Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
The New Socialists — The Green Red Deal
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Leftist environmentalists hate that. And yet, they do little to eschew the label. Quite the contrary, they earn it in spades.
They have from the outset. Whether sheer coincidence or because the Devil has a sense of humor, Earth Day always marks Vladimir Lenin’s birthday. The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, just happened to be the centennial of Lenin’s birth.
Given that interesting confluence of dates, it seems more than ironic that so many former Communists, when the Cold War ended, ran for the woods. It was the ideal ideological refuge. Rocks and frogs cannot tell the Commie “environmentalist” to go jump in a lake. They can’t tell the central planners to take a hike back to their air-conditioned offices in Manhattan or coffee shops in Berkeley. Thus, for socialists, here’s the perfect constituency to wield government power and manage people and property.
If Marx and Engels were alive today, they would be writing manifestos on ecological “social justice” at some silly university. Today, their disciples at People’s World urge left-wingers everywhere to “Get on board the . . . Climate Train.” The head of Communist Party USA hails modern ecological warriors as “climate justice activists” battling for a crusade of “green socialism.”
That brings us to, obviously, the latest manifestation of socialist ideology cloaked in green environmentalism: the so-called Green New Deal uncorked in February by its new champion in Congress, America’s “democratic socialist” star, Miss Socialist USA, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The entire spectacle was stunning to behold. And since the announcement at the end of last week, conservatives everywhere have teed off, taking their whacks at this ill-begotten creation.
Amid the many reports, one of the best distillations of this environmental swill was done by Americans for Tax Reform, which posted a PDF of Ocasio-Cortez’s talking points prior to the press conference for the February 7 morning launch. If you haven’t seen it, read it and weep. Actually, read it and laugh. It reads like something out of The Onion or The Babylon Bee.
One is tempted to call the proposal juvenile, but sophomoric seems a better word because it plays to the college-girl image that Ocasio-Cortez ironically wants to shed. Actually, the proposal may well forever torpedo her ability to be taken seriously. It makes one wonder if certain forces in the Democrat camp conspired against the young woman, perhaps one of the surprise Democrats who applauded Trump’s line denouncing socialism in the State of the Union — that would include Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and (it was reported in no less than the disgruntled Communist press) even Elizabeth Warren.
Did a Machiavellian Ms. Warren, perhaps working with her old Massachusetts colleague, Ed Markey, conspire to try to kill the presidential possibilities of Ocasio-Cortez? If not Warren, then maybe Schumer and Pelosi, who perhaps feel threatened by this young congresswoman that DNC chair Tom Perez calls “the future of our party”?
If that sounds over the top, well, take a look at Ocasio’s talking points from last week, which really ought to constitute political suicide:
“Build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
“Upgrade or replace every building in the U.S. for state-of-the-art energy efficiency.”
“A 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War II to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”
“National, social, industrial, and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II.”
As for paying for this “massive transformation of our society,” look at this breathtaking display of economic illiteracy: “The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments, and new public banks can be created to extend credit.” No fear, says Ocasio-Cortez, “the question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.”
The needed greenbacks from the Green New Deal will fall from the rejuvenated air like manna from Gaia.
Conservatives have lampooned the notion of attempting to lay a vast array of railways across the Pacific from California to Japan. It would be easier to invent Star Trek teleporters.
And yet, lest you think that Ocasio-Cortez and friends really want to ban airplanes, forget it. The jets will be there for the leisure of the limousine liberals, the champagne socialists, for the planners, for the rulers rather than the ruled, for the masters rather than the masses. The Proletariat, the rabble, what Marx called the lumpen proletariat — they will get sandwiched into the boxcars. The smart people, the party apparatchiks, they fly first-class.
Invoking FDR, JFK, Ike, and Kamala and Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez sums up her program in the name of “social and economic justice and security through 15 requirements.” The whole concoction reads like it was crafted at a corner Starbucks by college kids marshaled from Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter following. And no doubt, this proposal by Ocasio-Cortez and allies is a mass indictment of our universities and education system.
The old Al Gore’s environmental manifesto was pretty extreme too. He likewise spoke of changing human nature and Americans undertaking a “wrenching transformation” of their society. Also evoking World War II, Gore warned of an “environmental holocaust” and “ecological Kristallnacht.” Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance betrayed an Al Gore not in balance.
But even Ozone Al’s ideas weren’t as excessive as this heap of ecological-ideological mumbo-jumbo dished by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. This poor girl has embarrassed herself. This genuinely ought to be a career-killer.
Yes, I know that for liberals what matters most are intentions and identity. Identity politics is the altar at which they worship. They’ll vote for her. But vast numbers of Americans, including virtually anyone in the business world or private sector with a rudimentary sense of how stuff works, will judge this a disqualifier for higher office, especially the White House.
Again, one must wonder if Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been set up.
That aside, the less laughable and more insidious aspect of this are the genuinely radical roots. To that end, interested observers should dig deeper into the origins of the Green New Deal. This thing didn’t just roll off the turnip truck when Ocasio-Cortez strolled into Washington a few weeks ago.
For a gander at the wider tentacles of this beast, check out the “About” section for the Green New Deal at the website of the Green Party. One sees instantly that this is far more about socialism than environmentalism. Below the tab for “Hands Off Venezuela” are the Four Pillars of the Green New Deal. Point one focuses on the Economic Bill of Rights:
“Our country cannot truly move forward until the roots of inequality are pulled up, and the seeds of a new, healthier economy are planted. Thus, the Green New Deal begins with an Economic Bill of Rights that ensures all citizens:
After that comes pillar two, on “A Green Transition,” followed by the remaining two pillars, on “Real Financial Reform” and “A Functioning Democracy.” Thus, only a quarter of the four pillars for the Green New Deal actually deals with green deals. The vast majority is old deal socialism. Among the remaining two pillars are calls for: “Establish a 90 percent tax on bonuses for bailed out bankers”; “enact the Voter Bill of Rights”; “making Election Day a national holiday”; “abolish the Electoral College and implement direct election of the President”; “restore the vote to ex-offenders who’ve paid their debt to society”; “protect local democracy and democratic rights by commissioning a thorough review of federal preemption law and its impact on the practice of local democracy in the United States”; “create a Corporation for Economic Democracy”; “repealing the Patriot Act”; “ending the war on immigrants”; “rein in the military-industrial complex by reducing military spending by 50 percent and closing U.S. military bases around the world”; etc. Get the picture?
What in the heck does this have to do with the environment? Nothing, of course. But this is how the left has long exploited the environment for its own purposes of revolution and radical transformation. Not a word of this is a surprise to anyone who has followed left-wing environmentalists.
Green on the outside, red on the inside. Welcome to American socialism’s new Green Red Deal.
Abortion Racism in Pennsylvania — Where Abortion Wears a White Hood
Democrats are losing it over abortion. Sure, they’ve long been bad on the issue, but they’re suddenly escalating the vitriol. And by “Democrats,” I’m referring to elected ones. You could always find unhinged “pro-choice” liberals doing vulgar things. Elected Democrats, however, have tended to show a little more restraint. Not any more.
Look at Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York, or Gov. Ralph Northam in Virginia, the latter of whom generously promises that an infant that survives an abortion will be “kept comfortable” amid final gasps without attempts at resuscitation. In Alabama, Democratic state rep. John Rogers accepts abortion with a shrug: “you kill them now or you kill them later.” Here in Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf is the nation’s first governor who was a Planned Parenthood escort — those macabre volunteers who ensure that distraught girls approaching an abortion facility walk in with cash and walk out without a baby. In fact, here in Pennsylvania, we have not only a governor who was a Planned Parenthood escort, but a state rep., Brian Sims, which brings me to the focus of this article.
In a breathtaking spectacle, Sims proudly filmed himself outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia — the Locust Street Surgical Center — verbally accosting an older woman who was praying the rosary. For eight painful minutes, this former college football player turned angry LGBTQ activist, and he gives this woman an oral drubbing. He repeatedly tells her she is “shameful” and “disgusting.” “There is nothing Christian about what you’re doing,” he lectures. “There’s nothing loving or kind,” he says of her. He lambastes her “broken morality.” He asks for her address so people can “protest in front of her home,” as if hounding her there wasn’t sufficient. More must be done, with perhaps a larger and angrier mob.
Sims is a bully, with this woman as his victim. Watch him in action as he heckles her as she accepts his abuse stoically in silence. Truly, she turns the other cheek while he torments her.
I’m always amazed by the lack of charity and understanding by self-proclaimed “tolerant” liberals so intransigent that they can’t even concede that pro-lifers are motivated by a benevolent concern at least worthy of respect. They’re so hell-bent on the righteousness of their cause that they assume nothing but malice on the part of their opponents — whose primary objective is simply to try to save defenseless unborn babies. They rage against them. There’s something diabolical about it.
And make no mistake, a spiritual battleground wages at these clinics. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve watched the escorts engage the people praying. A few months ago, on a bitterly cold day, I joined a group outside the Planned Parenthood abortion center in Pittsburgh. Sims’ caricature could not be more inaccurate and viciously unfair. One of those praying told me that the previous week he stood beside an elderly woman who kneeled on a frozen sidewalk on her aching legs while a dude inside strummed a ukulele and grinned at her. “We’re freezing outside in the snow, with 80-year-old women praying and kneeling on payment covered with ice,” he told me, “and they’re inside, staying warm, and mocking us. You could feel the evil.”
The pro-lifers, particularly those from churches, are almost always a model of charity, sacrifice, and mortification. Moreover, it’s the pro-lifers, not the clinic workers or Planned Parenthood volunteers, that are there to comfort the crushed girl as she leaves the clinic and prepares for a life of emotional, spiritual, and, possibly, physical trauma because of what the abortion advocates did to her inside.
Sims’ nasty charges are wrong on so many fronts, but I want to underscore his most outrageous accusation against pro-lifers, namely: the “BLATANT RACISM they spew.” He leveled that surreal charge repeatedly in his video. This “old white lady,” he says of her dismissively, as if that label merits automatic denigration, is “extremely racist.” He accuses her of a “racist act of judgment.”
What in the world is Sims talking about?
If you’re looking to affix racism, you would be far more justified looking in the direction not of those defending the unborn babies, but of those terminating them. There’s far and away a disproportionate number of unborn African-American children killed by abortion. The escorts guide in and funnel their mothers. Sims’ wild claim has great irony given that Planned Parenthood is the spawn of Margaret Sanger, who I’ve written about frequently, including her work with the “Negro Project,” her gospel of “race improvement,” her May 1926 speech to the Silverlake, New Jersey chapter of the KKK.
The vast majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are located near African-American populations. The infamous Gosnell “House of Horrors,” a sick slaughterhouse of unborn black children, resided just down the street from where Sims engaged in his antics accusing pro-lifers of racism. It’s downright stunning that Sims either cannot see that or, in turn, casts the finger of racist shame in the complete opposite direction.
Well, given Sims’ claims to be worried about racism, and given that he’s a Pennsylvania legislator, I ask him this simple request as a fellow Pennsylvanian: Could he please ask the clinic for data on how many of its abortions have been of minority babies?
I asked that question of an analyst who does research on this issue in Pennsylvania.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a breakdown for that particular clinic, or for just Planned Parenthood, on how many patients are African-American,” she told me. “Here are some statistics we do have statewide.”
According to the latest abortion statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, in 2017 there were 30,011 abortions performed in Pennsylvania. Among them, 14,726 were to white women, 12,865 were to African-American women (43 percent), and 3,038 were to Hispanic women (10 percent).
Thus, 53 percent, or a majority of abortions, were of minority women and unborn babies. Even more remarkable is the sheer disproportion: only 11.9 percent of Pennsylvania women are black and 7.3 percent are Hispanic. Pennsylvania is 82 percent white. Abortion in Pennsylvania, like everywhere else in America, victimizes minorities by leaps and bounds.
If abortion was a person, it would wear a white hood, and be the deadliest Klansman in this nation’s history.
And who’s leading the assault? Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood performs half of the abortions in the state of Pennsylvania. It operates nine of the 12 largest abortion clinics in the state. The facility where Sims harangued that woman is the largest in the city of Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the fifth largest city in America. (The state’s second largest city, Pittsburgh, is 65th. Philly is the epicenter of abortion in Pennsylvania.)
And who does Brian Sims finger as the bad actor in all this? The “racist”? He points to the likes of the woman outside the clinic praying to God that this industry of death will stop — that this “black genocide,” as Dr. Alveda King calls it, will end. He says “shame” on her. She’s the one he finds “disgusting.”
And finally, aside from the race issue, that particular clinic that Sims stood in solidarity with isn’t good for women of any ethnicity. That Locust Street facility is guilty of many violations against the women whose babies it has ripped from their wombs. It has been cited for numerous code violations, failing over half of its last 23 patient-safety inspections. And yet, it has never been shut down.
Now that’s shameful and disgusting, Rep. Sims.
In fact, maybe we should be grateful to Sims. In bringing national attention to himself, he’s bringing national attention to this clinic and this scandal of abortion racism. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Women Who Lied About Sexual Assault
Remember the Scottsboro boys?
Over the weekend, a throng of angry protesters gathered outside the Capitol Building with signs and t-shirts touting a new battle cry: BELIEVE WOMEN. It’s a slogan that took off with the #MeToo movement, but it’s in hyperdrive right now.
The left found this slogan useful in serving its latest political purpose: an attempted takedown of Brett Kavanaugh. According to the new mantra, women never lie about sexual abuse, and thus anything and everything that Christine Blasey Ford alleged of Brett Kavanaugh was, ipso facto, accurate. Every charge she leveled must be believed, because women do not lie about sexual assault.
Well, here I would like to interject to remind liberals of one of their favorite historical morality tales: What about the case of the Scottsboro boys? And therein, what about Victoria Price and Ruby Bates?
Recall, liberals, that this has been one of your sacred cows for many decades. As a public service, I herewith share the story:
On March 25, 1931, two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, claimed that they had been gang-raped by nine black teens along the railroad from Chattanooga to Memphis. The boys had hopped a train ride, as had the two girls, who were with two white boys. A fight broke out inside the train car, with the white boys tossed off, leaving the white girls and black boys together. The white boys informed the nearest stationmaster that they had been in a fight with the black boys. The stationmaster took quick action. At the next stop, a town called Paint Rock, Alabama, a militia/posse took the law into their hands and “arrested” the black boys, transporting them to jail cells in nearby Scottsboro. The charge was that they had raped the white girls.
As news spread, enraged whites gathered outside the jail, ready to form a lynch mob. The governor of Alabama called in the National Guard.
Local authorities promised the seething vigilantes that justice would be hastily served, guaranteeing quick trials and verdicts. On cue, five days later, on March 30, 1931, an all-white jury indicted the nine boys, and the trial began shortly thereafter.
Thus ensued a whirlwind of complications, from miscarriages of justice to incompetence to retractions. The attorneys who defended the boys were judged too old or too drunk. The boys themselves did not always help their cause: one alleged that everyone was guilty except for himself; two others confessed but later withdrew their admissions, saying they had confessed under physical duress; and the remaining six pleaded innocence.
Not calming the storm was a racist jury, eager to execute the boys. Even as the prosecution argued that the youngest should get life in prison rather than capital punishment, the whites pressed for the gallows for the entire group. All were convicted and sentenced to death.
The story was far from over. A mistrial was declared, appeals were rapidly set in motion, and newspapers began reporting that the two girls were not pure lambs but, rather, Tennessee prostitutes. Yes, prostitutes.
A second round of trials commenced in March 1933.
In the most sensational development of the second trial, Ruby Bates recanted her earlier testimony, claiming she and Victoria Price had not been raped, and had concocted their story out of fear they might be charged for a federal crime because they had crossed state lines while practicing an “immoral” form of business with the white boys; the prosecution contended that Bates was lying, and had been paid off. The jury again voted for conviction, but the judge vetoed.
The case of the Scottsboro boys became a crusade and cause célèbre for the left, especially the Communist left. Communists adopted the Scottsboro case as a major campaign to recruit blacks to Communist Party USA. In one particular instance, their success was sensational: CPUSA’s cynical Scottsboro campaign caught the attention and began drawing into the Communist Party a young journalist and editor in Atlanta named Frank Marshall Davis, who decades later would become a mentor to a Hawaiian adolescent named Barack Obama. Yes, Barack Obama, America’s first black president. (I address this in great detail in my biography of Davis, The Communist.)
The American left insisted on the innocence of the black boys accused of sexual assault. The left insisted that the two women had lied about the sexual assault. You could not believe the women.
So, how does this square with the left’s BELIEVE WOMEN movement today? What does a righteous progressive do with the Scottsboro case now, given the new refrain that women never lie about sexual assault? How to reconcile the Scottsboro boys with the Ford-Kavanaugh case?
Well, truth be told, with the ideological perversities and pathologies of the left, this one can be (partly) tidied up with some nifty identity-racial politics. Here you go: the Scottsboro boys were black men, whereas Brett Kavanaugh is a white man, and a pro-life white man, and a conservative Catholic, and seeking to fill a crucial Supreme Court seat that could threaten the left’s holy grail: Roe v. Wade. Thus, Kavanaugh is a complete reprobate, never to be believed. By contrast, on the left’s ideological totem pole, the Scottsboro boys assume, by nature of their skin color, an elevated victim status that compels them to be believed, just as Kavanaugh’s position at the bottom rung of the pole (near the slimy pond scum) demands a verdict of presumed guilt.
For the confused, or unanointed, just ask a Millennial college grad. This is what your children learn in our universities with your life savings. This is the price you pay for their indoctrination.
But while those curious mental gyrations help a liberal navigate how and why Brett Kavanaugh must be presumed guilty and the Scottsboro boys presumed innocent, it does leave the messy problem of what to do with the left’s new dogma that women never lie about sexual assault.
Again, what about Victoria Price and Ruby Bates?
Yes, yes, I know — they were white southerners. That’s a definite bottom-dweller on the totem pole. But still, they were women. And women, we are told, quite categorically, must always be believed. And one of these two women admitted to lying. Both, at one point, reportedly lied about being raped.
So, liberals, especially those of you dominating our universities, how will you reevaluate the Scottsboro case in light of your new-fangled political sloganeering in October 2018? I’d like to be in the Gender Theory classroom at Swarthmore or Yale when the gals take up that one. Then again, maybe not.
Brett Kavanaugh’s Abortion Critics and Hypocrites
It’s shocking what forms of violence Christine Blasey Ford’s backers will accept.
Something undeniably bad happened to Christine Blasey Ford in the early 1980s. That seems clear. Whether the chief perpetrator was Brett Kavanaugh is something we may never know with absolute certainty, even as his alleged accomplice (named by Ford) likewise insists on Kavanaugh’s innocence. Still, Ford’s story, given in her compelling and emotional testimony, seemed heartfelt and believable. Likewise, Kavanaugh’s denial, given in his compelling and emotional testimony, seemed heartfelt and believable.
My earnest sympathies, at this point, are with both Ford and Kavanaugh, but they are not with the pro-choice Democrats and liberals reflexively backing Ford and reflexively excoriating Brett Kavanaugh as a presumed-guilty sex abuser.
The Senate Democrats and the abortion lobby opposing Kavanaugh vowed to oppose him long before Christine Blasey Ford came forward. Her allegations merely gave them ammunition for a character assassination (rightly or wrongly earned) to further back their pre-determined vote against Kavanaugh from the outset. Three weeks ago, before the public heard of Ford, nearly all Senate Democrats announced their intention to vote against him. And why? We all know the reason. There’s not a liberal or conservative in Washington who doesn’t know the reason.
Three words: abortion, abortion, abortion.
