swine flu” killed some people. The world’s media and the United Nations picked up on this issue and, again, those on the Left were far more concerned than those on the Right. Emblematic was the reaction of the vice president of the United States, Joseph Biden, a liberal Democrat, who told the nation that he recommends that people not travel on any public mode of transportation such as an airplane because the person seated next to them might be a carrier and his or her sneeze could be fatal.
After the airline and other travel industries vehemently protested, the vice president took back his words. It is inconceivable that the previous vice president, the conservative Dick Cheney, would have said anything analogous.
SILICONE BREAST IMPLANTS
Another Left-led hysteria concerned alleged serious dangers of silicone breast implants to women’s health. Feminist and other ideologically driven groups led a campaign to have the implants banned despite the lack of scientific evidence to substantiate their charges. The campaign was successful, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the implants in 1992. As in all the other cases, nearly all the news media had been publishing articles and broadcasting about how dangerous the implants were. Typical was CBS News broadcaster Connie Chung, two years before the ban: “But what’s shocking is that these devices have never been approved by the federal government. Only now is the government looking at the dangers. But for some women, it may be too late.” The show featured four women who claimed to be sick as a result of the implants and a physician who supported their claims. No dissenting voice was heard on the show.66
Meanwhile, juries were awarding enormous sums of money to lawyers and their clients on the basis of their claims that silicone implants ruined their health. In 1991, a California jury awarded $7.3 million to a woman with mixed connective-tissue disease—despite the testimony of her doctor that she showed symptoms two years before getting implants.67
In June 1994, an epidemiologic study done at the Mayo Clinic was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found no association between breast implants and the connective-tissue diseases and other disorders that were studied.68
In June 1995 another, very large, study was published, again in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study was conducted by epidemiologists and rheumatologists at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health. It, too, found no association between silicone breast implants and connective-tissue diseases.69 *
Such studies led Dr. Ed Uthman, a pathologist and adjunct professor of pathology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, to write in 1996: “Of my years in pathology, I have never seen such high-profile behavior and deliberately misleading literature from physicians as I have seen surrounding breast implants.” Lest one think that Uthman was in the pay of silicone breast implant makers, it is worth noting that he was, in fact, an outspoken opponent of breast implants in women with normal breasts: “Any woman whose Significant Other wants her to undergo surgical breast enlargement needs to get a new Significant Other, not new breasts.”70
In November 2006, the FDA finally approved silicone breast implants. But the liberal media continued its crusade against the product. Immediately after the approval, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams announced, “Given the history of this product, I think a lot of people are going to have a hard time with the government blessing for this particular product, being a foreign substance being sewn inside the bodies of women.”71
HOMELESSNESS IN AMERICA
During the Reagan era another crisis in America was announced by Left-wing activists. This time it was homelessness. Every homeless person is a tragedy, but, again, the Left created hysteria. The estimate of American homeless given at the time by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was between 250,000 and 350,000. But the best-known spokesman for the cause, a man named Mitch Snyder, regularly announced that there were between two and three million homeless Americans. And the press repeatedly cited these numbers as if they were accurate. It was the Left’s way, among other things, of demonstrating how callous America is to its own people—especially under a Republican administration. The numbers, however, were beyond wildly exaggerated; they were made up. When finally questioned about his numbers by Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline, Snyder admitted the numbers were invented. “Everybody said we want a number,” Snyder told Koppel. “We got on the phone, we made a lot of calls, we talked to a lot of people, and we said, ‘Okay, here are some numbers.’ They have no meaning, no value.”72
HUNGER IN AMERICA
After the massive homelessness issue was finally dismissed as hysteria, the Left focused attention on another alleged area of Americans’ disdain for their fellow Americans—hunger. John Edwards, Democratic candidate for vice president of the United States in 2004, repeatedly proclaimed, “Thirty-five million Americans last year went hungry…. This [election] is about those 35 million people who are hungry every single year.”
There was no truth to this charge. The only basis for it was a U.S. Department of Agriculture report that said that about 35 million Americans experienced “household food insecurity.” That term does not, the USDA emphasized, mean hunger. It only means being forced to reduce “variety in their diets” or eat a “few basic foods” at various times of the year. If a country could sue for libel, America would have had cause to sue John Edwards and all those on the Left who repeat this falsehood.
PEANUTS
In 2005, according to the CDC, eleven Americans died of all food allergies—that is, adults as well as children, and from an allergy to any food, not just peanuts. Yet schools across America have banned peanuts and peanut butter, among the few protein-rich foods many children like to eat.73 Compare this with about ten thousand children who are hospitalized each year for sports-related traumatic brain injuries. The hysteria has been led by school officials, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, and Consumer Reports, a liberal magazine that helped stoke the hysteria about secondhand smoke. It is mind-boggling that schools have banned peanut butter. But in the Age of Hysteria, one child who might die suffices to ban a food for the millions of students who would benefit from it.
MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING
The most recent Left-wing induced crisis and hysteria appears to be over allegedly severe global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Computer models suggest that the increased carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere will raise the earth’s temperature so precipitously as to endanger much of civilization as we know it.
One must accept all of the following statements or the entire global warming edifice crumbles:
If only one of the four propositions is incorrect, we have a new example of hysteria, and we have no reason to cause the Western world’s economies to contract greatly enough to induce widespread unemployment and economic dislocation.
On statement 1: If the earth is not heating up dangerously, the entire issue is moot. There is some scientific dispute over whether the earth is heating up at all, and considerable dispute about whether it is doing so to world-endangering levels. Why else would the global warming alarmists have renamed “global warming” “climate change”?
Professor Mojib Latif, a climate expert at the Leibniz Institute at Kiel University in Germany and member of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s most significant organization arguing for the man-made global warming threat, said that recent fluctuations in ocean currents in the North Atlantic (Arctic oscillation) may signal cooler temperatures ahead, perhaps for the next thirty years (though he still believes that the even longer term trend is toward global warming).
In January 2012, sixteen eminent scientists published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “No Need to Panic About Global Warning.” They included the president of the World Federation of Scientists, a Princeton University professor of physics, a Hebrew University professor of astrophysics, the former president of the New York Academy of Sciences, and others of similar stature:
In their column, they wrote, among other things:
The number of “scientific heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts….
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over ten years now.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the twenty-two years in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.
On statement 2: If the earth is heating up, but there is a natural explanation for this—that is, if human beings burning fossil fuel is not the primary cause—the issue is moot. And this may be the case. After all, the earth experienced much hotter periods before there was any fossil fuel burning, and before there were any human beings.
Denis G. Rancourt, professor of physics and an environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has written that “even doubling the present atmospheric CO2 concentration, to the unattainable value of 800 ppm (parts per million) say, without changing anything else in the atmosphere, would have little discernable effect on global temperature or climate.”74
Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, argues, “Saying the climate system is completely dominated by how much carbon dioxide we have in the system is crazy—completely wrong…. Carbon dioxide is not the major driver for the earth-climate system.”75
So, too, the earth has been much colder, also having nothing to do with human beings. We know, for instance, that ice ages have come and gone throughout the earth’s history. In fact, as recently as the 1970s, there were widespread scientific predictions of global cooling. George Will gathered some representative statements from scientific and liberal news, predicting global cooling:
In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950” (The New York Times, May 21, 1975). Although some disputed that the “cooling trend” could result in “a return to another ice age” (the Times, Sept. 14, 1975), others anticipated “a full-blown 10,000-year ice age” involving “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The “continued rapid cooling of the Earth” (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery” (International Wildlife, July 1975). “The world’s climatologists are agreed” that we must “prepare for the next ice age” (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of “ominous signs” that “the Earth’s climate seems to be cooling down,” meteorologists were “almost unanimous” that “the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, “The Cooling World,” April 28, 1975).76
On statement 3: If the earth’s temperature does rise and this does not lead to massive catastrophe—in other words, if we humans can adapt to the warmer temperatures or if the warmer temperatures are in fact good for us—the issue is, again, moot. Rancourt: “There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population. If it were not for the global greenhouse effect, the planet would on average be 33 C colder and [un] inhabitable. As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it’s hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator…”77
On statement 4: Even if one accepts the first three premises, the economic dislocation of the proposed remedies would render the cure far worse for humanity than the disease. This is Danish professor Bjorn Lomborg’s thesis. A committed environmentalist, named one of the “50 people who could save the planet” by the Left-wing newspaper the Guardian, Lomborg does believe the globe is getting warmer. But he believes that so much more good could be done for humanity for so much less money (fighting AIDS, distributing mosquito nets, etc.) than it would take to combat global warming that such massive funds would be wasted and ultimately harm the world.
The media have ignored the global warming denials of Richard Lindzen, the scientist who may be America’s leading climatologist. An atmospheric physicist who is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Lindzen wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, “It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about,” and “The basis for the weak IPCC [UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] argument for anthropogenic [man-made] climate change was shown to be false.”78
Even more irresponsible than ignoring Lindzen, the media constantly report that there is an overwhelming “scientific consensus,” indeed “97 percent” of all scientists agree on the man-made global warming thesis—yet the media ignore a petition on the Internet signed by more than 31,000 scientists, including 9,029 PhDs, 7,157 with a master’s of science, and 12,715 with a bachelor of science degree, all of whom dispute the global warming thesis. Here is a listing they provided of their fields of expertise:
The scientist who organized this “Global Warming Petition Project” was Professor Frederick Seitz, one of America’s most honored physicists. Seitz, who died in 2008, was president of the National Academy of Sciences, the highest honor a scientist in America can attain. He was also president of Rockefeller University. He received the National Medal of Science and numerous other awards, including honorary doctorates from thirty-two universities around the world. Seitz wrote on the home page of his Petition Project, “Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful.”