And therein lies something sick, perverse, wicked about the “pro-choice” left’s castigation of Brett Kavanaugh as an abuser. What Kavanaugh was accused by Ford of doing when they were teenagers — forcing himself upon her, covering her mouth, with her fearful of being raped — is an abusive act we all condemn and abhor. I’m the same age as Ford, and if I ever saw a guy doing that to a girl at a party, I would have been the first to pounce on the dirtbag. And I’d shudder to imagine him one day sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
But while such is a violent act that we all, conservatives and liberals alike, condemn and abhor, the same cannot be said about the thinking of conservatives and liberals toward unborn human life.
The pro-life position views unborn children as precious, innocent, and worthy of our intervention and protection. Pro-lifers defend the sanctity and dignity of each life in the womb. They seek to stop violence against unborn babies.
The pro-choice position, to the contrary, does not. It allows for — and, in fact, relentlessly fights for — the “right” of a mother and an abortionist to rip apart an unborn baby in the most destructive way imaginable, often into the third trimester.
A lot of people were crying when they listened to Christine Blasey Ford describe what she claimed happened to her: the pinning down on the bed, the escape from the clutches of her attackers, her “pinballing” (as she described it) down the stairwell, her dash outside, her never forgetting the cruel laughs of the attackers.
It’s indeed very sad. Well, here’s a newsflash: If a national audience of tens of millions of Americans sat and listened to a blow-by-blow description of what happens to an innocent child during an abortion, well, they would be more than weeping. They would be sobbing. They’d be in agony, asking how a supposedly humane country and culture could continue to permit such mass injustice. Why do you think liberal newspaper editors refuse to show even a cartoon rendering of a partial-birth abortion?
Both acts of violence are heart wrenching: against Ford, against some 60 million aborted babies in America since Roe v. Wade.
And yet, it is the latter — the feminist left’s holy grail, Roe v. Wade — that Ford’s most ardent defenders, and Kavanaugh’s most vociferous detractors, are seeking to protect and preserve at all costs. As they demand the protection of victims of sexual abuse, they also demand the preservation of abortion. They seek to undermine Kavanaugh in order to maintain Roe. To borrow from Nancy Pelosi, this is “sacred ground.” Abortion, abortion, abortion.
“The greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion,” said Mother Teresa. “By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.” Abortion
“. . . is really a war against the child, and I hate the killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use violence to get what they want.”
Sex abuse is violence. And abortion is violence, too.
And yet, and yet, that is ultimately what the political left and the Senate Democrats are battling for in resisting not just Brett Kavanaugh for the high court but each and every pro-lifer who will sit before the Judiciary Committee. They will continue to oppose all pro-life Supreme Court nominees, regardless of any alleged incidence of sex abuse in their background. And they will do so in the name of the single greatest abuse of unborn children in the history of America: Roe v. Wade.
Liberals, your opposition to violence in the ultimate cause of continuing the violence of abortion — long before and after Brett Kavanaugh — rings rather hypocritical.
George Cahill’s New Constellation
Editor’s Note: George Cahill was a much-appreciated long-time supporter of The St. Croix Review.
George Cahill was a man with a higher mission fixed to the skies.
He volunteered to fight in World War II at the earliest possible age: seventeen-and-a-half. Both parents signed off, and he headed to gunnery school in Las Vegas.
George met his crew in Lincoln, Nebraska. They flew to Newfoundland and then Iceland and England. And there, his mission would be a most daring one.
George flew on a B-17 with the Eighth Air Force. He was a togglier, a perilous position often alternately referred to as a “bombardier” or “nose-gunner” or “tail-gunner,” though George was a stickler for the differences. The togglier sat inside the cramped “nosecone” of the plane and released the bombs.
Earl Tilford, my retired colleague from Grove City College, who himself served in the Air Force, and who had George speak to his classes, told me this about toggliers:
“A B-17 togglier was responsible for arming and dropping the bombs in lieu of a bombardier. . . . The togglier had to flip a number of toggle switches to arm the bombs and activate the release mechanism and — above all — make sure your plane’s bombay doors were open, otherwise you’d blow yourself out of the sky. That happened on occasion.”
George flew 28 combat missions under intense fire, wedged into a tiny spot between two 50-caliber machine guns.
Over lunch one day in September 2015, I pushed George to describe what that was like. He wasn’t surrendering much. I got a few short sentences from him.
“Nothing but plastic between me and the atmosphere,” he told me of his vulnerability while bombing Nazi targets. I asked if the plastic could stop enemy bullets. “Oh, hell no!” he scoffed. “Bullets go right through it, and you hope they go out the other side!” Out the other side of the plane that is, not the other side of the togglier and crewmates.
I asked George if he had “any close calls.” He shot me a shocked look, with another, “Oh, hell!”
This time, the “Oh, hell” meant “Oh, hell yes,” though he didn’t care to elaborate. There were, I pried out of him, “at least a dozen” close calls.
I later learned that on one occasion George’s “Flying Fortress” was so shot up with holes that his crew of 10 had to do an emergency landing in Wales with only one of four engines still operating. As the plane coasted into a landing, the final engine stopped. They barely made it.
That was what George faced.
“Incidentally,” adds Earl Tilford, “more B-17 crewmen were killed in World War II than U.S. Marines. In 1943-1944, attrition rates were near 90 percent for 25-mission tour.”
For a visual, if you’ve seen the chaotic opening scene of the film “Unbroken,” about World War II bombardier and Olympian Louis Zamperini, that’s what George experienced.
“Oh, hell.” That’s about right.
But during our lunch, George wasn’t there to tell me about World War II. He had two other missions that day. First, he showed me around Flag Plaza in downtown Pittsburgh — his creation, pride, and joy. George was the founder and president of the National Flag Foundation, a terrific organization.
George was our flag-man at our American Founders luncheon events, held quarterly by the Center for Vision & Values, at the Rivers Club in downtown Pittsburgh. After saying grace, we would do the Pledge of Allegiance, which George always led, but first with an extemporaneous explanation of something about the American Founders’ understanding of their new flag as representing a kind of New Constellation.
And that brings me to the former togglier’s primary mission that day in September 2015. George took me to lunch to toggle my attention, to zero-in on a project close to his heart: something called The New Constellation.
An admirer of flags since his Boy Scouts days, George explained to me that the arrangement of the stars of the new flag envisioned by the American Founders represented a kind of New Constellation altogether. There was a divine Author to the heavens, who had set the stars in place. The men of the Founders’ era learned to navigate by the stars. Their country would be navigated by both a natural law and divine law — or, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration, by “the laws of nature and nature’s God.”
Nate Mills, a GCC alumnus and emerging expert on the topic, puts it this way: “The Founders believed that by structuring a government inspired by the laws of nature and nature’s God they could look to the night sky as a metaphor for their experiment in federalism.” In the Flag Act of 1776, the flag implemented a design of 13 stars “representing a new constellation.” The Founders saw each colony as a fixed star, set and living in harmony with one another and not interfering in the spheres of any other state’s place in the celestial order. “In understanding their experiment in self-government in terms of astronomy,” says Mills, “the Founders appealed to a powerful set of metaphors to help explain to the world the unique synthesis of ideas that the United States of America represented.”
The New Constellation was a stirring image grounded in the natural, the theological, the astronomical, the philosophical, and the political. The Founders did nothing without meaning, and their flag and New Constellation was no exception.
George loved this concept, and was anxious to convince the Center for Vision & Values to pick it up. He told me he was old and running out of time. It was the last best thing he wanted to do. Current and future generations needed to know. He wanted our group, the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, to study it. One of my best students, Nate Mills, now with National Review Institute, jumped on it. He did not disappoint. We thrilled George with Nate’s paper and presentation on the topic at our American Founders event in March 2017.
Nate’s work and ours isn’t finished. We will continue to carry this flag for George, whose time has indeed now passed.
George Cahill passed away on July 2, at the age of 92. This unflagging champion of America’s New Constellation now joins the shining light of the brightest and best of all constellations — no doubt a heavenly one.
We salute you, George. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Today’s Progressives Have Completed the Takeover and Destruction Communists First Started Calling for More Than a Century Ago.
The title of this article will raise eyebrows even among conservatives, but read on. The title is accurate and undeniable.
The left has succeeded in driving a final nail in the coffin of the Boy Scouts as it once was. The organization is now a shell of itself. It capitulated first on “gay” scout leaders, then on “transgender” scouts, and now on girls joining the Boy Scouts.
Progressives bask in their triumph, dancing on the grave of an organization they never wanted to build up; it was an organization they wanted to take down. For the left, this is less about giving something to girls than taking something from boys. It’s another scalp on the cultural-ideological wall.
Lest anyone think this isn’t a take-down, or a fundamental transformation, well, consider that the Boy Scouts of America, founded in 1910, will now be called simply “Scouts BSA” for those ages 11 to 18 (a change openly celebrated with puffy propaganda pieces by PC-stylists at the BSA website). This is a coerced inclusion of gender-neutral “Cub Scouts.”
The Boy Scouts have been emasculated, neutered. The organization that prided itself on courage stands impotent, fearful in the face of feminists and LGBTQ militants. They’ve cowered to the forces of “diversity” and “tolerance.”
And for cultural revolutionaries, the defeat of the Boy Scouts is the end of a long march through yet another institution. This march began literally a century ago, not with the New York Times or Democrats, but with Socialists and Communists.
Surely that’s an exaggeration — a right-wing red herring? Grab the nearest liberal to howl accusations of Red-under-every-bed McCarthyism?
No doubt, the notion of a long Communist assault against the Boy Scouts will surprise even many conservatives. The ugly truth, however, is that American Communists have been after the Boy Scouts for over a century. Marxists were hell-bent on taking down the Boy Scouts prior to even the Bolsheviks taking down czarist Russia. Once again, here as well, it just took the wider liberal left a little longer to eventually align with the Marxist left.
I will not here lay out the full litany or extended paper trail of evidence, which can be found in the (less accessible) Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA at the Library of Congress or (easily accessible) simple searches of archives at the remarkable Marxist clearinghouse, www.marxists.org. What follows are several unmistakable examples beginning in 1911, with links to the original sources:
Exhibit 1 takes us way back to June 1911, only a year after the Boy Scouts of America was established. It’s an article by a Celia Rosatstein titled “Why Boys Should Not Join the ‘Boy Scouts,’” published in The Young Socialists’ Magazine. The article portrayed the Boy Scouts as gun-hungry, pro-war, bloodthirsty capitalist fanatics. The young socialists instead urged youth to sign up for the Socialist-Communist faith. The Young Socialists’ Magazine promoted “Socialist Sunday Schools,” not unlike the “Commie Camps“ to which New York City-based Marxist parents sent their children in the summers — a political-ideological substitute to what Christian parents commonly know as “VBS,” or Vacation Bible School. (Ex-Communist Ron Radosh writes of his commie-camp experiences in his fascinating memoir, Commies.)
This was the faith for the new school, for the new revolution.
“Especially you boys of the Socialist Sunday Schools, do not join the ‘Boy Scouts,’” urged Ms. Rosatstein. “Persuade your friends not to do so, but instead to join the Socialist Schools.”
Exhibit 2 is the March 1924 issue of The Young Comrade, an article titled, “Why We Are Against the Boy Scouts,” by Thelma Kahn. There, “capitalism” was fingered as the nefarious tool for training Boy Scouts not only to shoot guns, but to shoot their fathers and brothers (yes, seriously):
“Capitalism does not only train the Boy Scout to shoot and use a rifle for its own interest but to shoot down his own father and brothers when there is a strike.”
This penchant for violence ultimately marches the Boy Scout off to war: According to Ms. Kahn, “grown-up Boy Scouts” infested by the vagaries of capitalism become soldiers who go off to “fight England.” (Hmm, England?) “The Boy Scouts,” added Ms. Kahn with an added twist of the knife, “also learn how to stick people on the end of their rifles and other ignorant things.”
The delightful Ms. Kahn wrapped up with a pitch to youngsters to instead join the Junior Section of the Young Workers League.
Exhibit 3 is a full issue of Young Pioneer from July-August 1929, published by the Young Workers League of America in New York City. The lead piece focused on a shameful demonstration against 1,500 innocent boys from across America as they excitedly prepared to cross the Atlantic for an international Jamboree in England. The Young Pioneers came to rain on the parade.
The young commies denounced these boys as children exploited by their parents’ greedy factory “bosses.” As the Boy Scouts readied to board their ship for the trip of a lifetime, the Young Pioneers descended, unfurling banners that read “Down with the Boy Scout Jamboree,” “The Boy Scouts are supported by the bosses,” “Smash the Boy Scouts,” “Join the Young Pioneers of America,” and “Defend the Soviet Union.”
At the demonstration a young Red named Harry Eisman was arrested for what even the Communist publication described as “militant” behavior.
As for that Boy Scouts’ pledge to God and country, the Young Pioneer urged the youth to “Follow in Lenin’s Way.” And as an added kick in the rump of the boys, it accused the Boy Scouts of racism, publishing an alleged letter to the editor from a “Negro” boy named Leslie Boyd swearing his allegiance to the glorious Young Pioneers rather than the disgraceful Boy Scouts.
The bilious smears that I’m recounting here were standard fare from these Communist organizations, and I could give example after example, from campaigns against the Boy Scouts by New York Communists in the 1920s to Chicago Communists in the 1930s onward to the 1970s and on and on. Communists in the 1970s assailed the Boy Scouts for “being indoctrinated to emulate the Green Berets.”
This runs all the way to modern times, especially as American Communists vigorously embraced cultural issues. By the start of the new century — as seen, for instance, in a May 2001 issue of Party Builder — Communist Party USA was joining forces with the ACLU to openly condemn the Boy Scouts as “anti-gay.”
And alas, it was here that the far left found its formula. This tactic would work masterfully in redefining the Boy Scouts in the left’s own image. As cultural Marxists have taught in their universities, the trick to deconstructing America, especially its Judeo-Christian roots, is to go cultural, not economic, particularly through the perverting of sexuality and gender. The key was a cultural Marxist revolution rather than an economic Marxist revolution. That’s the ticket.
And yet, while the prime instrument against the Boy Scouts has been sexuality and gender, Communists have remained capable of wild cheap shots at the Boy Scouts that smack of the 1930s all over again. An egregious example is a piece published last summer in People’s World, the successor to the Soviet-backed Daily Worker. The author was John Bachtell, head of Communist Party USA. This piece was headlined, “Trump’s Scout speech likened by some to Hitler Youth rally.”
The piece lit up the “reprehensible” Donald Trump for a “hate-filled speech” that violated “every norm of decency and morality” before 40,000 Boy Scouts at their national Jamboree in West Virginia. In a moment of confession, Bachtell conceded to his comrades that he had once been a Boy Scout. But he saw the light through the darkness of the Boy Scouts’ militaristic, jingoistic, homophobic, and racist ways. Bachtell testifies to his moment of grace, when he left the Boy Scouts for good:
“This was during the height of the Vietnam War and all the militarism and the patriotic display was meant to whip up war fever and loyalty to country. Again, as someone coming from a progressive family opposed to the war, the entire show was a big turnoff.
“After that Jamboree I quit the Scouts and never regretted it. I felt like I was being indoctrinated to be a cog in the war machine.
“Later, I realized just how reactionary the Scouts were, including the whole ugly history of racial exclusion, segregation, and homophobia. It wasn’t until 2015, after a long struggle that the BSA adopted a resolution dropping restrictions against gay youth joining.”
There, in one piece, in 2017, is a summary list of Communist attacks in a protracted ideological war against the Boy Scouts. It took a century, but the Marxists and Socialists finally got them. They needed the help of the wider left, especially the thorough re-education in the universities. It took the wider liberal left some time to warm to the cause, but eventually liberals/progressives got there. As they typically do.
Fifty Years Ago: An Assassination That Shook America
It was 50 years ago that a shocking moment of violence rocked America: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
The tragedy erupted shortly after midnight June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It should have been a great night for RFK. He had just achieved a grand victory, having won California in the Democratic primary. He was on his way to the party’s presidential nomination.
But not everyone in that building had similar plans.
After giving a jubilant speech, Kennedy was led from the podium toward the hotel exit via a carefully preselected back route through the kitchen. But someone was lurking along that path.
A 24-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan jumped out from behind a cart stacked with trays and began firing a .22 revolver. He lodged three bullets in his intended victim, one directly in the head, entering behind the right ear and piercing Kennedy’s brain. Kennedy went down. He would never stand again.
Why did Sirhan pull the trigger? The answer was simple: The young Palestinian was seeking vengeance for the New York senator’s support of Israel in the Six-Day War the previous June.
Sirhan was vehemently anti-Israel when the Jewish state had defeated the Arab states. He vowed revenge, with Bobby Kennedy the chosen outlet for his anger.
His rage at RFK went ballistic. He scribbled maniacally in his diary on May 18, 1968:
“My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more (sic) of an unshakable obsession. R.F.K. must die. R.F.K. must be killed. R.F.K. must be assassinated. . . . Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68.”
Looking back, this was maybe the first major manifestation of Middle East terrorism in the United States, long before September 11, 2001.
And yet, it is crucial to understand that this was a deadly act prompted not only by the evil of Middle East terrorism but also — albeit quite forgotten — by the evil of Soviet Communism.
What did the Soviets have to do with this dirty deed? The answer: The Six-Day War had been shamelessly provoked by the Kremlin.
Looking to exploit divisions in the Middle East and further exacerbate America’s foreign-policy problems at the time (especially in Vietnam), Soviet officials in May 1968 had cooked up false intelligence reports claiming that Israeli troops had been moved into the Golan Heights and were readying to invade Syria. Moscow peddled the malicious disinformation to Egypt and other Arab states hostile to Israel. The Kremlin wanted to provoke a military confrontation with Israel. And it worked. On this, there is no debate. It is a historical certainty.
Moscow had precipitated the Six-Day War in June 1967, which, in turn, had prompted RFK’s assassin in June 1968. And the rest is history.
At the time of his death, Robert F. Kennedy was only 42 years old. Had he lived to win the presidency, he would have been 43 at his inauguration, the same age as his late brother at his swearing in. His shooter was 24 years old, the same age as Kennedy’s late brother’s shooter.
Today, 50 years later, the shooter is still with us. Bobby Kennedy is long gone. Who knows what might have been?
A Victory for Freedom and the Pro-Life Movement
The pro-life movement celebrates this Independence Day 2018 with a big victory at the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s a victory for freedom.
In yet another narrow decision, this one titled National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the high court last week struck down a 2015 California law that forces pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to advertise abortions. These are centers established for the very purpose of not doing abortions and for providing an alternative to abortion. The California law compelled the centers — many of them religious, with conscientious objections to abortion — to hand out materials to their clients advertising state-subsidized abortion clinics.
As noted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the centers before the Supreme Court, the California law requires these approved and licensed pro-life medical centers, which offer free help to pregnant women, to provide phone numbers for local county offices that refer women to Planned Parenthood and nearby abortionists for free or low-cost “abortion services.”
What happens if the pro-life centers do not follow the abortion dictates of the state? The California law allows for a cumulative fine of $1,000 penalized against each pregnancy center for each instance in which the center fails to communicate the abortion option to a client.
Policing and enforcing the financial penalties alone would be a bureaucratic mess. And that’s aside from the obvious moral affront.
The pregnancy centers viewed the law as an unconstitutional infringement upon their rights of speech, not to mention their freedom of religion and conscience. As LifeNews.com described it:
“This law sabotages freedom of speech by forcing organizations to encourage actions that are in direct opposition to their religious beliefs and counter the mission and purpose of their organizations.”
It is indeed a direction contravention of the religious beliefs and missions of so many of these centers. It begs the question: What’s next? Requiring a synagogue to hand out materials promoting Islam? Requiring Baptist and Catholic churches to post or hand out materials to same-sex couples instructing them where to go for a same-sex marriage ceremony? And with state-leveled fines for non-compliance?
This is a clear intrusion upon the freedoms of these non-abortion centers.
The high court agreed, but barely. The slim 5-4 majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Anthony Kennedy, the court swing-vote who in June 1992 preserved Roe v. Wade by writing the majority opinion in the infamous Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling. The Supreme Court’s four liberals walked in usual lock-step, with Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor insisting that non-abortion centers provide information on abortion as an option.
The 5-4 ruling was a victory for the pro-life cause, but the reality is that this unjust California law should have never gotten this far. The very notion that it did is another sad reminder of how militant the “pro-choice” side is.
To that end, the reactions to the court decision by the pro-choice movement are telling:
The Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Abortion Rights Action League insist that pregnancy centers “manipulate and deceive” pregnant women by not advertising the abortion option to them (as if these women had never heard of abortion prior to stepping into the center).
Planned Parenthood Action called these centers “deceptive” and “harmful” to women. It charged centers — the vast majority of which are run and staffed by women — with “lying to women, withholding medical information, and cutting off access to care.”
Abortion activist Heidi Hess protests that the high court has “voted to control women,” and has now “set the stage for even more attacks on our reproductive rights.” This was done by the court’s “anti-woman majority,” Hess fumes, and by “five male Supreme Court justices.”
That complaint seems the height of hypocrisy. Again, one of the five male justices, the court’s “moderate” Anthony Kennedy, is seen as a hero to the abortion cause. He wrote the dreadful June 1992 opinion that preserved Roe v. Wade. And, lest we forget, it was an all-male Supreme Court that gave America Roe v. Wade in January 1973.
No complaints about the seven male Supreme Court justices who gave us Roe?
Such reactions reveal not only the stridency of the “pro-choice” movement; they also reveal how far too many “pro-choice” activists merit the very label they detest: pro-abortion. Consider:
For decades, these same activists have adamantly refused to advertise or counsel non-abortion options in abortion clinics. There has long been a legislative and grassroots push by pro-lifers to have ultrasound machines installed in abortion clinics and to require that each woman evaluated for an abortion receive an ultrasound first. (That’s wise, if not essential, from a medical standpoint alone.) Pro-lifers are not deceptive about why they want ultrasound images: 80-90 percent of women considering abortions change their minds when they see a picture of their unborn baby in their womb. I know women who run crisis pregnancy centers and have told me story after story of women instantly changing their minds the moment they glimpse of a photo of their child.
In fact, one friend who runs a center told me that pregnancy help centers are proliferating at a rapid rate, and in direct proportion to the shrinking number of abortion clinics. That’s the real story that’s going on here. Follow the money. Abortion centers are losing business, big-time, to pregnancy help centers that give women alternatives to killing their unborn baby. Thus, pregnancy help centers are a mortal threat to abortion clinics. Abortionists and their defenders want to stop these centers in any way they can.
If an abortion clinic — take the Gosnell clinic in Philadelphia, for example — suddenly lost 80-90 percent of would-be abortions from clients changing their minds because of ultrasounds, the abortion clinic would go bankrupt. The entire abortion industry would be in jeopardy if ultrasound technology was required.
“Pro-choice” activists know this, which is why they refuse legislation requiring ultrasounds. And how does that refusal help a woman’s “choice”? Do pro-choicers want women to have maximum information for their best “choice” or not? The tragic truth is that far too many pro-choice activists want only information that leads to a choice in favor of abortion, not a choice against abortion.
That’s not a pro-choice position; it’s a pro-abortion position.
I’ve met women in tears who have told me about walking into Planned Parenthood clinics and receiving no option but abortion. One woman told me through sobs about her experience two decades ago. She was a college freshman terrified of her parents learning she was pregnant. She hoped that someone, somewhere, on her way to the clinic or inside, would provide her with options other than abortion. At the clinic, she was given no such option, nor a flicker of compassion. She said the nurses and “doctors” alike treated her with such cold routine. She was stunned to discover that the physical pain was immense (she said she felt “everything”), and the emotional pain has never gone away. Her baby was destroyed. She has never gotten over the trauma.
I frequently attend and speak at pro-life gatherings, and I meet these women constantly. Today, they are the backbone of crisis pregnancy centers. They staff the centers and they also give money to the centers to provide abortion alternatives, not to promote abortion. The California law sought to undermine that very purpose. Shame on the “pro-choice” movement and Supreme Court justices who refuse to understand that.
And for the pro-life movement, this is a July 4th to be thankful for a major court victory on behalf of liberty.
With God and Richard Pipes
The most respected academic authority on the Russian Revolution, 20th century Communism, and the Cold War has died. He was Richard Pipes, longtime professor of Russian history at Harvard, and a remarkable man.
Where to start with an adequate tribute to Professor Pipes? I’ll start with some biographical observations and then finish with personal reflections.
Richard Pipes was born in Poland on July 11, 1923. As a 16-year-old Jew at the time of Hitler’s invasion, Pipes mercifully escaped, thanks to a clever and shrewd father. He credited not only his father but also Providential intervention. That experience, and those that followed, taught Pipes several life lessons. In his memoir, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, he wrote, “The main effect of the Holocaust on my psyche was to make me delight in every day of life that has been granted to me, for I was saved from certain death.” Pipes observed:
“I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences. Since scholars have written enough on the Holocaust, I thought it my mission to demonstrate this truth using the example of Communism.”
Pipes would do exactly that.
Pipes earned a doctorate in history at Harvard in 1950. He spent the next 50-plus years there, as professor of Russian history, director of the Russian Research Center, and principal investigator of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies. He was well-received at Harvard, with full classrooms, even as one of its few outspoken conservatives. In 1996, he retired, though his association with Harvard continued under emeritus status. Among his most important publications were Russia Under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1990), Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), and Communism: A History (2001). The latter is a concise go-to book for understanding Communism in theory, practice, and history.
But among Pipes’ greatest contributions were outside the classroom, as he helped win the Cold War at a practical-policy level. To that end, he joined President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981, where he was the NSC’s senior Kremlinologist.
He did great work for Reagan, which means he was loathed by the Kremlin.
In January 1982, Pipes was described in Pravda as “one of the ideological mentors of the U.S. administration.” The Moscow Domestic Service excoriated this “odious figure” who “plowed the furrow of ardent anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism.” He was a “dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, hysterically fighting for nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.” Pipes was a favorite bogeyman of the likes of the disgraceful disinformation artist Georgi Arbatov. He would confess satisfaction over arousing the contempt of such “vile people.”
Pipes certainly had Ronald Reagan’s respect, and vice versa. He was impressed at how Reagan had “grasped that the Soviet Union was in the throes of terminal illness” at a time when “nearly all the licensed physicians” — academic Sovietologists, the State Department, the CIA, journalists, ambassadors — “certified its robustness.” Pipes said that Reagan “instinctively understood, as all great statesmen do, what matters and what does not.” This quality, said Pipes, cannot be taught: “like perfect pitch, one is born with it.”
Pipes’ most lasting contribution to the Reagan team was his hand in writing one of the most critical documents in the take-down strategy against the USSR: NSDD-75. Released on January 17, 1983, it became probably the most important document in Cold War strategy under Reagan’s and Bill Clark’s NSC. As Pipes put it, the nine-page directive “said our goal was no longer to coexist with the Soviet Union but to change the Soviet system.” Norman Bailey would call NSDD-75 “The Strategic Plan That Won the Cold War.” Bailey’s NSC colleague, Tom Reed, called it “the blueprint for the endgame.”
The Soviets certainly saw it that way, as evidenced by an article in one Soviet publication in March 1983 which carried the telling title, “Pipes Threatens History.” It alleged (correctly) that NSDD-75 “speaks of changing the Soviet Union’s domestic policy. In other words, the powers that be in Washington are threatening the course of world history, neither more nor less.”
They were indeed.
Warnings About Putin — It was two decades after NSDD-75 that I met Pipes in person. It was September 27, 2005, and he came to Grove City College to give our annual J. Howard Pew Lecture. A few things from that day have stuck with me.
I’ve never forgotten Pipes’ assessment of Vladimir Putin, which has stood the test of time. I asked his opinion of Russia’s prospects for a democratic future. Pipes described what he called a “very discouraging picture”:
“I had high hopes that after the dissolution of the Communist regime, Russia would take the path of democracy — imperfect, but a democratic path nonetheless. Instead, they went right back to autocracy. I have no hopes now. . . . Russia 10 to 20 years from now will be a kind of a mild dictatorship. If Russians elect their leaders, they will likely do so in skewed elections. . . .
“Of course, Russia today is certainly better than it was under the Communist regime. . . . But it is not a democracy. It’s not what we hoped for. It’s an autocracy. Not a tyranny. Not a totalitarian regime. An autocracy. . . .”
According to the Russian constitution, the president can only serve two terms, but there is already talk in the Duma that he should be begged to run for a third term, that it is undemocratic to deny the people the right to vote for a man they want just because he has served two terms. Putin repeatedly says that he will not run for a third term, but I would not bet on that.
I argued with Pipes about that. At the time, I had a much more positive view on Putin and Russia, and I was surprised by Pipes’ pessimism. As usual, he was right.
Pipes and Ted Kennedy — Beyond that, two other things really struck me about that Pipes visit in September 2005.
I handed him two things that really piqued his interest: One was that March 1983 article from the Soviet press, “Pipes Threatens History,” which Pipes hadn’t seen. (I found it in Soviet press archives.) He loved it. It made him proud to so rattle the Kremlin.
The other document was unworthy of pride: it concerned Ted Kennedy’s private overture to the Kremlin.
I had been with Pipes all day, from the airport to dinner to the lecture and then getting him back to his room at Grove City College’s Cunningham House. Late that evening I showed Pipes the now-infamous May 1983 Ted Kennedy-KGB document of which I had recently come into possession. I was considering publishing it in my coming (2006) book on Ronald Reagan, but only if I could verify its authenticity. Given his expertise in Soviet archival work, Pipes was a perfect person to examine the document.
I handed Pipes the five-page memo in Russian, followed by an English translation. He sat in a chair in the corner, legs crossed, and began with the Russian version. I waited on the sofa, thumbing through a coffee-table book of Norman Rockwell illustrations. I impatiently headed to the entryway and then the kitchen in search of a piece of paper to jot down his conclusions.
Pipes calmly stared at the document and then muttered a curse word in reference to Kennedy. I immediately wrote down every word that followed. I’ve debated back and forth in writing this tribute whether I should quote Pipes verbatim. His reaction was visceral, and I implore readers to consider it in full:
After studying the document in silence, Pipes looked up at me and shared his immediate emotional reaction, “This is treason.” When I cautioned that it might indeed be close to treason, but not necessarily, Pipes nodded, retreated, and reevaluated, speaking more carefully, “Yes, at least very close to treason.” He then provided a rough summation of what he read: “He [Kennedy] was operating behind the back of the president of the United States, reaching out directly to a major head of state, to work against the president.” He paused and added simply, in his typical style: “Terrible.”
I implore people to interpret this in the proper spirit: Pipes’ initial reaction was to curse Kennedy and utter the “T” word. It’s a natural first-reaction I’ve seen many times. But after his initial anger cooled, he stepped back, thought more deeply, and assessed that, yes, at the very least, what Kennedy did was bad. Treason? Maybe, maybe not. Pipes knew that treason was a significant legal, technical, Constitutional matter. He knew that far more information would be needed to level such a formal charge. But it was bad.
I told Pipes my understanding of the provenance of the document. Before I could ask my main question, he affirmed, in his distinctive voice: “I’m sure it’s authentic.” I pressed him (and many others, incidentally) on that, inquiring whether the memo might be a forgery. “Oh, no,” he said. “I have no doubt that this is authentic.”
I told him that I felt history needed to know about the document and what it describes. He completely agreed: “Yes, yes. . . . I hope you can publish it.”
I shared with him my concern that Kennedy and his liberal admirers in the media would tear into me for questioning their vaunted “Lion of the Senate.” Pipes advised me on that and wished me luck. It turned out I had nothing to worry about it. Kennedy and his press sycophants simply ignored the document, and still do to this day.
“Fools and Useful Idiots” — I would remain in touch with Richard Pipes over the years. He was an invaluable expert and eyewitness. I could give example after example.
As I searched my email box today, the most recent Pipes’ email that I hadn’t deleted is dated April 7, 2014. I had asked him his thoughts on the role of the Soviets in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. He wrote:
“Thank you for your letter of April 3 which arrived while I was in Moscow. I certainly was not skeptical about Moscow’s role in the attempt on the life of John Paul II while working in the White House in 1981: I believed then and believe now that the assassination attempt was initiated and organized by the USSR. . . .
“I trust you are well. All the best, RP”
Like Ronald Reagan, like Bill Clark, like Bill Casey at the CIA, Richard Pipes never had any hesitation in thinking Moscow capable of all sorts of malice and mischief.
Another of my favorites was an email thanking me for exposing what Pipes called “the fools and useful idiots” among the American left who said stunningly ignorant things glowing about Lenin’s and Stalin’s USSR. It reminds me of when I saw Pipes at a Philadelphia Society conference in April 2012. I was speaking on dupes from the 1920s and 1930s, quoting the likes of George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells, and Margaret Sanger, and their outlandish encomiums for Stalin’s Russia, as well as Malcolm Muggeridge’s bewildered amazement at the spectacle of Western progressives raving about Bolshevism. I lifted my eyes from my text and caught Pipes with an impish grin, loving every minute of the roast.
And then there was a correspondence we carried on over the prospect and possibility that Moscow considered a full-scale invasion of Poland in 1980-81, with President Reagan contemplating a military counter-response, which, as Pipes said dramatically, would have erupted into “World War III.”
Well, those discussions are gone now. In fact, each time I received an email from Dr. Pipes I wondered how much longer they would continue, because his email address included the year of his birth: 1923. Each year that date grew older.
It ended last week, at age 94.
In God’s Image — I’d like to finish with a favorite Pipes’ reflection, which I’ve shared every year with my Modern Civilization course at Grove City College. It deals with what matters most to Pipes now, at this very moment. It concerned keeping rather than losing the faith. Pipes wrote:
“Many Jews — my father among them — lost their religious beliefs because of the Holocaust. Mine, if anything, were strengthened. The mass murder (including those that occurred simultaneously in the Soviet Union) demonstrated what happens when people renounce faith in God, deny that human beings were created in His image, and reduce them to soulless and therefore expendable material objects.”
As noted, surviving the Holocaust made Pipes delight in every day that God had given him. There would be many such days. He felt a “duty” to defy Hitler by living a joyful and contented life. To be sad and morose and to complain would thereafter strike him as “forms of blasphemy” in light of his Providential gift of survival.
Above all, he would spend the remainder of his long and scholarly life exposing godless ideologies and the totalitarian tyrants who deny that human beings are made in God’s image. Few human beings in the academy did that as nobly and expertly as Richard Pipes. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Marx at 200: Classical Marxism vs. Cultural Marxism
This Saturday, May 5, marks the bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth, a cause for literal celebration in certain quarters of the academy.
It’s often charged among the political right that America is going Communist, or at least socialist, or toward some form of Marxism. My concern is less classical Marxism than cultural Marxism, a strain of Communist thought that even most of those engaging in it aren’t consciously aware of. If you Google “cultural Marxism,” the first thing that pops up is a Wikipedia definition dismissing it as a “conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western culture.”
A conspiracy theory? Well, that merely affirms the point. The vast majority of those advancing cultural Marxism aren’t even aware they’re doing so. Tell them and they’ll either blankly stare or mockingly laugh at you as a conspiracy monger.
In truth, cultural Marxism not only exists, but exists as a dominant form of Marxism in America and much of the West today.
Classical Marxism’s Decline
Classical Marxism, by contrast, continues to dwindle.
Just this week I caught a rare admission that slipped from the lips of the current chairman of Communist Party USA, John Bachtell: He said that CPUSA has a mere 5,000 members.
Yes, only 5,000. You could find more members of Unicorn Party USA.
Even more pathetic is that CPUSA has been pounding its chest lately claiming a “surge” in membership under the siege of President Donald J. Trump. Really? Some surge.
Of course, CPUSA never had big numbers. At its heyday in the 1930s, it probably never had more than 100,000 members. That’s why Communists have always sought out dupes among the broader liberal left. It’s why Marxist ringleaders like Angela Davis show up at the Women’s March not quoting Lenin but stumping for same-sex marriage and condemning “climate change.” Davis didn’t dare openly agitate for the KGB at the March; she agitated for LGBT.
The Communist movement has always needed liberals as props to enlist at rallies. Rarely could CPUSA ever have filled Central Park with its own members. Bachtell’s cohorts today might not fill a sandbox at a Manhattan playground.
The reason for that is good news: The original ambition of an economic/class-based revolution has failed in America. And so, instead, today’s Marxists — including those in CPUSA, once the home of classical Marxism — have gone cultural.
It’s a form of Marxism so radical in its redefinition of human nature that Marx himself would blush and find it bewildering. As I write, the lead article at CPUSA’s website is titled, “The Capitalist Culture of Male Supremacy and Misogyny” — a piece breathtaking in its cultural radicalism. And it personifies the Communist movement’s thrust today.
Frankfurt School of Freudian-Marxism
So, what is this cultural Marxism, and how did it emerge?
It began not on May 5, 1818, with Marx’s birth, but over 100 years later with the birth of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School.
These 1920s and 1930s German Marxists were Freudian-Marxists. For them, orthodox/classical Marxism was too limiting, too narrow, too controlled by the Soviet Comintern that strong-armed national Communist parties. This rigidity prevented these more freewheeling neo-Marxists from initiating the cultural transformation they craved, including revolutionary changes in marriage, sexuality, and family. These Frankfurt-based theorists were left-wing intellectuals who looked to the universities as the home base from which their ideas could be launched. They spurned the church and looked to Marx and Freud as the gods they believed would not fail. Rather than organize the workers and factories, the peasants and the fields and the farms, they would organize the students and the academy, the artists and the media, and the film industry.
One can look at the Frankfurt school’s cultural Marxism not as a replacement for classical Marxism, but as the accelerator pedal that was missing from the wheezing, stalling vehicle. The cultural Marxist agrees with the classical Marxist that history passes through a series of stages on the way to the final Marxist utopia, through slavery and capitalism and socialism and ultimately to the classless society. But the cultural Marxist recognizes that Communists will not get there by economics alone. In essence, cultural Marxists shrewdly realized that the classical Marxists would utterly fail to take down the West with an economic revolution; capitalism would always blow away Communism, and the masses would choose capitalism. Cultural Marxists understand that the revolution requires a cultural war over an economic war. Whereas the West — certainly America — is not vulnerable to a revolt of the downtrodden trade-union masses, it is eminently vulnerable when it comes to, say, sex or pornography. While a revolution for wealth redistribution would be unappealing to most citizens of the West, a sexual revolution would be irresistible. Put the bourgeoisie in front of a hypnotic movie screen, and it would be putty in your hands.
The key figures of the Frankfurt School included Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich — who literally wrote the book and coined the term, “The Sexual Revolution” — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and others. The formal school began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Among its driving forces from within Moscow was Willi Munzenberg, the so-called Red millionaire. “We must organize the intellectuals,” exhorted Munzenberg.
And so they would. And how did they slide into America?
The threat of Hitler’s Germany drove the Frankfurt School out of Europe and into the welcoming arms of America’s left-wing academics. Most to all of the leading practitioners of the Frankfurt School were Jews who needed a safe haven from Hitler’s madness. So, they and their Institute came to New York City, specifically to the campus of Columbia University, already a hotbed of Communist thought.