The media have likewise ignored sixty Canadian scientists, all of whom are accredited experts in climate and related disciplines, who published an open letter to the Canadian prime minister in which they concluded: “Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models.”80
The media have ignored Claude Allegre of France, a member of both the French Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and a former French minister of education (Socialist Party). Allegre argues that the vast amount of money governments have thrown at scientists who advocate the man-made global warming theory has distorted science.
There are other scientists with impeccable reputations all over the world who have taken issue with the man-made-global-warming-leading-to-catastrophe hypothesis. But given the Left-wing bias of the world’s news media, they are rarely given attention. In addition, the Left has done to these people what it normally does to opponents—demonize them. Anyone who is skeptical of any of the four propositions is labeled “anti-science,” and any scientist who expresses skepticism is accused of being in the pay of energy companies despite the fact that the vast majority of global warming research money is made available only to scientists who have sided with the Left’s view of the issue.
For the record, the previously mentioned professor Denis Rancourt, a major global warming expert, is a radical Leftist: “I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”81
It is too early to state definitively that what we have here is another expression of Left-wing hysteria. We do know that if we enact the Left’s prescriptions to dramatically slash carbon emissions, the Western world would experience a severe economic depression, government power would greatly expand, and individual liberty would contract.
So, both sides need to be honest: The vast majority of people who believe the man-made global warming leading to calamity prognosis know nothing about climate science, and the vast majority of skeptics also know nothing about climate science. On this issue, we all choose what to believe and, more important, what to do. I choose to join the skeptics because an extraordinary number of scientists—tens of thousands—consider the prognostications to be either outright wrong or greatly exaggerated; because I am not prepared to wreck the Western world’s economy, which is already on the brink of debt-caused collapse; because computer models predicting what may happen in half a century are not compelling; because climate has always changed (sometimes dramatically) without any human influence; because climate is extremely complex and quite beyond anyone’s current ability to predict with certitude; and because the people pushing this thesis have been wrong regarding every crisis and hysteria they have heretofore asked the rest of us to believe in.
When you cry wolf ten times, many people are not inclined to change their lives on the eleventh.
WHY THE NEED FOR CRISES?
What does the Left gain by making up or exaggerating crises—to the point of frightening children as it did at the Democratic National Convention and does in schools throughout America? And why do so many ordinary people Left of center believe these “crises”?
First, the more things one fears, the more one is likely to hold Left-wing positions. This is not an impressive characteristic, but it is not meant only as criticism. It is also a statement about the sincerity of Left-wing hysteria. Most people on the Left really do fear for the viability of the earth because of carbon emissions, really do believe that 35 million Americans go hungry, that 150,000 girls and women die from anorexia each year, that monkey bars and dodgeball and peanuts are too dangerous for children, that secondhand smoke is a major killer, and so on.
Second, since the wish to create a utopia is central to Leftism, there is little tolerance for risk. After all, “better safe than sorry”—so why allow anything that can hurt a child in schools?
Third, hysterias usually demand far more government intervention in people’s lives. Leftism trusts the state—when run by the Left—not the individual.
And, finally, and most significantly, it seems to be a law of life that those who do not confront the greatest evils will confront lesser ones. Most humans know the world is morally disordered, and people therefore try to fight what they deem to be most responsible for that disorder. The Right tends to fight human evil; Communism and Islamism are two examples. The Left has generally avoided confronting such evils, but it does fight. And what it tends to fight are considerably lesser threats, often non-evils.
First and foremost the Left fights those who do fight the great evils. Anti-Communists were vilified and anyone who uses the term Islamofascism is likewise vilified.
The Left fights:
A good example of what the Left fights instead of great evils—or, if you will, what the Left defines as great evil—was stated on the cover of the first “Green Issue” of the popular Left-wing magazine Vanity Fair: “A Graver Threat than Terrorism: Global Warming.”82
The notion that global warming is a graver threat than terrorism is astonishing. Human beings are incomparably more threatened, to cite one example, from the terror-sponsoring regime of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons than by carbon emissions.