Pleading the case for them at Columbia was John Dewey, founding father of American public education and Communist sympathizer. (Dewey described himself as a small “c” Communist, objecting only to “official Communism, spelt with a capital letter.”) Thus, their primary area of operation would be the educational system — the schools, the universities, and particularly the teachers’ colleges. It was no coincidence that Columbia housed the nation’s top teachers’ college — a creation of John Dewey.
From there, the cultural Marxists spread their ideas to campuses nationwide. Their extremist notions would sweep up the ’60s New Left, to which the likes of Herbert Marcuse became an ideological guru to the radicals who today are tenured at our universities.
Gramsci’s March Through the Institutions
Not to be forgotten in all of this was a critical figure, a non-German. At the age of 35, in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was arrested in his native Italy by Mussolini, and would spend the last 11 years of his life in prison. Samuel Gregg calls Gramsci perhaps “the most dangerous socialist in history.”
Whereas Marx and his original followers were all about class economics, seeing wealth redistribution and the seizure of the means of production as the key to their vision, Gramsci looked to culture. If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production:” the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches.
Not until leftists came to dominate these institutions would they be able to convince enough people to support their Marxist revolution. “This part of his thesis was like manna from heaven for many left-wing Western intellectuals,” writes Sam Gregg. “Instead of joining a factory collective or making bombs in basements, a leftist professor could help free society from capitalist exploitation by penning essays in his office or teaching students.”
And in a really radical stroke — one too radical for its own time, but that would ultimately succeed — Gramsci and his heirs insisted that these leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.” By the 21st century, even biological sex was no longer considered a settled issue. As I write, the New York City council offers public employees the option of choosing from 31 different gender identities. Of course, that’s nothing compared to Facebook, which at various times in the last three years has listed 51 gender options.
There was no traditional institution off limits to the cultural Left.
In fact, so “critical” was the cultural-Marxist left of anything and everything that it would brand itself as “critical theory.” Today, there are entire academic departments and programs dedicated to “critical theory.” Barack Obama’s alma mater, Occidental College, has a Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice, which at its website promises to instruct wide-eyed students in the principles of “Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, deconstruction, critical race studies, queer theory, feminist theory, postcolonial theory. . . .” You get the picture.
For the cultural-Marxist left, “critical theory” is the zeitgeist, the prevailing spirit of the age. Michael Walsh calls it “the cult of critical theory,” the guiding force of what Walsh describes as “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” the instrument for what he rightly calls “the subversion of the West.” To quote the ’60s radicals, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go.
Gramsci himself foresaw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.” In this, he was prophetic.
Sam Gregg puts it well: “The worst part of Gramsci’s legacy is that it has effectively transcended its Marxist origins. His outlook is now blankly taken for granted by millions of teachers, writers, even churchmen, who have no idea that they are committed to cultural Marxism.” And so, adds Gregg, “the vast structures of cynicism which Gramsci’s ideas have built, which honeycomb Western society today, will prove much tougher to dismantle than the crude cement blocks of the old Berlin Wall.”
They will indeed. The people of Berlin had no problem recognizing the concrete wrongness of the wall that corralled them. But try to tell those redefining marriage that what they’re advocating is concretely wrong.
The Never-Ending Search for the Newest Victim Class
In a crucial respect, classical Marxism and cultural Marxism will always bear an essential, enduring commonality — one that explains a lot about today’s modern left.
Both classical Marxists and cultural Marxists see history as a series of struggles that divide the world into hostile/antagonistic groups of oppressors and the oppressed. Both seek out victim groups as the anointed group that will serve as the redeemer group. The victim group becomes the agent for emancipation in ushering in the new and better world. The Marxist must always, then, be on the search for the victim class that, in turn, must always be made aware of its victimization. Its “consciousness” must be raised.
In classical Marxism, this was simple: the victim group was identified by class/economics. It was the Proletariat. It was the factory worker.
In cultural Marxism, this hasn’t been so simple, because the culture is always changing: the victim group is constantly being searched for anew by the cultural Marxist. The group one year might be women, the next year a new ethnic minority, the next year another group. Today, there’s a hard push by cultural Marxists to tap the “LGBTQIA-plus” (People’s World frequently uses that label) movement as the championed victim group.
Thus, a cultural Marxist like Angela Davis — mentored by Herbert Marcuse — could stand at the Women’s March before a sea of young women in pink hats and recite a litany of popular grievances. In her casting about for victim groups, the former Communist Bloc cheerleader hailed Chelsea Manning, “trans women of color,” “our flora and fauna,” and “intersectional feminism,” and denounced “white male hetero-patriarchy,” misogyny, Islamophobia, and capitalist exploitation.
This is where today’s Marxists in America are toiling hard. They are working diligently on the cultural front. That’s where they are confident they can finally take down Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian bedrock.
From Factory Workers to “Cultural Workers”
In closing, consider this striking new term I recently encountered when perusing the latest “About” section of the website of People’s World, successor to the Soviet-funded Daily Worker and the leading mouthpiece of American Communism. It singled out a label I hadn’t heard before: “cultural workers.” It states:
“Today, People’s World offers a daily news platform for the broad labor-led people’s movement — a voice for workers, the unemployed, people of color, immigrants, women, youth, seniors, LGBTQ people, cultural workers, students and people with disabilities.”
They’re looking not for factory workers but for cultural workers. Forget the factory floor — that project failed long ago. Communists tried to organize the steelworkers, the autoworkers, the teamsters, the coalminers. It didn’t work.
Thus, the new recruiting ground is the classroom floor, the campus, the university, and the schools. That’s where the cultural workers who can usher in the fundamental transformation are being found. These modern cultural revolutionaries are succeeding magnificently in redefining everything from marriage and family to sexuality and gender. And most stunning of all, it’s the parents — many of them conservative Christians — who are paying for the grand indoctrination with their life savings.
And 200 years later, Karl Marx would be chuckling heartily at that irony.
Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
May 5 marked the bicentennial of Karl Marx, who set the stage with his philosophy for the greatest ideological massacres in history. Or did he?
He did, but deniers still remain. “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag,” writes Francis Wheen in Karl Marx: A Life (1999). Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, Mr. Wheen insists, created “bastard creeds,” “wrenched out of context” from Marx’s writings.
Marx has been accused of ambiguity in his writings. That critique is often justified, but not always. In The Communist Manifesto, he and Friedrich Engels were quite clear that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”
“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” they wrote. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.” And this: “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”
Marx and Engels acknowledged that their views stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.” Communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things” and represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”
Toward that end, the manifesto offers a ten-point program, including “abolition of property in land,” “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” “abolition of all right of inheritance,” “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” and the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”
In a preface to their ten points, Marx and Engels acknowledged their coercive nature: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
They were right about that. Human beings would not give up fundamental liberties without resistance. Seizing property would require a terrible fight, including the use of guns and gulags. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and a long line of revolutionaries and dictators candidly admitted that force and violence would be necessary.
We’re told the philosophy was never the problem — that Stalin was an aberration, as were, presumably, Lenin, Trotsky, Ceausescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, the Kims and the Castros, not to mention the countless thousands of liquidators in the NKVD, the GRU, the KGB, the Red Guard, the Stasi, the Securitate, the Khmer Rouge, and on and on.
Couldn’t any of them read? Yes, they could read. They read Marx. The rest is history — ugly, deadly history.
Remembering Barbara Bush — and Robin
Only two women were both wife to a president and mother to a president. One was Abigail Adams, who died 200 years ago, October 28, 1818; the other was Barbara Bush, who died yesterday, April 17, 2018. Mrs. Bush was 92 years old.
Barbara Bush will be remembered as simple and unpretentious, especially following Nancy Reagan as first lady. Mrs. Reagan was known for fancy clothes and fancy friends, as part of the Hollywood set. Mrs. Bush was known for being more homespun, more Texas, even though she was raised a blueblood with much fancier trappings than Nancy. She followed Nancy in many ways, including in death, as Nancy passed away in March 2016.
Still, Barbara humbly accepted the role of the older-looking and less-glamorous first lady. Her husband jokingly called her “The Silver Fox,” and she graciously smiled and accepted the ribbing. She was more Mamie Eisenhower than Jackie Kennedy.
We’ll hear all sorts of things about Mrs. Bush in the next few days. But there’s one story about her that I learned when researching and writing a biography of her oldest son — a story I think is well worth remembering. It’s probably the most human thing about this very human lady.
It was the fall of 1953. George W. Bush was seven years old. His parents’ green Oldsmobile pulled in front of Sam Houston Elementary School in Midland, Texas. George happened to be strolling down an outdoor corridor with his friend, carrying a Victrola record player to the principal’s office. The moment that he saw the car, he set down the phonograph and sprinted ahead to his teacher. “My mom, dad, and sister are home,” he shouted. “Can I go see them?
The little sister was Robin. To this day, George W. Bush swears he saw her. He says he caught her small head barely rising above the backseat. His parents had been in New York, where they were tending to George’s little sister. He knew Robin was sick, but had no idea how sick. The three-year-old was dying from leukemia.
George’s parents returned with an empty back seat and emptier news. “I run over to the car,” said Bush almost half a century later, “and there’s no Robin.” She was not coming home. “I was sad, and stunned. I knew Robin had been sick, but death was hard for me to imagine. Minutes before, I had had a little sister, and now, suddenly, I did not.” Bush says that those minutes remain the “starkest memory” of his childhood. When asked about the incident in an interview, his eyes welled with tears. He stammered his response.
Pauline Robinson “Robin” Bush started to show symptoms in February 1953, just after the birth of her baby brother Jeb. She simply wanted to lie down all day. Mysterious bruises began appearing on her body. The Bushes took her to Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, renowned in West Texas pediatrics. Wyvell was shocked by the test results. She told the Bushes that the child’s white blood cell count was the highest she had ever seen, and the cancer was already too advanced. She recommended they simply take Robin home and allow nature to take its course, sparing all of them the agony of futile treatments.
The Bushes couldn’t do that. George H. W. Bush had an uncle in New York who was president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer center. They agreed to do everything they could in the hope of some breakthrough.
As for Barbara Bush, she was constantly at Robin’s side during the hospital stay. Her husband shuttled between New York and Midland. Each morning of Robin’s New York stay, her father dropped by the family’s Midland church at 6:30 a.m. to hold his own private prayer vigil. Only the custodian was there, and he let him in. One morning, Pastor Matthew Lynn joined him. They never talked; they just prayed.
Barbara was the strong one throughout the affair. When Robin received blood transfusions at the cancer center, her mother held her hand. Her father had to leave the room.
Robin never had a chance. Eventually, the medicine that labored to try to control the evil metastasizing in her frail frame quickly caused its own set of problems, and George H. W. was summoned from Texas immediately. He flew all night to get there, but by the time he arrived Robin had slipped into a coma. She died peacefully.
“One minute she was there, and the next she was gone,” remembered her mother. “I truly felt her soul go out of that beautiful little body. For one last time I combed her hair, and we held our precious little girl. I never felt the presence of God more strongly than at that moment.”
It all happened so fast. By October, Robin was dead, only weeks from her fourth birthday.
“We awakened night after night in great physical pain — it hurt that much,” Barbara recalled.
Alas, it is said that this was the reason Barbara Bush turned prematurely gray. There was a story — quite a story — behind that trademark hair of Barbara Bush. The story’s name was Robin.
May Barbara Bush rest in peace, reunited at long last with that little girl.
John Kerry: Reporting for Duty . . . From Vietnam to Iran
He hasn’t changed a lick in 47 years.
I’ve been asked a number of times about John Kerry’s unauthorized actions with Iran compared to Ted Kennedy’s unauthorized actions with the Kremlin. Kerry, this spring 2018, sought to undermine President Trump’s policies, whereas Kennedy, spring 1983, sought to undermine President Reagan’s policies.
Many people — including the president of the United States — want to know if Kerry’s actions constitute a violation of the Logan Act. It’s a question I’m frequently asked about Kennedy. The short answer, in both cases, is that I’m not the source to provide the answer. Congress is. The Democratic Congress in the 1980s didn’t hesitate to launch criminal proceedings against President Ronald Reagan and his staff (many of them fine men of great integrity) in a militant pursuit for impeachment over “Iran-Contra.” Liberal Democrats did so while turning a blind eye as their leader — House Speaker Jim Wright — buddied up to Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega in his own negotiations.
And Wright wasn’t secretary of state, just as John Kerry wasn’t secretary of state when he conferred with Iranian officials in secret meetings in New York. In what the Boston Globe described as a “rare move” of “unusual shadow diplomacy,” Kerry met with the Iranian foreign minister (among other high-level foreign officials) “to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.”
That’s the very deal that President Trump was working to cancel just as Kerry was working to save it.
And that’s hardly the only Kerry outrage. No, this is old-hat. I’d like to remind everyone of Kerry’s affront decades ago. The date was April 22, 1971, 47 years to almost the exact day that Kerry met with the Iranians.
That moment, too, included yet another unsavory role by Ted Kennedy. Senator Kennedy helped arrange for the young Kerry, a Vietnam vet, to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, courtesy of Senator J. William Fulbright, hero to a young Bill Clinton, another vocal Vietnam War opponent. There, Kerry spoke of “war crimes committed in Southeast Asia” by American troops — war crimes that were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He charged that U.S. soldiers had:
“. . . personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam. . . .”
Kerry’s blistering testimony went on and on, filling two hours. The Senate room was packed with reporters and cameras. The testimony scandalized America and its soldiers.
Kerry claimed to speak on behalf of not simply the “small” group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which he was the only representative to testify, but on behalf “of a very much larger group of veterans in this country.” And most damaging, his testimony came amid at least seven pending legislative proposals relating to the war; continued funding hung in the balance. That funding would signal whether the United States tried to win or opted for withdrawal, and whether the boys in the rice paddies got the weapons to defend themselves.
Kerry’s statement hit Vietnam vets like verbal napalm. His analogy to Genghis Khan, widely considered one of history’s worst beasts, was a damning indictment. His words made headlines worldwide. Overnight, his face was everywhere. He was inundated with media requests, an instant celebrity. He was discussed at the highest echelons of the Nixon White House, where the president dismissed him as a “phony.”
And speaking of phony, John Kerry’s testimony would be vigorously disputed from the outset.
One of the most dramatic such confrontations was a heated debate between Kerry and John O’Neill on the Dick Cavett Show on June 30, 1971. O’Neill had taken command of PCF 94, John Kerry’s Swift Boat, after Kerry’s departure. So incensed was O’Neill that over 30 years later he would co-author a bestselling book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, laying out why he and other Swift Boat veterans judged Kerry “a liar and a fraud, unfit to be the commander in chief of the United States of America.” O’Neill and a group of roughly 200 “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” called a press conference in Washington on May 4, 2004. The group wasted no time with an extraordinary ad campaign that arguably cost John Kerry the presidency. He lost the presidency less in November 2004, than in April 1971.
As to the actual origins of Kerry’s information, that is likewise a controversy. One source disputes Kerry’s claim with a bracing suggestion — namely, that the origins were not American, nor Vietnamese, but Russian.
The Kremlin, primarily under Yuri Andropov’s lead at the KGB, had a nasty campaign of disinformation aimed at American servicemen. An eyewitness was Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who later became the highest-ranking intelligence official to defect from the Soviet bloc. Pacepa spoke to Kerry’s testimony of brutal U.S. “war crimes”:
“The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)?
“To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and ‘news reports’ about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.
“As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe.”
Pointing to “peace” organizations that the KGB saturated with dubious anti-American propaganda, Pacepa stated:
“The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very likely a direct quote from one of these organizations’ propaganda sheets.”
Andropov would proudly tell Pacepa that the KGB’s Vietnam campaign had been “our most significant success.” Thanks to the manipulation of the American peace movement.
One can debate where and when John Kerry got his information. What is undeniable, however, was its value to America’s enemy: the Viet Cong.
In Unfit for Command, John O’Neill recalls the experience of one his band of brothers, Bill Lupetti, a Navy corpsman who had treated injured Swift Boat soldiers. Lupetti was stationed at An Thoi, where both O’Neill and Kerry had served. For Memorial Day 2004, Lupetti returned to Vietnam, painfully visiting Ho Chi Minh City, wandering through the streets earnestly looking to find out whether certain Vietnamese friends had survived the merciless Communist takeover enabled by the American withdrawal.
Lupetti happened upon the War Remnants Museum. Inside, he came to an exhibit dedicated to “heroes” who had helped the Communists win the war. A wall plaque at the head of the exhibit stated: “We would like to thank the Communist parties and working class countries of the world.” This included the “wholehearted support” of various “progressive human beings.”
Among those progressives represented in pictures, Lupetti glimpsed American campus radicals from the 1960s. (In fact, Jane Fonda’s smiling face was captured in a photo in a separate Women’s Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, standing alongside Madame Binh.) And there, Lupetti was staggered by the sight of a photo of John Kerry — the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee that year. There he was, John Kerry, in a special exhibit honoring those whose “heroic” contributions had helped the Viet Cong defeat the United States.
The Communist Vietnamese never forgot John Kerry’s testimony in 1971. It had been a great help. And perhaps today, in Iran, Kerry’s words are again being heralded, this time by the world’s worst theocratic terror state. Perhaps if the nuclear deal gets resurrected, Kerry’s mug will find a frame on the wall of a “heroes” exhibit somewhere in Tehran one day: Another testimony to him saving America’s adversaries from the Republican in the White House. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Imagine if Stormy Daniels Were Bill Clinton’s Friend Gennifer Flowers.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” rounded out Palm Sunday yesterday with an exclusive interview with porn-star Stormy Daniels leveling salacious charges against President Trump. The interview was aired almost 20 years to the day of another surreal interview involving a president and sensational sexual allegations.
On March 24, 1998, the New York Times provided a platform for one Bernard Lewinsky, father of a lady likewise infamous for lewd antics. In an article titled, “He Accuses Special Prosecutor of ‘Trying to Torture’ His Daughter: Lewinsky’s Father Rips Into Starr,” Lewinsky exploded not at the man who employed his little girl — Monica — as a sexual play-thing in the nation’s most revered office, but instead unleashed his anger at, well, Ken Starr.
“I think this is just the drip torture technique that Ken Starr is using on her,” complained the Los Angeles cancer specialist, condemning not Bill Clinton’s grotesque techniques on his daughter. “He is just trying to torture her in every possible way.” Dr. Lewinsky said his daughter was being used as a political “pawn” by the slimy Starr. She was now “very depressed” and a “virtual prisoner in her apartment,” unable to talk or even see family and friends and her own brother.
It wasn’t his first slap at the independent counsel. In a piece the Times ran a few weeks earlier, “Intern’s Father Assails Starr Over Inquiry,” Lewinsky had barked at Starr: “Lay off!” These were words that surely would have been better spent hurled at Bill Clinton. But that wasn’t the mindset of Monica’s father; his villain was the independent counsel. Dr. Lewinsky surmised that what Ken Starr (not Bill Clinton) had “brought upon” his daughter was “unconscionable.” Displaying his liberal bona fides, Dr. Lewinsky said the nefarious Starr so repulsed him that the counselor made him think of the worst of humans: Joe McCarthy. The attorney was running a “McCarthy-era” investigation. In fact, said Dr. Lewinsky, this new era was actually worse than that: it was reminiscent not merely of the McCarthy era but “of the Inquisition” and even “the Hitler era.”
Yes, the Hitlerian Ken Starr was “completely out of control.” (Again, no charges of Bill Clinton being out of control.)
That was 20 years ago. And it’s worth noting today because Dr. Lewinsky’s comments weren’t solely representative of an enraged father who had gone bananas thanks to Bill Clinton and was lashing out. No, Lewinsky was a proud liberal, and his misdirected indignation was reflective of liberals’ misdirected indignation during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The liberal press wasn’t simply in denial mode; it, too, was in attack mode — attacking not Boy Clinton, but Bad Boy Starr.
Such it had been for two nutty terms of Bill Clinton. Above all, the left told us this sordid stuff didn’t matter, and the liberal mainstream press did everything to avoid the elephants in the Clinton bedroom — actually, in the Clinton Oval Office.
Monica’s dad was sadly symptomatic of Bill’s supporters throughout the media.
It wasn’t until deep into the second Clinton term that names like Monica Lewinsky and Juanita Broaddrick — the latter a two-decade old case of alleged rape by Bill Clinton — made their way into the media. The press had to be dragged kicking and screaming, and only then after exposés by Matt Drudge. As for Broaddrick and her rape claims, the story finally hit the mainstream media when NBC’s Lisa Myers bravely broke ranks and interviewed Broaddrick. Then, the mainstream press slowly followed, including a detailed report on the front page of the February 20, 1999 edition of the Washington Post. It was, alas, the seventh year of Bill’s presidency.
Broaddrick herself would confront Hillary Rodham Clinton with a letter to the sitting first lady demanding an explanation, a letter excerpted in the press. That story didn’t enter the mainstream media until October 2000, the final full year of the Clinton presidency.
The American Spectator as early as late 1993 had been breaking extraordinary stories based on stunning interviews with (among others) the Arkansas state troopers unluckily assigned to Gov. Bill Clinton. The troopers’ accounts were jaw-droppers, and credible — and yet the press assiduously ignored them. When Paula Jones or Gennifer Flowers attempted a press conference, they were openly mocked by the press; literally laughed at on the spot. (To its credit, “60 Minutes” did confront both Clintons on allegations of Bill’s marital infidelity during the 1992 campaign, an interview in which Bill and surely Hillary lied through their grinning lips.)
Recall, too, how all the president’s men joined the pack. Throughout 1998, the lieutenants in the Clinton camp were on a rampage against the special prosecutor’s office, which they openly portrayed as operated by fundamentalist-hayseeds, puritanical tyrants, sexual McCarthyites looking for a woman under every Clinton bed. Ken Starr was a modern Torquemada.
Especially adept at the art of vicious sliming was Clinton hatchet-man James Carville, who lampooned Starr for — heaven forbid — praying and singing hymns during walks along a creek near his home. “He goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing water of the Potomac goes by,” screeched a howling Carville, “and we’re going to wash all the Sodomites and fornicators out of town!” Sidney Blumenthal, White House aide and Clinton apologist extraordinaire, snarled that Starr fancied himself a “zealot on a mission derived from a higher authority,” and ripped Starr’s chief deputy in Little Rock, W. Hickman Ewing, who was obviously a “religious fanatic.”
Words like “bimbo” and “trailer-park trash” were tossed around brutally by Clintonistas to besmirch women who courageously stood up against the most powerful man in the world. Bill’s victims might have started the #MeToo movement, if only a single pro-choice feminist in Washington had been willing to stand at their side.
And now, 20 years later, it’s March 2018, barely a full year into the Trump presidency, and liberals are practically kicking down the door of the Playboy Mansion looking under couches for dirt on the Donald. It seems only a matter of time before CNN sets up a full-time bureau in a Washington strip club. Poor Anderson Cooper, a genuinely decent guy, seems to have been dispatched to the Porn Beat, where his duties include shoving microphones in the faces of X-rated film stars and former centerfolds. Turning on CNN in front of the kids is a risk nowadays.
Now, every new sexual allegation against Donald Trump is an instant headline. No hesitation — straight to the front pages, baby.
And as for me, for the record, I’m as troubled by the allegations in 2018 as in 1998. I’m not shrugging this off. Conservatives must stand on principle and care about and condemn such outrageously and scandalously bad behavior, especially to retain any credibility. As readers here well know, I voiced character concerns about Donald Trump during his campaign in 2016 — as I had about Bill Clinton in 1992. But my focus here is liberals, and this reality: Their hypocrisy is coming back to bite them.
When liberals protest that Trump supporters aren’t taking these charges seriously, or cry foul when Trump defenders point instead to Bill Clinton in the 1990s, well, they shouldn’t be surprised. Liberals, there’s a moral-political consequence to how you covered your ears and eyes in the 1990s. And now you’ll see it among a sizable segment of voters who will reject your remonstrations of moral outrage against Donald Trump. Frustrated? So were we.
Obama’s CIA Director Would Sooner Vacation in North Korea Than at Mar-a-Lago.
Obama CIA director John Brennan, recently uncorked an epic Twitter rant. Enraged by President Trump’s words aimed at FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, Brennan steamed at the president:
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America . . . America will triumph over you.”
More than one faithful reader emailed me about the irony of such words coming from a man who wanted Gus Hall to be president of the United States.
Indeed.
For those too young to remember, Gus Hall was the longtime hack and head of Communist Party USA, beginning in 1959 until his death in 2000. Not even Joe Stalin as a Party General Secretary came close to matching Gus Hall’s interminable tenure. Hall was unwaveringly dedicated to a global Communist revolution and a truly Evil Empire that was ultimately and blessedly consigned to “the dustbin of history.” Brennan’s loaded words echoed a phrase that Bolshevism made infamous: From the delightful Leon Trotsky to the charming Yuri Andropov, the exhortation evidently remains etched in Brennan’s comradely memory. “Go the place where you belong from now on,” Trotsky thundered at the Mensheviks in 1917, “the dustbin of history!”
Our former CIA director channeled Trotsky in the service of blasting Trump.
Of course, that’s precisely why the good reader emailed me. The reader graciously remembered my piece for The American Spectator in September 2016 in which I noted that the same Mr. John Brennan had supported Mr. Gus Hall for POTUS back in the Brezhnev era. Brennan literally cast a vote for the Kremlin’s man in Washington. Needless to say, the Kremlin in those days was a rather bad place that housed some nasty guys. Leonid Brezhnev’s KGB chief was Yuri Andropov. About the time that Brennan was registering a ballot for Moscow’s man in America to become America’s next president, Brezhnev and Andropov were giving the green light to one of the most shocking crimes of the deadly 20th century: the assassination of Pope John Paul II. Andropov gave the go-ahead to the Soviet GRU to hire Muslim-Turk Mehmet Ali Agca to murder the head of the world’s largest Christian church and inheritor of the Chair of St. Peter.
That ought to have raised a red flag to John Brennan, who, among other things, had been raised an Irish Catholic. His lurch to the far left occurred during his college years at the Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. (Today, it’s unclear where Brennan stands faith-wise, with not a single mention at his official CIA page and other biographical sources and amid unproven claims that he converted to Islam. The Arabic-speaking ex-CIA director, who studied abroad in Cairo, has made very positive statements about Islam and the “privilege” of making pilgrimage to Mecca and paying homage to “the majesty of the Hajj.”)
In fact, if one studies Brennan’s admission that he voted for Gus Hall, it looks like he also suggested that he might have been a member of the Communist Party in 1980. Yes, a formal member.
Once upon a time in pre-Obama America, the possibility of CPUSA membership would have been a disqualifying factor to run the CIA. But not to the president that Americans elected in 2008 and reelected in 2012. To the contrary, Obama would have been highly sympathetic. It was likewise in 1980, at Occidental College, according to classmate John Drew, that the young Obama was an ideological Marxist, albeit not a formal CPUSA member. Only the most hardcore joined The Party — including Obama mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, whose underground code name for The Party was “The Church.”
But alas, that’s just the start of the irony in John Brennan’s Tweet about the corruption of Donald Trump. Observe that Brennan also blasted Trump for demagoguery, venality, and moral turpitude. Well, that took some gall for a Gus guy. Gus Hall was all those things, and worse.
I couldn’t begin to here lay out the full spectrum and spectacle (and disgrace, to borrow another Brennan description) that was Gus Hall, but here’s one particularly relevant item of interest: ol’ Gus was so corrupt that even the Russkies couldn’t trust him.
An eyewitness to that reality was Morris Childs, a remarkable individual whose story was told by the late John Barron in his fascinating book Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. Childs was Gus’s number-two at CPUSA. And all along, Childs was secretly working for the FBI.
The courageous Childs marvelously hoodwinked Hall and his Moscow cronies. The Soviets loved Childs like a brother, bestowing on him their celebrated Soviet Order of the Red Banner — a hilarious accomplishment for an undercover FBI agent.
What Childs learned from the Soviets was significant. But as to the point of Gus Hall’s corruption, consider this: The Soviet Union was secretly bankrolling CPUSA, including annual subsidies to the Daily Worker. It was illegal for CPUSA and Gus Hall to receive this money. Our government knew this was happening, but it kept the information quiet to protect Childs so he could continue providing crucial inside intelligence.
Morris Childs and his brother Jack (also working for our side) were conduits for the funding. The Kremlin gave CPUSA tens of millions of dollars. The total rose to $2,775,000 by 1980. The FBI knew the precise amount because it counted every dime at a half-way house prior to when Morris deposited it in a safe for Gus Hall.
To repeat: Hall and CPUSA were doing all of this illegally. They were a directly-subsidized arm of America’s chief adversary, a barbaric regime.
But that’s not the end of it — of, that is, Gus Hall’s corruption. As for the safe in which Moscow’s money was placed for CPUSA, Gus always pocketed a portion for his personal stash. Childs knew this, the FBI knew it. He wasn’t trustworthy. Then again, why would anyone trust a Communist General Secretary? Come to think of it, why would anyone vote for a Communist General Secretary to be their president of the United States?
That brings us back to John Brennan.
One might lend more credibility to Brennan’s crowing about Donald Trump if he had better judgment about presidents of the United States. And this article doesn’t begin to detail Gus Hall’s venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption. Where to start and finish with those? Here are merely a few Gus gems:
On vacationing in North Korea: “The world should see what North Korea has done. In some ways it’s a miracle. If you want to take a nice vacation, take it in North Korea.”
On the Party’s position on the Hitler-Stalin of 1939, Stalin’s purge trials, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary: “I never believed that we should dwell too much on the past. I have been much more interested in the future.”
On socialism’s inevitability in America: “There’s no question that the United States will become a socialist country. It’s as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.”
On the Party remaining committed to revolution: “We want to overthrow the capitalist system. But the means that we have chosen are ones of mass education and propaganda. We have our newspaper and we appear on talk shows and we will take part in elections.”
Well, John Brennan took part in those elections. He cast a vote for the cause.
Let’s Not Forget Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and the Four-Finger Salute
Most articles on the death of madman Charles Manson opened by mentioning his role in the diabolical Tate-LaBianca murders. The AP story started this way:
“Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after nearly a half-century in prison. . . .” The Manson Family, as his followers were called, slaughtered five of its victims on Aug. 9, 1969, at Tate’s home: the actress, who was 8½ months pregnant, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voyteck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the estate’s caretaker. Tate’s husband, “Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time. The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town.
Charles Manson led this cult of killers. After a sensational trial that truly shocked America, Manson and four genuinely scary members of his “family” — Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Charles “Tex” Watson — were sentenced to death. But because the California Supreme Court had struck down the death penalty, all were spared execution and instead given life sentences.
Manson had directed his “family” members to go out into the dark of night to do “something witchy.” That they did. The way they killed Sharon Tate was especially gruesome. Shortly after midnight, they stabbed Tate at least a dozen times, mutilating the beautiful actress, who was due to give birth in two weeks. Tate had reportedly begged for the life of her unborn child but was told by one of the Manson girls:
“Look bitch, I don’t care about you. I don’t care if you are having a baby. You are going to die and I don’t feel a thing about it.”
The Manson girls repeatedly rammed forks into Tate’s belly to kill her child. The dead baby boy was later removed from his mother’s still womb and buried with her in her arms.
Manson’s acolytes took Tate’s spilled blood and used it to paint the word “PIG” on the front door of her home.
As for the murder of the LaBiancas the next day, Manson himself tied up the couple and ordered his devotees to do the kill. They brandished their knives and ferociously hacked away. They would leave a fork sticking out of the dead belly of Leno LaBianca, a supermarket executive. The fork was used to carve the word “WAR” on his belly.
Everyone knows that Charles Manson inspired those murders. None of that is being forgotten in reports of his death. But what also shouldn’t be forgotten was how the murders inspired Bernardine Dohrn, the ’60s militant Marxist who spearheaded the Weather Underground.
That surreal, cruel moment came at the appropriately titled “War Council” held in Flint, Michigan on December 27, 1969, two days after Christmas. It was attended by some 400 student radicals from the SDS-Weathermen cabal, who promoted this political-ideological-sexual gathering as a collective “Wargasm.” For the lovely ’60s hippies, it would be (as usual) a night of radical politics, unrestrained sex, and violence.
Among the ringleaders was the late John Jacobs, who had coined a fitting slogan for the evening and for the entire movement: “We’re against everything that’s good and decent.” That became obvious when the indecent Bernardine Dohrn grabbed the microphone. “We’re about being crazy motherf—ers,” Dohrn shouted, “and scaring the sh-t out of honky America!”
It was like a radical revival meeting, with the Rev. Dohrn at the political pulpit. Inspired by the spirit — that is, some sort of spirit — Bernardine fired up her brothers and sisters with her hideous ruminations on the vicious Tate-LaBianca murders. The future professor of child education at Northwestern University School of Law — no less than founding director of the university’s Children and Family Justice Center — thrilled over the scene in the bloody Tate living room:
“Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”
One would like to think that this gory moment appalled even the hardcore in that room, but that wouldn’t be accurate. The faithful, from Bernadine’s sweetheart, Bill Ayers, to everyone else in the hall, knew Bernardine was serious — and they dug it. As reported by Mark Rudd, one of the core leaders of SDS and the Weathermen, the assembled “instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly.”
Imagine. Just imagine. A room full of highly educated young people from some of America’s most hailed colleges. United in a grotesque four-finger salute of diabolical death.
Bill Ayers has been asked to comment on the episode. The best face that Ayers has tried to put on the event is to claim that his sweetheart was being “ironic” or had employed “rhetorical overkill” (Freudian slip?) or was speaking “partly as a joke.”
Among the former ’60s radicals who later investigated the incident is David Horowitz, today a leading conservative. Horowitz set out to document the incident, interviewing his old comrades: “In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership,” he wrote. “Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious.”
I’ve likewise talked to witnesses. A few years ago I spoke to a Weather Underground cadre who was there. This witness was a good guy — a courageous Vietnam vet who offered his services to the FBI and had infiltrated the group at great personal risk. His name was Larry Grathwohl, who I wrote a tribute to at The American Spectator in July 2013. There, I recounted a conversation I had with Grathwohl the previous summer.
Grathwohl had been at the War Council. When I asked if Dohrn and the others were indeed serious, and whether the rest of the radicals had joined the four-finger salute, he confirmed vigorously: “Absolutely! No question.” He repeated emphatically: “Remember, I was there. I saw it.”
In fact, Grathwohl added a tidbit that I hadn’t read in accounts of that evening. He said that throughout the remainder of the night, as the “flower children” danced, they gleefully bopped and grooved with their fingers in the form of the four-finger salute, thrusting their arms up and down and back and forth, laughing joyfully. Larry demonstrated for me. I felt sick to my stomach.
“How awful,” I said. “Oh, yes,” he replied. “It sure was.”
Mark Rudd, the SDS leader who shut down Columbia University a year earlier, in the spring of 1968, translated this message for the wider world:
“The message was that we sh-t on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies. There were no limits to our politics of transgression.”
No, there were not. And this is not quite the flowery image of the innocent ’60s idealists dancing with daisies that liberals would like us to believe about this degenerate generation of ideological goons and nerds and thugs.
A line had been crossed that night in Flint — the first steps into a dark world. From the high altar of Rev. Dohrn’s four-finger salute flowed domestic terror cells, gunpowder, bomb-making units. A “new decade now dawned,” recalled Rudd, as “the New Red Army marched out from Flint, exhilarated and terrified.” Its members would spend the next decade literally plotting the violent overthrow of the United States of America, which (quoting their hero, Che Guevara) they declared “the Great Enemy of Mankind.”
They planned attacks, planted bombs, and engaged in murder, all along fleeing the federal authorities as fugitives on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. Ayers would change his name from town to town, chillingly visiting cemeteries where he borrowed the names of deceased babies from tombstones as his macabre aliases.
Neither Ayers or Dohrn would get prison time. Quite the contrary, both spent the 1980s earning education degrees from universities like Columbia, and in the 1990s would become professors at, respectively, University of Illinois-Chicago and Northwestern.
Dohrn and Ayers, of course, were back in the news again in 2008, when their friendship with an aspiring Illinois politician named Barack Obama was raised. A chilling symbolic moment in Obama’s rise was the political blessing he received in the living room of Bill and Bernardine in their Hyde Park home in 1995. (Even the New York Times reported on this on the newspaper’s front page in October 2008, albeit downplaying the incident. See: Scott Shane, “Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths,” New York Times, October 4, 2008.)
Obama during the 2008 campaign would do his best to distance himself from Ayers, just as he did another leftist Chicagoan, his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
In fact, Obama and Bill Ayers actually did a number of things together in Chicago. They jointly served as board members at the Woods Fund in Chicago; they worked on “school reform” through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; they served on a juvenile-justice panel (organized by Michelle Obama); they appeared together as speakers or panel participants at Chicago events; they had many mutual associations, including with disturbing figures like Rashid Khalidi; they acknowledged one another in books and reviews and even endorsements of their books; they had a relationship as neighbors (three blocks apart); plus numerous other reported associations. (I detail these and many additional connections, with copious endnotes, in my book 2010 book, Dupes.) In 2001, the same period when Ayers openly lamented that he had not done enough damage to the Pentagon, Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s reelection campaign for the Illinois Senate, which Obama happily accepted and was never called upon to repudiate. The relationship was professional and personal. Some have speculated that Barack met his wife Michelle at the Sidley & Austin law firm where Bernardine Dohrn worked.
But, hey, who’s counting — eh?
By 2008, Bill and Bernardine were enthusiastic backers of the group “Progressives for Obama,” spearheaded by SDS founder and leading ’60s radical Tom Hayden.
Unlike Charles Manson, who spent the rest of his life in prison, neither Bill or Bernardine were sentenced to jail time for their alleged crimes, some of which (albeit not as sadistic as Manson’s) could have killed many more people. As Ayers later infamously celebrated, “Guilty as hell, free as a bird!”
Of course, what Charles Manson did was truly of hell. Manson was guilty as hell, and he didn’t get away with it — neither in this world and surely not in the next.
But as we look back at the evil that Charles Manson committed in 1969, we shouldn’t forget how Bernardine and buddies saluted that evil.
Remembering Fidel Castro’s Death
Editor’s note: A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Last November marked the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro, our hemisphere’s worst dictator for a half century. When we remember Castro’s death, we should remember him for just that: death.
Expressing the depths of Fidel’s destruction is impossible in a short article. But among the corpses under his despotism were the thousands who perished while trying to escape his island-prison by swimming nearly 100 miles to American shores.
A testimony to that desperation was recently provided to my students at Grove City College by a Cuban citizen, who I must leave nameless. In describing her fellow citizens’ surreal lives under totalitarian Communism, she noted that only recently have Cubans been allowed to visit their beautiful beaches, and even then only under strict surveillance. That’s a stunning thought for a country literally surrounded by beaches. And yet, Cubans are banned from their beaches because their government fears they’ll dash into the deep water and start paddling profusely for freedom — swimming all the way for Florida.
Imagine that. Try to conceive the utter despair. Try to wrap your mind around the cruelty of a government not even letting its suffering citizens escape — a regime so repressive that it will not dare avert its gaze for a moment lest its people attempt the physically unimaginable in the agonizing hopes of dashing from this Marxist police state.
We already know that Cuba is a bizarre island without boats. Look at satellite images of Cuba. No boats! There’s also no fishing industry, and people don’t have the luxury of eating fish. (They largely eat chicken, pork, rice, beans.) Why no boats? Why no fishermen? Because fishermen bolt the first chance they get — just like swimmers.