The Vanity Fair cover reinforces the conviction that while fine people can have Left-wing views, individuals who think morally clearly will not have these views. To argue that global warming is a graver threat than terrorism is to betray a callousness to human suffering that has long characterized the affluent Western environmentalist Left. For example, it kept pushing for worldwide bans on the pesticide DDT despite the fact that these bans led to millions—yes, millions—of preventable deaths in Africa and elsewhere from malaria.
Conservatives are more concerned with human evil than with ever cleaner air, the fate of the three-inch delta smelt fish, or the possibility that fifty to a hundred years from now human carbon dioxide emissions may lead to the flooding of some coastal areas. So they hold the opposite view: that Islamic terror—and human evil in general—is a far graver threat than global warming.
A cover of Time magazine was even clearer in depicting the Left’s substitution of fighting evil with fighting for the environment. The cover took the iconic Joe Rosenthal photograph of American Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story called green “the new red, white and blue.”83
Needless to say, American veterans groups thought the Time cover morally obscene. But for the Left, trees are their flag; environmentalists are their Marines; and carbon emissions (and the Right) are the enemy. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer indication that the Left avoids fighting the greatest evils and instead fights lesser ones.
5. Creating, Then Protecting, Victims
FROM MARX UNTIL TODAY, victim groups have played an indispensable role in Leftist success. Without victim groups, the Left cannot succeed. They enable the Left to play the role of savior—without us, groups A, B, and C would be devastated. And they enable the Left to villainize the Right—were it not for the Right, those groups would not be suffering.
In the United States, the Left identifies blacks, Latinos, women, gays, Muslims, and the poor as the primary victim groups. They are, in the Marxist vernacular, “oppressed” groups, victims, respectively, of racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and “rapacious capitalism.”
The harm done by the Left to individual members of most of these groups and to American society generally has been incalculable. Since the 1960s, the media, schools, and the Democratic Party have told black Americans that the United States is a racist society. Imagine being a black child in America constantly told that the white majority disdains you. It is difficult to overstate how harmful that is. Why work hard? The society is out make you fail. Why befriend whites? They can’t be trusted and they have no desire to befriend you. And the harm done to blacks by affirmative action has already been described.
Moreover, it is a lie. The United States is the least racist multiracial country in the world. It is probably the best place in the world for a black to live—which is why almost no black Americans have decided to leave America for anywhere, including black Africa; and it is why more black Africans have immigrated to America than were sent over as slaves.
But the day most blacks acknowledge how little racism there is in America is the day they stop automatically voting Democrat. It is impossible to deny the fact that the less that blacks, women, Latinos, gays, and Muslims see themselves as victims of America, the less the appeal of the Democratic Party. It would take a willingness to lose elections for the American Left to stop labeling these groups as victims. We therefore have a troubling situation—it is vital to the very survival of the Democratic Party to portray as many groups as possible as victims.
One of the many destructive consequences of the Left-wing labeling of white Americans as racist is that many white Americans stopped reacting normally to blacks out of fear that something they may say will be construed as racist. To cite an illustrative example, as a radio talk show host, I was shown a video of people reacting to radio talk shows. Organized by a firm that specializes in analyzing such shows, the members of the listening panel were carefully chosen to represent all major listening groups within American society. I quickly noticed something odd, however. There were no blacks among the selected listeners. I asked why. And the response was stunning.
Blacks had always been included in these listener test groups, I was told, but not anymore. This was not because the firm was uninterested in black listeners; on the contrary, blacks compose a significant segment of the radio audience. They were not invited because the company had discovered that almost no whites would publicly differ with the opinions of the blacks on the panel. Once a black listener spoke, whites stopped saying what they thought, if what they thought differed from what a black had said.
Left-wing political correctness has created an environment in which one who differs with a black is not perceived as merely disagreeing with him, but as “dissing” him. Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers asked Professor Cornel West, a black academic superstar then still at Harvard, to engage in more scholarship and less rap music making and political activism (West had been a major figure in the Al Sharpton campaign for president). The result? West announced that Summers had shown him “disrespect,” as if demanding more professional work from a black professor is disrespectful. The lesson was clear: Even a Harvard president doesn’t tell a black professor what to do. West then went to Princeton, where he continued to do little worthwhile in the intellectual arena.
In sum, a combination of political necessity—we can’t allow blacks to leave the Democratic Party—and white guilt has led the Left to pursue policies and foster attitudes that have done real damage to black America and to America generally. This is especially true of the Left’s positions that blacks cannot be judged by the same standards as others—manifest from lowering standards of admission to universities and on civil service exams, to blaming whites for the high number of black men in prison for violent crimes, to denying black racism exists.84
So we now have, thanks to the Left, precisely the opposite situation from the one we sought—that blacks be treated just like anyone else, and certainly as any white would be.