For the record, how many people have attempted the swim since Castro took over in 1959? It’s difficult to say. In 1999, the Harvard University Press classic, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that some 100,000 Cubans had risked the treacherous journey. Of those, perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As those in the sea bob for breath, the government on occasion has employed the resources of the state to sink them, dropping large bags of sand at them from helicopters hovering above.
Yes, actually dropping sandbags.
As we consider the tens of thousands who’ve drowned, compare it to another glaring number: zero. That’s the total number of Americans who have attempted the swim to Cuba, including all those merry liberals raving about the wondrous “free” education and healthcare awaiting humanity in the Castro collectivist utopia.
Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, speaks of “the gates test.” To wit: when a nation opens its gates, in which direction does humanity flow? Well, when the United States leaves its borders unchecked, the refugees stream in. In the Communist world, the apparatchiks had to build a wall in Berlin to keep the captives contained. In Cuba, they can’t even visit their beaches. I imagine the Communists in Cuba would earnestly have followed the example of their old comrades in East Germany and built a wall around the beaches — if they could afford it.
Aside from those who drowned, how many others died under Fidel Castro?
Those numbers likewise run into the thousands. There were the more traditional Marxist methods: bullet to the head, deprivation, succumbing to inhumane prison conditions. The numbers vary, but the range of dead from those means is typically between 10,000 and 20,000, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.
Fidel’s onetime executioner-in-chief, Che Guevara, today an icon to profoundly ignorant college students who sport the cruel psychopath on their t-shirts, is estimated to have overseen as many as 2,000 executions (some of which he personally performed) during the brief period he ran Fidel’s execution pit at the La Cabana concentration camp. Beyond Che’s “bloodthirsty” (he charmingly used that word to describe himself in a letter to his wife) achievement, many more Cubans were liquidated by other state assassins. In all, most credible estimates place the total dead somewhere between 15,000 to 18,000. That’s a lot of people for a tiny island. And again, it doesn’t include those who drowned while attempting an incredible swim.
The late professor R. J. Rummel, an expert on the sordid subject of death by government, estimates that from 1959-87 alone, the grand total of cadavers produced by Fidel ranged from 35,000 to as high as 141,000. How’s that for a resume? Actually, for a Communist leader, it’s pretty typical.
As we pause to remember Fidel Castro at the one-year anniversary of his demise, let us remember him for what he achieved the most: tyranny, repression, and death. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Going Red for International Women’s Day
The ability of the Communist left to consistently mislead and use an ever-wider group of people never ceases to amaze.
I wrote a few weeks ago about the Women’s March, a shocking display of vulgarity that erupted after the Trump inaugural in January, where none other than Angela Davis — America’s longtime leading female Marxist revolutionary — was honorary co-chair and featured speaker. Davis fired up the faithful as they donned crude pink hats and cheered her revolution. Now, this week, the female front was enlisted again, this time going not pink but red — figuratively and literally.
[March 8] was International Women’s Day. If you know little to nothing of the history of this event, then you probably know more than the vast majority of young women and oblivious corporate sponsors tapped as dutiful foot soldiers.
The fact is that the origins of International Women’s Day are Communist-socialist. That reality is so unavoidably obvious that the “About” section at the official International Women’s Day website candidly lays out the origins in touting this glorious “collective day of global celebration” and calling on “the masses” to “help forge a better working world.” Take a look at this surprisingly honest historical timeline provided at the website:
International Women’s Day Timeline Journey
1909: In accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Woman’s Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on 28 February. . . .
1910: In 1910 a second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named Clara Zetkin (Leader of the “Women’s Office” for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day — a Women’s Day — to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs — and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament — greeted Zetkin’s suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women’s Day was the result. . . .
1913-1914: On the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, Russian women observed their first International Women’s Day on the last Sunday in February 1913. In 1913 following discussions, International Women’s Day was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Women’s Day ever since. . . .
1917 : On the last Sunday of February, Russian women began a strike for “bread and peace” in response to the death of over 2 million Russian soldiers in World War I. Opposed by political leaders, the women continued to strike until four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. The date the women’s strike commenced was Sunday 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.”
I must concede kudos to the International Women’s Day website developers for sharing this accurate history. This is spot on.
Readers will, of course, recognize many of these dates and names, especially the Russian ones. They may not identify names like Clara Zetkin. Zetkin was a big-time German Marxist — or, as leftists will prefer to call her, a socialist or “social democrat.” In fact, Lenin and Trotsky and pioneering cultural Marxists like Herbert Marcuse were also social democrats. Clara was a leading international advocate for Lenin. I have clips from Working Woman magazine, the January 30, 1934 edition, which I copied from the Soviet Comintern files on Communist Party USA. This particular edition included a preview of the coming International Women’s Day of March 8, 1934. It featured a glowing review of Clara’s book Reminiscences of Lenin, including praise for the late despot’s “warm smile,” “keen joy” for workers, “clear thinking,” and “masterly eloquence.” This was Clara’s valentine to Vladimir — a vicious killer — at the time of his death in January 1924, amid her “hour of grief” and “deepest personal sorrow” at the “irreparable loss” of this “great man.”
Perhaps passages of this blast-from-the-past could be posted in the “About” section of the International Women’s Day website?
But there was much more to this year’s International Women’s Day. Its call for a better “gender world” was a distinctly and fittingly red one. Indeed, this seems almost unbelievable in its audacity, but the January Women’s March organizers, who just happened to spearhead this year’s International Women’s Day, literally urged women everywhere to wear red on Wednesday. Yes, red, and to do so in “solidarity” with the “masses.” That call is issued without apology or irony at the Women’s March website, along with two other eye-opening exhortations:
Anyone, anywhere, can join by making March 8 “A Day Without a Woman,” in one or all of the following ways:
Women Take the Day Off, from Paid and Unpaid Labor: Avoid shopping for one day (with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses).
Wear RED in Solidarity with a Day Without a Woman: What a perfect color for this year’s International Women’s Day: red, the color of the revolution.
But the ironies don’t stop there. Consider the parade of duped organizations that this year’s comradely organizers managed to hook into their cause. No, I’m not talking about the usual suspects, such as those highlighted at People’s World, which I quote: “Backers include the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), Jobs With Justice, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), National Nurses United (NNU), Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC United), and the National Organization for Women (NOW).”
Those are just a smattering of the same-old-same-old; basically, the regular assortment of leftist groups that rallied behind the so-called “P---y Hats” (their word) in Washington in January. No, look at this group of unexpected allies: The banner sponsors for this International Women’s Day included a select list of ten prominent corporate partners that served up themselves as this year’s cast of tools for exploitation. The list includes Caterpillar, BP, MetLife, PepsiCo, and Western Union.
Do the folks at the PR office at these corporations have any concept of what they lent their name to? Maybe they do. I’m wondering if their female employees got the day off on Wednesday. If not, hopefully they didn’t get in trouble if they simply “took the day off.”
Vladimir Lenin is credited for devising the term “useful idiots.” It’s a cynical albeit all-too-fitting label. And this International Women’s Day once again smoked them out.
Neil Gorsuch on Life, Liberty, and the Natural Law
In a stunning moment in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Neil Gorsuch, Senator Dianne Feinstein, a staunch supporter of so-called “abortion rights,” took umbrage with one of Gorsuch’s previous written statements. As Feinstein described it, “He [Gorsuch] believes there are no exceptions to the principle that ‘the intentional taking of a human life by private persons is always wrong.’”
Well, yes, that’s right. That’s what Gorsuch believes. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Not to Senator Feinstein, sadly, for whom the alpha and omega is what her colleagues Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton consider a “sacred right:” a woman’s “right to choose.” Roe v. Wade is sacrosanct in their eyes, and that’s the complete opposite of what Neil Gorsuch considers sacrosanct.
The Gorsuch statement that Feinstein was quoting comes from a book he wrote in 2006, The Future of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, published by Princeton University Press. In that book, Gorsuch wrote that “all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”
As for me, I will choose that worldview over the Feinstein worldview any day.
Gorsuch’s views stem from a very deep, very rich, and very old tradition known as natural law.
Natural law affirms that we do what we ought to do according to nature, to our very nature. “What we ought to do is based on what we are,” writes Peter Kreeft. The natural law, notes Kreeft, is naturally known, by natural human reason and experience. You need not be a religious believer to know the natural law, even if that law (many of us believe) was written into nature by a Creator.
Really, it’s easier to give examples of natural law than a definition. Human sexuality demonstrates natural law so well because it’s so self-evident. Another violation of natural law is murder: one human life taking another. That’s a violation held by cultures and societies and governments of all times.
Natural law is as old and varied as the Old and New Testaments, as the Jewish and Christian faiths, as Aquinas and Augustine, as John Calvin and John Paul II, as Martin Luther King Jr. and Jacques Maritain. It is considered immutable and permanent throughout the variations of history, a universal rule that binds us all. As Augustine put it, natural law is “the law that is written in the human heart.” As Aquinas explained it, the natural law allows us to “know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.”
Of course, Augustine and Aquinas were Christians, but one need not be a Christian to understand what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Pre-Christian figures like Aristotle and Cicero spoke of this eternal law. “True law is right reason in agreement with nature,” stated Cicero. “It is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.”
Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped many in today’s culture from aggressively seeking to redefine human nature. If you’re endeavoring to fundamentally transform human nature, especially on issues like marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, then the natural law is your chief foe. Indeed, if you’re an aggressive secular progressive, one seeking day in and day out to redefine human nature, what do you do with natural law?
One of my former students got an answer in law school, when her progressive professor boldly proclaimed that “natural law doesn’t exist.” But I caution this professor that if he/she really believes this, then he/she must also reject the natural-law-based conclusions of tribunals such as Nuremberg after World War II, when the judges told Nazi officials that regardless of what Hitler’s laws stated, they should have known that what they were doing was wrong. To gas human beings and recycle their corpses into soap and lampshades is an obvious violation of basic laws of humanity — no excuses.
Or, consider slavery and various civil-rights laws. One current libertarian writer states that “the greatest spokesman for natural law in the 20th century was probably Martin Luther King, who denounced segregation not because of its technical complexities, but because it betrayed the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
This being the case, most progressives will do with natural law what they do with Biblical Law and other moral laws — they will pick the applications they like and ignore or reject those they don’t. Or, even more brazenly, they will try to remake the natural law in their own image.
No, sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Nature tells you what to do; you don’t tell nature what to do. Just as your biology and your 74 trillion chromosomes tell you your gender; you don’t tell yourself your gender.
But tell that to modern disciples of the dictatorship of relativism, where everything is deemed redefinable, from one’s gender to whether a human life is even considered a human life.
And that brings us back to Neil Gorsuch.
Gorsuch is incredibly well-educated. It’s difficult to find a more credentialed academic pedigree. He studied natural law while earning a Ph.D. at Oxford (he has a J.D. from Harvard) under one of the world’s preeminent authorities on natural law, John Finnis. Professor Finnis was Gorsuch’s dissertation adviser. He’s now on faculty at Notre Dame Law School and a professor emeritus at Oxford. Finnis’ best-known work is his Natural Law and Natural Rights.
It was there that he issued his statement on the inviolability of all human life, and how no human being should be able to take the life of another human being — the statement that Senator Feinstein found so reprehensible.
Gorsuch is also a defender of religious liberty, which Feinstein is likewise finding objectionable.
Take Gorsuch’s statement in support of the Little Sisters of the Poor, when the Obama administration tried to force the nuns to pay for abortion drugs. He wrote: “When a law demands that a person do something the person considers sinful, and the penalty for the refusal is a large financial penalty, then the law imposes a substantial burden on that person’s free exercise of religion.”
It’s good to have Supreme Court justices of this mind, not of the thinking of the likes of Senator Feinstein.
In all, this means that Neil Gorsuch’s thinking on issues like human life and religious liberty should be in concert with faithful Christians, and it should be sympathetic to the rights of those Christians against a government that tries to coerce them.
Socialism Attacks the Family, Just as Its Inventors Intended
Editor’s note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.
Last year, “socialism” was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters have only a hazy idea what socialism entails, but most surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called “means of production” as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.
American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: I’ve published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.
Intended Consequences: Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive, and impoverishing. It creates not economic prosperity but backwardness, and often, genuine deprivation (see Venezuela). In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the “fundamental cell” of society: the family.
But surely socialism’s founders didn’t realize that their system just flat-out didn’t work, right? Actually, they believed that it did — and in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.
Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural, traditional, Biblical, family — the Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of today’s secular left, which employs bullying, state coercion, and demonization to forcibly redefine everything from marriage and parenting to biological sex (or as they now call it “gender”), and whether a child in the womb is even considered a life.
Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the “abolition of the family,” which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an “infamous proposal of the Communists.” What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work, from Marx and Engels to sordid figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, and assorted ’60s New Left radicals from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden. They included groups ranging from the Bolsheviks to the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxists to the Planned Parenthood eugenics “progressives” to the Weather Underground and many more.
Socialists on American Soil: A glance at this list of dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specifically — at least from a family-focused perspective — was perhaps Robert Owen.
Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the geniuses of the Declaration of Independence, both dramatically breathed their last gasps on the 50th anniversary of their eloquent achievement on behalf of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana and delivered his “Declaration of Mental Independence.” It is a document you surely didn’t read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age. Owen proclaimed:
“I now declare to you and to the world that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.”
“I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.”
There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owen’s unholy trinity.
Owen’s acolytes began their new civilization by scrapping the Christian Anno Domini calendar, marking 1826 as their new “Year One.” He was imitating the Jacobins, who had likewise “reset” the calendar in 1794 amid their bloodcurdling de-Christianization of France. (Mussolini and Pol Pot would later follow suit.) Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owen’s socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family. His socialism was cultural as well as economic, as socialism and its enthusiasts always would be.
The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and Communism have always been for “the people,” “the masses,” the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Castro, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao — given the choice — they never lived the same way with the same rules and equal salaries as the serfs. Indeed, how could they? Their socialist-Communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.
But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead. Even as Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune quickly collapsed, a dozen or so imitators sprang up around the country. Rarely did any of them last more than four years. Owen’s leftist vision remained alive and undeterred. “The social system is now firmly established,” he asserted.
An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family. Never learning from failed projects of the past, they would always convince themselves that the previous project simply wasn’t done quite right — not yet. When they implemented their commune, their utopia, their more enlightened and modern view of marriage and the family, it would surely work this time around. Such is the socialist faith.
Polyamory and Lemonade Seas: Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was another merry socialist who reviled property, marriage, and religion. He dreamed of collectivizing the masses in communes where they could undergo fundamental transformation. (He also believed that human efforts would someday turn the seas to tasty lemonade.) A forerunner to 1960s New Left radicals on American college campuses, Fourier openly advocated the abolition of monogamous marriage, and championed polyamory, homosexuality, and other forms of what Margaret Sanger and the 1920s American progressives would celebrate as “free love.” Fourier’s lead disciple in America, Albert Brisbane, practiced what his master taught, proving himself exceptionally progressive by maintaining several mistresses and fathering three illegitimate children.
Predictably, the Fourier-Brisbane communes would work about as well as Owen’s ideological colonies, and the ones that followed. There were probably forty some such communes that sprung up around the country in this period, and quickly dissolved. No matter, leftists never give up. All they need is more power than the previous group of ideological colonists, and then they’ll get it right the next time. It is the governing spirit of their ideology. Just wait for their better, more enlightened ideas on marriage, family, sexuality, gender, and on and on. Forward!
On the heels of Fourier came John Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida colony and their newfangled designs for the family, which included group marriages that shared both intimacy and children.
Socialist Ancestors of the Gender Wars: All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in “ideological colonizations.” Each new generation came up with its own socialist colonies, all the way to the Red Family Colony in Berkeley in the 1960s established by Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer. The ’60s New Left also launched its glorious “smash monogamy” movement, which was an exciting form of marriage that would be (and had to be, they insisted) non-monogamous.
In short, these were the bold ancestors of today’s same-sex marriage movement and “LGBTQ” sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional, and Biblical model for the family.
“It is not possible to speak of ‘the’ family,” insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization “Beyond Marriage.” They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Rating the Presidents — and Obama
I’ve been getting emails from bewildered colleagues asking about a survey of presidential scholars that determined that Barack Obama is the twelfth best president in the history of the United States, putting him near the top quartile of our presidents.
How can this be? I, too, was mystified, especially given that I participated in the survey.
The survey was conducted by the impeccably fair C-SPAN. Few sources do their job like C-SPAN does. If you want truly unfiltered news, C-SPAN is unrivaled for its ability to simply place a camera in a room and let reality speak for itself.
When it comes to surveys of presidents, C-SPAN likewise has no peer. I remember the nauseating presidential surveys in the 1980s and 1990s. They were mere measurements of the liberalism of the academy — that is, liberal historians and liberal political scientists expressing their liberalism by their liberal rankings of presidents. It was a farce.
C-SPAN, fortunately, has endeavored to provide a valuable corrective. In 2000, 2009, and 2017, C-SPAN set out to do its own survey and has indeed assembled a more rounded group of scholars. (I was among those surveyed for the 2009 ranking, as well.) To be sure, most (if not the vast majority) of the scholars surveyed are clearly on the left, but there are a decent number of conservatives: By my estimate, over a dozen, possibly as many as twenty. Of course, that’s still far out of proportion with the population at large, where self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals for decades (usually in the range of 35-40 percent self-identified conservatives vs. 20-25 percent self-identified liberals). C-SPAN needs to do better next time around. A field of 10-20 conservatives among 91 participants isn’t good, albeit better than the nonsense we used to see in biased surveys.
Likewise befitting C-SPAN’s fairness, the ranking criteria for the presidents are commendably nonpartisan. The criteria are obviously intended to remove ideology from those doing the judging. Here are the ten criteria:
Public Persuasion
Crisis Leadership
Economic Management
Moral Authority
International Relations
Administrative Skills
Relations with Congress
Vision / Setting an Agenda
Pursued Equal Justice for All
Performance Within Context of Times
For each of the ten criteria, a president received a scored ranging from one (“not effective”) to ten (“very effective”). I’d like readers to pause and look at those criteria carefully. Imagine if you were doing the judging.
Given these criteria — again, essentially non-ideological criteria — I personally had no choice but to score very highly presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, all of whose presidencies I either did not approve of or outright despised or found destructive. But facts are facts: These presidents were extremely effective. No, I personally didn’t like how they were effective, but they were effective nonetheless. Did Wilson have an agenda and vision and get it through? Oh, yes. You bet he did. So did FDR and LBJ.
And yet, those same criteria prompted me to rank Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and Eisenhower very high. I will not here share exactly how I tallied each, but I will say that those presidents in my top ten were very similar to those in the overall top ten. Here’s the top ten that C-SPAN compiled:
Lincoln
Washington
FDR
Teddy Roosevelt
Eisenhower
Truman
Jefferson
Kennedy
Reagan
LBJ
Following at eleven and twelve, respectively, were Woodrow Wilson and Obama. (For the record, I gave Kennedy a decent rating, but to place him in the top ten, and ahead of Reagan, is just plain stupid. Gee, the guy wasn’t even president three full years.)
But what about Barack Obama at twelve? I’ll say this as nicely and professionally as I can: I find this utterly perplexing. Do the exercise yourself. Go through those ten categories. Ascribe Obama a score of one to ten, and do so relative to other presidents you’ve ranked. Where would you give Obama a ten? How many (if any) scores above a five would you give Obama? For that matter, how would you not score Reagan so much higher than Obama? Yes, Reagan finished with an overall ranking of nine, which is better than Obama, but his total composite score wasn’t much higher than Obama’s.
Seriously, are even liberals that happy with the Obama presidency? Try to remove your ideological lens, whether left or right, and assess these questions:
What did Barack Obama accomplish? What is the Obama legacy? What was the Obama vision/agenda and (more important, since we’re measuring effectiveness) how successful was he in implementing it? In 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Obama’s promoters could do no better than come up with silly placards about how Obama “got Osama” and “saved GM.” Unlike the vast majority of two-term presidents, Obama’s re-election numbers were much worse. In fact, Barack Obama was the first president ever re-elected with fewer popular votes, fewer Electoral College votes, a lower percentage and percentage margin of victory, and winning fewer states. He never had a sustained period of high favorability. He couldn’t elect a successor to carry on his legacy. To the contrary, Donald Trump plans to repudiate any Obama legacy.
Where is the list of signature domestic achievements by Obama? Obamacare maybe? It was a disaster from the rollout, and it’s going to be repealed and replaced.
What were Obama’s defining moments of crisis leadership? Where’s his Cuban Missile Crisis? Did he even have a crisis to lead? How about Benghazi as a candidate?
Where was Barack Obama’s Camp David? What did he do for the Middle East, for Arab-Israeli relations, for relations with Russia, the EU, NATO, and the G-20? Where’s his NAFTA? Where’s his summit with the Russian leadership? Where’s his missile-reduction treaty? Where’s his chemical weapons ban?
As for Obama’s economic record, it was colossally bad. My economist colleague Mark Hendrickson calls it a “shocking historically weak economic performance,” as many others have shown. During the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the average annual real GDP growth was 1.5 percent, notes Hendrickson, “the weakest economic performance of any post-WWII president, and the fourth worst ever.” And to try to still blame that failure on George W. Bush after eight years is ludicrous. Obama’s GDP growth in 2016 (eight years after Bush) was a terrible 1.6 percent.
Bush’s economy grew better than that, and he inherited a recession and was hit with 9/11 his first year, which devastated the economy. In fact, not only was George W. Bush’s economic-growth rate better than Obama’s, but so was Jimmy Carter’s. Yes, Carter — typically upheld as the dubious yardstick of economic incompetence — actually had more than double Obama’s GDP growth (3.3 percent)!
Any deficit reduction under Obama (after he exploded the deficit to unprecedented record highs in the first two years of the Pelosi-Reid Congress) is attributable in large part to the Republican Congress that liberals excoriated for spending cuts (and now want to take responsibility for the subsequent deficit reduction). The Obama debt exploded way worse than the debt under Reagan and George W. Bush.
So, where would you score Obama on Economic Management? I can’t imagine anything beyond a three.
In what way was Obama a master at public persuasion? What new constituencies did he generate? Where are the Obama Republicans, akin to the Reagan Democrats? How were his relations with Congress? Did you observe stellar “administrative skills” in Obama? His notorious lack of meetings with his NSC and intelligence and security staffs were breathtaking in their lack of any administration. As I reported here in 2012, Obama attended only 44 percent of his Daily Briefs in the first 1,225 days of his administration. For 2012, he attended a little over a third. This was totally contrary to Bush and other predecessors. Reagan and Ike both had hands-off leadership styles, but at least they attended meetings.
Who gave him a ten for that category?
And if you’re extolling Obama’s attempted fundamental transformation of America’s public-school toilets via executive order, or his illuminating the White House in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, or his suing the Little Sisters of the Poor via the HHS Mandate, sorry, but those are not among the categories for evaluation.
I want to see the case made by the guy or gal who thinks that Barack Obama merits being listed near the top ten presidents in history. Actually, some must have rated him in the top five, because I guarantee my score for Obama (low as it was) surely dropped him a few pegs.
In short, I’m stunned. Based on the criteria we were given for ranking these presidents, I cannot conceive how Obama could possibly score well. I don’t see how Bill Clinton didn’t rate higher than Obama.
As noted, there were some conservatives on C-SPAN’s list. I’m wondering if the conservatives didn’t send in their surveys. The liberal historians must have gone bonkers in merrily giving Obama the highest scores in every category. But forget about that. This shouldn’t be a liberal-conservative thing. That’s the point. Literally half of my top ten or twelve were Democrats, and I’m no Democrat.
Clearly, the liberal scholars were not able to separate their partisanship when it came to objectively judging Obama. There’s no way that Barack Obama should rate the 12th-best president in U.S. history. Not a chance.
Women’s Marchers, Unite!
“The most important task,” said Communist dictator Kim Il Sung in October 1971, in his address to the Democratic Women’s Union of North Korea, “is to revolutionize and working-classize all the women.”
Kim hoisted the torch blazed by glorious female comrades such as Alexandra Kollontai (the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Bolshevik Revolution), Bella Dodd, Rosa Luxemburg, Ethel Rosenberg, Elizabeth Bentley, Lillian Hellman, Betty Freidan, Kate Millett, Angela Davis, and a bevy of true believers. Friedan and Millett were pioneers of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Millett, author of Sexual Politics, her dissertation at the ideological insane asylum known as Columbia University, became a cultural juggernaut when published in 1969. Time magazine hailed Kate as “the Karl Marx of the Women’s Movement.”
They were marchers for the revolution. And this past weekend, their ideological sisters lent their support to the Women’s March on Washington, an event that sources like CNN gave maximum publicity — a level of attention that absolutely will not be granted to this week’s March for Life in Washington, where the goal will be to preserve life.
A list of the sponsors for the Women’s March is illuminating. The two lead organizations, highlighted as the March’s “premier partners,” were Planned Parenthood — America’s preeminent abortion factory — and the Natural Resources Defense Council. As for the latter, if it confuses you why a group of climate comrades would march in lockstep with women whose highest priority is abortion, then you don’t understand the American left. Go to the website of the Women’s March, where “environmental justice” is featured among the leading “Unity Principles,” right up there with “reproductive rights” (read: abortion) and “worker’s rights” and “LGBTQIA rights” [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer, Intersex, Asexual].
But that was just the start. Arm in arm with the sisters at the Women’s March were two touted “Social Justice Partners,” namely: Emily’s List and NARAL. For these girls, too, “women’s rights” means one thing: abortion. Abortion, abortion, abortion. The holy sacrament in the feminist church.
The next major level of sponsors for the Women’s March was an eclectic cabal of fellow travelers and usual suspects: the ACLU, MoveOn.org, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, and SEIU, the worst of the government unions.
And then there was a longer list of March “partners,” a Who’s Who of the left: AFSCME, the toxic National Education Association, the National Organization for Women, National Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Occupy Wall Street, the NAACP, the Council on American Islamic Relations, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Watch, People for the American Way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Sierra Club, the National Urban League, the YWCA, the Center for American Progress, Code Pink, and a litany of Religious Left dupes such as the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, the Unitarian Universality Association, and the heretical Catholics for Free Choice.
And there was a wider panoply of perversity: novel organizations like Free the Nipple, Got a Girl Crush, Pussy Hat Project, and the Georgetown University College Democrats.
But alas, most enlightening was another curious collective of sponsors for the Women’s March, one that brings me full circle to the start of this article. The Communists and Socialists came out: Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Yes, Communist Party USA was a proud sponsor of the Women’s March on Washington, and the ladies were evidently proud to have them.
Ain’t nothing too left-wing, apparently, for the Women’s Marchers.
Among the Bolshevik element, consider some of the high-profile individuals who lent their names. Listed first among honorary co-chairs at the March website was none other than the delightful Angela Davis, where the glowing, lengthy bio somehow avoided mentioning even one word of Ms. Davis’s most notable bona fides: Davis has long been, of course, one of America’s most infamous Marxist-Leninists. Comrade Angela was so high-ranking that she not only met with the worst Communist despots in the Soviet Bloc, but actually twice ran on Communist Party USA’s presidential ticket. The celebrated recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, much appreciated by the Kremlin for her advocacy of the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, ran as vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket, alongside longtime CPUSA party secretary and hack Gus Hall. (As I noted in a recent piece for The American Spectator, among those who voted for the Hall-Davis Communist Party presidential ticket was none other than John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director.)
Davis was one of many tragic academic byproducts of Herbert Marcuse, the leading Frankfurt School cultural Marxist. Marcuse was guru to the 1960s New Left. Davis is arguably Marcuse’s most long-lasting success. He took her under his wing at Brandeis University in the early 1960s. In 1965, she honored her professor by retracing his steps to the University of Frankfurt. He sent her to West Germany to study at his old haunt, the hideous “Institute for Social Research.” She returned in 1967, coming back to America to continue studies with Marcuse as her doctoral adviser. The blooming Bolshevik formally joined Communist Party USA the next year.
Like any good Communist, Davis’s road to the revolution included breaking a few eggs along the way. She was soon pursued on charges of kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy for her suspected role in the August 1970 murder of a prison guard. Like Weather Underground terrorists and Obama buddies Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, she landed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. And like Ayers and Dohrn, she escaped jail-time (“guilty as hell, free as a bird!” Ayers boasted), and then spread her wings in academia.
Today, like her late mentor, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis is (naturally) a professor. She lists among her expertise the field of “critical theory,” the formal academic front-name for cultural Marxism. She holds forth on “LGBTQIA” issues to the wide-eyed freshmen whose duped parents hand over their children and lifetime savings to the universities to indoctrinate them.
One might think that today’s left would shy away from figures like Davis. But again, anyone who thinks that doesn’t know the left. The likes of Angela Davis are not embarrassments to today’s left; they are heroes. In June 2016, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum feted Davis with its 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”
Among Angela Davis’s firsts, of course, was to be the first female comrade to run on a Communist presidential ticket.
And this past weekend, Davis was listed literally first among the female comrades who were the poster-girls to the Women’s March on Washington. She and her cronies at Communist Party USA and the Democratic Socialists of America must have gotten quite a kick at the legions of oblivious ladies and splendid dupes who joined them in solidarity last weekend — all marching for “women’s rights,” of course. Forward!
Barack Obama’s Fundamental Transformation
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in Columbia, Missouri on October 30, 2008, on the cusp of his historic presidential election.
It was a stunning statement, boldly revolutionary, surpassed only by the response of those in attendance, who, rather than pausing to reflect upon such an audacious assertion, wildly applauded. To be sure, these Obama enthusiasts would have ecstatically cheered anything he said at that moment. There was a full-fledged Obama personality cult in motion at that time. He could’ve promised a box of “Lucky Charms” cereal in every home and gotten a giddy reaction. Obama himself admitted to serving as a kind of “blank screen” upon which Americans desiring some warm and fuzzy “hope and change” could project whatever they wanted.
But even then, the words “fundamentally transform” should have alarmed everyone. We Americans generally don’t do fundamental transformation. We make changes, yes, small and large, but who among us — other than the most radical revolutionaries — actually want to fundamentally transform the nation? Many people think that America has many problems, but those can be addressed without a fundamental transformation. Ask professors who teach history or political ideologies (as I have for two decades) and we will tell you that totalitarianism is the ideology that fundamentally transforms. Indeed, the textbook definition of totalitarianism, which I’ve scribbled on the chalkboard every fall and spring semester since 1997, is to seek to fundamentally transform — specifically, to fundamentally transform human nature via some form of political-ideological-cultural upheaval.
So, that being the case, I winced when Barack Obama said that, and then felt sick to the stomach when I watched people blissfully and blindly applaud without question or objection.
But now here we are, at the end of Obama’s presidency, a two-term one, and the question begs to be pondered: Did Barack Obama fundamentally transform the United States of America, as he promised?
The answer is absolutely yes.
That fundamental transformation, however, has not happened in areas where many might have hoped (or feared) in 2008. It has not been a fundamental shift in the attitudes of the vast majority regarding the role of government, taxation, regulations, economics, education, or even healthcare, where Obama had his signature legislative achievement. It hasn’t happened in foreign policy, though Obama has made a seriously detrimental impact in regions from Eastern Europe to the Middle East.
The reality is that the true fundamental transformation has been in the realm of culture, notably in matters of sexual orientation, gender, marriage, and family. The shift there has been unprecedented and far beyond anyone’s imagination eight years ago. Looking back, that was where Obama’s heart was, and that was where his deepest impact will be felt. Changes there, more than anywhere, seem irreversible by anything other than the miraculous, than anything short of a religious revival or dramatic shift in spiritual-moral thinking.
Obama’s cultural revolution on the sexual-gender-family front is all around us. We see it in the culture of fear and intimidation by the forces of “diversity” and “tolerance” who viciously seek to denounce, dehumanize, demonize, and destroy anyone who disagrees with their brazen newfound conceptions of marriage and family, even as our position (not theirs) has been the prevailing position of 99.99 percent-plus of human beings who have bestrode the earth since the dawn of humanity. Instead, in the Obama era, we are the ones portrayed as the outliers, as abnormal, as extremists, as “haters.” If you dissent from this new vociferous breed of human-nature re-definers, they sue you, they jail you, they smear you, they boycott you, they harass you, they ruin you — and they do so (with no sense of their hypocrisy) in the name of “tolerance” and “diversity.” Whether you’re a Baptist grandma who bakes cakes, or a Catholic photographer who takes wedding photos, or a Mormon florist who arranges flowers, they refuse your appeals to your conscience; they steamroll you. Changes by Obama and his allies here have constituted a major attack on religious liberty, where two-century-old First Amendment guarantees have been torched by modern culture warriors discerning heretofore unknown higher rights like “marriage equality” and co-ed toilets.
That is a fundamental transformation of a culture and a nation that did not exist prior to Barack Obama’s ascent.
The manifestations of this are so ubiquitous that laying them out here isn’t necessary, but I’d like to offer just a handful of brief illustrations and images:
The first was the Newsweek cover from May 2012 showing Barack Obama with a rainbow halo over his head above the words, “The First Gay President.” This was in response to Obama coming out for same-sex “marriage,” which for five years he had claimed to oppose. This public shift occurred as Obama was ramping up his reelection campaign, just as Hillary Clinton would do later that year when she announced her 2016 campaign. After that announcement, Obama went wild with an aggressive agenda of fundamental transformation on the sexual-gender-family front, one that picked up speed, depth, and arrogance throughout his second term.
The second is another image, more profound than the Newsweek creation/coronation because it was real. It was from June 2015, when the Obama White House, the nation’s first house, was lit up in the colors of the “LGBTQ” rainbow [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (and/or questioning) individuals/identities] on the day of the Obergefell decision, when a Catholic Supreme Court justice, Anthony Kennedy, led the liberal bloc of the court in redefining marriage and imposing this non-existent “Constitutional right” on all fifty states. If ever there was a picture of Obama’s fundamental transformation of America, that was it.
Third was the bathroom fiat, when according to Barack Obama’s word, all public schools were ordered to revolutionize their restrooms and locker-rooms to make them available to teenage boys who want to be called girls (among other gender novelties). It is hard to conceive a more surreal example of executive overreach. Truly, George Washington is rolling over in his grave.
Fourth is an ironic moment of Obama’s own doing, one that got virtually no press coverage. It occurred at a townhall meeting in London last April, where Obama was scolded by a young man for not doing enough to “recognize non-binary people” such as himself. This young man wanted the British government to “respect pronouns” — using not words like “he” or “she” but rather “hir” or “ze” — in addition to “commit to gender-neutral toilets.” “I really, really wish that yourself and [British Prime Minister] David Cameron would take us seriously as transgender people,” pushed the student.
“. . . And perhaps you could elucidate as to what you can do to go beyond what has been accepted as the LGBTQ rights movement, in including people who fit outside the social norms.”
It was almost hilarious to observe Barack Obama, of all people, reprimanded for inadequacies in this area, which brings me to my final example.
That London incident might have prompted a remarkable action by the Obama White House a few weeks later, which also got virtually no news coverage: The White House press office released two extraordinary fact sheets detailing Obama’s vast efforts to promote “LGBT” rights at home and abroad. Not only was it telling that the White House would assemble such a list, and tout it, but the sheer length of the list is striking to behold. It is hard to find any similar roster of such dramatic changes by the Obama White House in any policy area. The list runs page after page.
In short, what we see here is the true Barack Obama legacy, the genuine fundamental transformation. It has occurred not in economics, government, or foreign policy, but in culture. When we look back at Barack Obama’s eight years, we should visualize not Obamacare or something in foreign policy but the White House illuminated in rainbow colors on June 26, 2015, or a rainbow-haloed Obama coronated as the “first gay president.”
George W. Bush: Deadlier Than Stalin? Our Profound Ignorance of the Crimes of Communism
“Many Millennials Think Bush Killed More Than Stalin.” Such was the surreal subject head sitting in my email box one morning. “Holy @#$%!” wrote a colleague in response. “This is mind-boggling. . . . This is scary, scary, scary.”
It sure is. It also isn’t surprising. Such profound, disturbing ignorance is a direct result of what Americans have learned about Communism in our horrid system of education, from high schools to colleges. The failure is massive.
According to a stunning new report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, one-third of Millennials (32 percent) “believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.” And it isn’t just those silly Millennials that we like to view as clueless. One in four Americans generally (26 percent) believe more people were killed under Bush than Stalin.
That is breathtaking. Truly incredible.
That rather sickening finding was just one by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has the noble objective of trying to correct America’s ignoble ignorance of the crimes of Communism.
Among the basic facts that every American should know: At least 100 million people have died under Communist governments. That ghastly number, tabulated two decades ago by The Black Book of Communism, the seminal work on the subject by Harvard University Press, is actually conservative. For instance, the Black Book recorded merely 20 million dead in the Soviet Union. Alexander Yakovlev, one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s top aides, was given the official task of trying to quantify the victims. In a 2002 book published by Yale University Press, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Yakovlev estimated that Stalin alone “annihilated . . . sixty to seventy million people” — figures consistent with those estimated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others. Similar levels of bloodshed were wrought by China’s Mao Tse-tung, who was responsible for the deaths of 65 million, according to the Black Book, and possibly more than 70 million, according to more recent biographical studies. And then there were the killing fields of North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and more. Really, the death generated by Communist governments over the last 100 years is likely closer to 140 million.
For a sense of proportion, Hitler’s mad genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the mentally disabled, the elderly, the handicapped, and others he deemed “misfits,” was approximately 10 million (six million of them Jews). The combined dead from World Wars I and II — the most destructive conflicts in human history — was 50-60 million. Communism’s body count surpasses both world wars combined and probably doubled.
And yet, Americans’ knowledge of this vast sea of destruction is atrocious, which brings me back to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
The foundation is seeking to document this ignorance on a regular basis via its first “Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Towards Socialism.” According to the report, the vast majority of Americans (75 percent) underestimate the number of people killed by Communist regimes, and a strong majority (68 percent) believe that Hitler killed more people than Stalin.
Death tallies aside, not only do they not see Stalin for the killer he was, but their views on Communism are not terribly negative.
Just 37 percent of Millennials had a “very unfavorable” view of Communism. One quarter (25 percent) of Millennials have a “favorable” view of Vladimir Lenin, namesake of Marxism-Leninism, the vicious architect and godfather of the Bolshevik totalitarian state. And 42 percent of Millennials are flatly “unfamiliar” with Mao Tse-tung.
It gets worse: 64 percent of Americans agree with Karl Marx’s classic credo that underpins Communist philosophy: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Thus, it’s not surprising that close to half (45 percent) of Americans aged 16 to 20 (first-time voters in this presidential election) said they would vote for a socialist, and 21 percent would vote for a Communist. Of course, that’s reflected in what happened in 2016, as Bernie Sanders, a lifelong self-professed “socialist,” received 13 million votes in the Democratic primary. To give you a sense of that number’s significance, Donald Trump got 14 million votes in the Republican primary, and that was a record for a Republican primary.
This is not a failure to teach history; it is a failure to teach Communist and socialist history. We haven’t neglected to teach that Nazism was evil, that Hitler was a mass-murderer, that fascism is bad. We long ago failed when it came to Communism, Marxism-Leninism, Bolshevism, the USSR, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Pol Pot, North Korea’s crazy Kims, and on and on.
Importantly, that failure is often the result of ideological biases, especially among leftist teachers and professors. Liberals and progressives do not suffer the same historical negligence when it comes to teaching the crimes of fascism and Nazism. They do a bang-up job with Hitler’s crimes, but not Stalin’s.
And the result is seen in this study. You reap what you sow.
More death under George W. Bush than Joseph Stalin? Good grief, comrade.
Remembering Two Christian College Presidents—Charles MacKenzie and Michael Scanlan
The story of Christian higher education in America is a sad saga. Once upon a time, the nation’s premier universities were run by religious people or founded with religious missions, or at least were respectful of the Christian faith. That sharp reversal has been a painful long march, with a marked turn early in the 20th century. I’m often reminded of the sardonic words of Thomas Merton, who at radical Columbia University in the 1930s became a Communist. He ultimately escaped the god that failed, instead becoming a Trappist monk. Columbia had become a toxic environment where Dewey-ism rather than Christianity was the prevailing zeitgeist. Merton wrote:
“Poor Columbia! It was founded by sincere [Christians] as a college predominantly religious. The only thing that remains of that is the university motto: In lumine tuo videbimus lumen — one of the deepest and most beautiful lines of the psalms. ‘In Thy light, we shall see light.’ It is, precisely, about grace. It is a line that might serve as the foundation stone of all Christian and Scholastic learning, and which simply has nothing whatever to do with the standards of education at modern Columbia. It might profitably be changed to: In lumine Randall videbimus Dewey.”
That last sentence was a reference to John Dewey and to John Herman Randall, another influential Columbia philosophy professor. For Merton, he found God in spite of Columbia. And that was the 1930s. Merton and Randall and even Dewey would be stunned by the secular/leftward lunge of our universities in just a few generations. By the 1970s and 1980s, even colleges that were explicitly Christian by charter and mission enthusiastically separated from those moorings, led by administrators and faculty who fled the faith.
And yet, amid all the chaos, a few jewels held firm to the foundation, keeping the faith and holding true to or reverting to their missions. Two colleges that did just that, preserving and actually heightening their commitment, are Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, one Roman Catholic and one Protestant. The period when the two institutions successfully struggled to retain their commitments came in the 1970s and 1980s under the long-term leaderships of two particular presidents: Father Michael Scanlan and Dr. Charles MacKenzie.
My occasion for mentioning this now is a quite moving development: both Father Scanlan and Dr. MacKenzie were called to be with their Maker this January. Scanlan died on January 7 at the age of 85. MacKenzie died, on January 26, at age 92.
Michael Scanlan had stepped down as chancellor of Franciscan in 2011. He had been chancellor since 2000, and before that was president for 26 years. MacKenzie had been president of Grove City College from 1971 to 1991. He was the college’s (mere) fifth president.
In reaction to Scanlan’s death three weeks ago, the Catholic press was filled with glowing tributes. Tributes to MacKenzie likewise have now begun. Current Grove City College president Paul McNulty describes MacKenzie as a man of “courageous leadership” who had an “extraordinary impact” on the college, strengthening its “core values of faithfulness, excellence, community, stewardship, and independence. . . . He inspired us to serve God with energy and integrity.” Right up until his death, said McNulty, MacKenzie “continuously prayed for Grove City College and our distinct mission.”
Among the many remembrances of Scanlan and MacKenzie, I want to report an interesting but unseen ecumenical item related to their efforts — a joint effort. Faithful Catholics and Protestants alike will appreciate it, and it was first told to me by Scott Hahn, the famous Catholic convert and Franciscan University theology professor who, ironically, had been a student and then special assistant to President MacKenzie at Grove City College. Only Hahn could have observed what I’m about to relate.
During some very trying days when the two colleges were seeking to hold true to their Christian missions, Hahn several times overheard phone calls between MacKenzie and Scanlan, as the two men alternately advised and encouraged one another. Somewhat akin to the excellent ecumenical work of the late Chuck Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus, here were Protestants and Catholics working together, united by a common foe: secular relativism, in this case in the academy.
Those phone calls, said Hahn, an eyewitness, were very important to MacKenzie. Hahn observed this first-hand in the president’s office at Grove City College. Hahn later heard more about the calls from Father Scanlan. When I met Scanlan, he confirmed the relationship with MacKenzie.
Back in 2011, when I heard the news of Scanlan’s retirement, I emailed MacKenzie to inquire about their relationship. He was eager to go on-the-record. “During my twenty years at Grove City, Father Scanlan and I had several conversations or communications,” MacKenzie confirmed to me.
“He and I were on the same wavelength as we sought to lead our schools back to the roots of the Christian faith. We were very careful what we said to each other, but I personally benefitted from his encouragement.”
MacKenzie hastened to add that he wasn’t free to share everything from their conversations. That isn’t a surprise. Recounting the faculty battles alone would be enough for a book. MacKenzie simply summed up by emphasizing that he and Scanlan “were on the same side on many of the issues.” He called Scanlan a “man of courage and faith, and in that regard, he was a blessing to me. . . . I thank God for him.”
And so do the folks at Franciscan University, which, today, like Grove City College, is a shining light amid the darkness of higher education. Both Scanlan and MacKenzie ensured that those lights were not extinguished under a bushel of secular relativism, as has happened at countless erstwhile Christian colleges. They wanted that light to shine before men, and they sought to do so cooperatively, not as antagonists from opposing Catholic and Protestant trenches, but as allies and partners working together in a shared vision.
It’s a tale of two Christian colleges that both Catholics and Protestants alike can learn from and emulate. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Death by Fidel
Fidel Castro is dead. To say those words is so strange. I’ve never known a moment when he wasn’t alive.
Castro came to power seven years before I was born, and I’m almost 50. I’ve been lecturing on the man every fall semester for 20 years, spending two or three weeks on him, his ideology, and the beautiful country he destroyed. It’s ironic that the day he died I finished two long chapters on him for a book manuscript, and a family friend (whose mother escaped Cuba) visiting for Thanksgiving just happened to ask how much longer I thought the 90-year-old despot might continue to live. The answer, it turned out, was a mere few hours more.
What to say in a few hundred words about a man like Fidel Castro at his death? Where to start? Where to end?
I think the answer is easy: The focus on Castro at his death must be just that: Castro and death. First, there’s the death he was responsible for since seizing Cuba in January 1959, and then, second, there are the incalculable millions more who would have died — not just in Cuba but in America and worldwide — had he gotten his way in October 1962.
So, for starters how many people were killed by Fidel and his Communist dystopia?
Unfortunately, no one truly knows, akin to how no one knows how many poor souls he tossed into his jails, from political dissidents to priests to homosexuals. Fidel’s prison state has never permitted human-rights observers, reminiscent of how he never permitted the elections he repeatedly promised in the 1950s. That said, many sources have tried to pin down numbers and have generated some common estimates:
The Black Book of Communism, the seminal Harvard University Press work, which specialized in trying to get accurate data on the enormous volume of deaths produced by Communist tyrants, states that in the 1960s alone, when Fidel and his brother Raul (Cuba’s current leader) established their complete control, with the help of their murdering buddy Che Guevara, an estimated 30,000 people were arrested in Cuba for political reasons and 7,000 to 10,000 were believed to have been executed. Even then, that was merely the start.
From the late 1950s to the late 1990s, it’s estimated that Castro killed between 15,000 to 18,000 people, whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.
That is a lot of people for a small island. And it isn’t all.
Cuba is a surreal island of no boats, where boats are banned — because people with boats flee. Thus, untold numbers of citizens have attempted the treacherous nearly 100-mile swim to Florida in shark-infested waters. An estimated 100,000 have risked the journey. Of those, perhaps as many as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As they bob for breath, the Castro government sends military helicopters to drop large bags of sand on them from high above.
Yes, actually drop sandbags on them.
So, Fidel Castro is responsible for a lot of death.
But here, too, these numbers do not capture the level of Fidel’s brutal madness. Consider the actual millions he badly wanted to kill, especially here in America.
If Fidel Castro had his way in October 1962, the United States would have been leveled by atomic bombs and so would little Cuba, which would’ve ceased to exist. The fact is that Fidel recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that Cuba and the USSR together launch an all-out nuclear attack upon the United States, literally igniting Armageddon.
This is no secret. Castro admitted it. In an open forum discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis 30 years later, Castro told Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense: “Bob, I did recommend they [the nuclear missiles] were to be used.”
In total, said McNamara, there were 162 Soviet missiles on the island. The firing of those missiles alone would have led to (according to McNamara) at least 80 million dead Americans, which would have been half the population, plus added tens of millions of casualties.
That, however, is a conservative estimate, given that 162 missiles was far from the sum total that would have been subsequently launched. The United States in turn would have launched on Cuba, and also on the USSR. President Kennedy made that commitment clear in his nationally televised speech on October 22, 1962:
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
In response, of course, the Soviets would have automatically launched on America from Soviet soil. Even then, the fireworks would just be starting: Under the terms of their NATO and Warsaw Pact charters, the territories of Western and Eastern Europe would also erupt.
Once the smoke cleared, hundreds of millions to possibly over a billion people could have perished, with Western civilization in its death throes. If Fidel Castro had gotten his way, he would have precipitated the greatest slaughter in human history. (Che Guevara also wanted to launch the nukes.)
The Soviets were horrified. Their ambassador to Cuba, Alexander Alekseyev, was so stunned at what Castro told him that he stood frozen, speechless, crushed. Without waiting for an answer from the numb ambassador, Castro started writing his feelings on paper, which Alekseyev saw as a kind of “last testament, a farewell.”
Fidel was ready to go — go up in a giant mushroom cloud for Marxism. As McNamara learned, this was Fidel’s big chance to die as a “martyr” for Marxism-Leninism. He was ready to “pull the temple down on his head.”
A shocked Nikita Khrushchev realized he was dealing with madmen. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, in his three-volume biography of his father, said that the Soviet general secretary huddled with top officials in the “code room” of the Foreign Ministry late on a Sunday night and repeatedly ordered, “Remove them, and as quickly as possible.”
Khrushchev urged Andrei Gromyko to instantly get in touch with Washington in order “to save the world from those pushing us toward war.”
As for Fidel, he was “furious” with Khrushchev. “Castro was mortally offended,” recorded Sergei. “He had not managed to engage in a fight with the Americans. He had made up his mind to die a hero, and to have it end that way.” He had been ready to “die beautifully,” as one Soviet official put it. Denied his glorious opportunity, he now considered Khrushchev “a traitor.”
Thankfully, the world averted nuclear war, through the leadership of Khrushchev and Kennedy, and no thanks to bloodthirsty lunatics like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who were ready to blow up the world in the name of their Marxist-Leninist nightmare.
This, alas, was Fidel Castro. And for the record (and not surprisingly), not a word of it is found in the awful press release by President Barack Obama acknowledging Castro’s death, a statement that Marco Rubio rightly called “pathetic,” with “no mention of [the] thousands he killed and imprisoned.”
Pathetic, indeed. Fidel Castro is dead. And Fidel Castro was death.
Hillary’s Faith: In God and Roe She Trusts
“Secretary Clinton, I want to explore how far you believe the right to abortion goes,” asked Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace, moderator for the third and final presidential debate.
“You have been quoted as saying that the fetus has no constitutional rights. You also voted against a ban on late-term, partial-birth abortions. Why?”
Mrs. Clinton’s answer was precisely what we’ve come to expect. She bristled, her voice turning sharp, her tone unyielding: “Because Roe v. Wade very clearly sets out that there can be regulations on abortion so long as the life and the health of the mother are taken into account. . . .” It was her canned answer, one I’ve heard countless times in my years writing about her.
Donald Trump’s retort was a good one — one of his best:
“Well, I think it’s terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK, but it’s not OK with me.”
With that, Hillary grew angry, denouncing Trump’s “scare rhetoric.” I wasn’t surprised. If you want to get under Hillary’s skin, challenge her on abortion, what she considers a sacred “right,” the hill of Roe that Hillary would die on.
She continued with this telling line: “The government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith.”
With that word, “faith,” I envisioned my email box filling up. That’s because I have the unenviable position of being a go-to guy on questions involving the faith of Hillary Clinton — fitting punishment for daring to write a book on the faith of Hillary Clinton a decade ago. Ever since, I’ve been peppered with questions from all sides of the political and spiritual spectrum. Among them, the one I get the most from conservatives goes something like this: How can you call Hillary Clinton a “sincere, lifelong Christian” (as I have) when she is so fanatical on abortion?
The question frequently moves beyond abortion to more general statements about Hillary Clinton’s honesty and character.
As one conservative colleague put it in an email to me this week, if Hillary is such a committed Christian, where is her faith in action — especially in regard to character and this abortion thing?
It’s a valid objection from conservative Christians. It’s not, however, an objection that I hear from liberal Christians. And indeed, that dichotomy gets to the crux of the matter, and it’s one that conservative Christians always struggle to grasp.
Here’s the reality: The fact is that Hillary Clinton, since childhood, has been a committed Methodist, which is a liberal denomination, the tenets of which she interprets very selectively — much like how Nancy Pelosi or Tim Kaine selectively interpret Catholicism. Much like how a Barack Obama selectively invokes the “Golden Rule” as (amazingly) a rationale to redefine marriage, obviously and unequivocally violating the multi-millennial natural-traditional-Biblical standard of marriage as being between a man and a woman. Look at Jimmy Carter, the “born-again” president, invoking his garbled understanding of the Scriptures in his support of redefining marriage. Look at Jim Wallis and the old Sojourners gang and their myriad of radically left-wing positions.
Ask any of these liberal Christians if they believe they are acting un-Biblically, or in an un-Christian or ungodly way. They will vehemently protest. They are convinced — or have convinced themselves — that they are doing the right thing. They are Religious Left Christians. And, yes, certain positions they take, especially to conservative Christians, can be downright maddening.
That brings me back to Hillary Clinton. She is a classic Religious Left Christian. In her mind, her position on abortion, even partial-birth position, is a moral one. I have no doubt that Hillary feels that someday she’ll be able to stand before her Savior and make the case that she did what she thought was right because she was seeking to save women’s lives via legal abortion — yep, irrespective of the 60 million unborn victims of Roe v. Wade.
And Hillary is far from alone in that belief among the Religious Left. Do a Google search on the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. It’s an entire organization of left-wing believers who seem to think that the Creator would approve of Roe v. Wade. Among the members are the Episcopal Church, Obama’s United Church of Christ, Presbyterian Church USA, and other mainline groups. Most significant to the Hillary discussion, Hillary’s United Methodist Church was a pivotal, founding member (it finally withdrew only last April). The UMC’s liberalism on abortion is a key reason that Hillary glows about being “so comfortable” as a member.
So, think about it, conservative Christians: How can you insist to Hillary that she’s not being a Christian in supporting legal abortion when all of these mainline Christian groups, including her own, were supporting legal abortion?
Do I agree with these groups? No, I think they’re off their rockers, and will have much to answer for. But if you’re looking to reconcile Hillary’s thinking, well, you’re not thinking about it enough. Peer beyond your conservative Christian choir and gaze into the perverse ideological abyss of the Religious Left and you’ll discern some answers, infuriating as they are.
Thus, returning to Hillary’s answer on partial-birth abortion in the third and final presidential debate: “The government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith.”
Conservative Christians who believe that statement is inherently contradictory need to realize that to Hillary Clinton it is not. She believes she can justify her abortion position in accordance with her faith.
To borrow from Donald Trump, Hillary can say that that’s OK, but it’s not OK with me. Nonetheless, to Hillary, it’s OK.
How Mother Teresa Challenged Hillary Clinton on Abortion
Two very different women on the minds of Christians right now are Mother Teresa, with her canonization on Sept. 4, and Hillary Clinton, with her name on the presidential ballot in 2016. Hillary stands as the most influential woman in America. Someone who might have foreseen such prominence for Hillary was Mother Teresa. Perhaps that’s why the bold nun from Kolkata, India, persistently challenged the then-first lady’s push to make abortion more widely available.
Let’s back up to where it all began.
Clinton’s arrival upon the national scene became reality when her husband was inaugurated president in January 1993. That same year, in August, both Clintons would greet Pope John Paul II, who came to America for World Youth Day in Denver. John Paul II spoke to both Clintons on the imperative of valuing the life of the unborn child.
It didn’t seem to make much of an impact.
The new first lady was already starting her efforts to revolutionize the health-care industry — which, people forget, she was doing very aggressively that first year, only to back off as her efforts hurt her husband politically.
She said in an October 1993 televised forum discussing her new national healthcare plan that abortion would be made “widely available.” This prompted anxieties over the prospect of taxpayer-funded abortion, sparking the Coates Amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, which sought to strip abortion funding from the plan. Mrs. Clinton’s intentions sent elected pro-life Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey into such anger that Casey considered a run for the presidency to dislodge the Clintons.
Clinton’s words also ignited fears over the availability of the abortion pill, RU-486, under her plan. One of her husband’s first acts in office was to push the pill to market through an expedited FDA approval process that pro-lifers insisted was too quick for the safety of the women who would take the pill.
Not at all ignorant of these advances by the Clintons was a nun named Mother Teresa, who in February 1994 made her own visit to America, which included a meeting with the Clintons.
The occasion was the annual National Prayer Breakfast, a huge ecumenical gathering in Washington. As president, Bill Clinton was a high-profile attendee, with Hillary accompanying him. That year, on Feb. 3, 1994, the keynoter was a very special guest, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and saintly figure who had come all the way from the most impoverished area of the planet, the slums of Kolkata.
According to Kathryn Spink’s Mother Teresa, An Authorized Biography, the reluctant nun was invited by President Clinton himself.
Held at the Washington Hilton, nearly 3,000 people packed the huge room. Near the dais were the president and first lady, along with the vice president and his wife, and a select few VIPs, including Supreme Court justices and the highest-ranking members of Congress.
Unlike in typical years, where the keynoter sits among the assembled and waits for others to finish before his or her turn, Mother Teresa emerged from a curtain behind the platform only when she was called and then slowly hunched her way to the microphone. Hillary said in her memoir, Living History, she was struck by how tiny she was, wearing only socks and sandals in the bitter cold.
The title of the talk was “Whatever You Did Unto One of the Least, You Did Unto Me.” She began by talking about Jesus and John the Baptist in their wombs, about their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, and how the “unborn child” in the womb of Elizabeth — John the Baptist — leapt for joy as he felt the presence of Christ in the room when Mary entered to speak to Elizabeth.
Hillary might have seen what was coming.
She next spoke of love, of selfishness, of a lack of love for the unborn — and a lack of want of the unborn because of one’s selfishness. Jesus, said the sister, who brought joy while still in the womb of Mary, had died on the cross “because that is what it took for him to do good to us — to save us from our selfishness in sin.”
Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter and a pro-life Catholic, was there. She says that by this point in the talk some attendees began shifting in their seats, as a lot of what the lady from Kolkata had to say was striking too close to home.
Then the sister said something that made everyone very uncomfortable:
“But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.’ So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, the neglect of receiving Jesus.”
Here, Noonan described a “cool deep silence” that enveloped the room, but only for a brief moment, and then applause started on the right side of the room and then spread throughout the crowd, as people began clapping and standing; the ballroom was swept up in nonstop applause, which Noonan says lasted five to six minutes.
Yet some did not clap at all. Hillary Clinton did not, and neither did her husband; nor did Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore. They sat there, in the glare of the hot lights, all eyes in the crowd fixed upon them, as they tried not to move or be noticed, conspicuous in their lack of response, clearly uncomfortable as the applause raged on.
The tiny, weak, aged lady was only warming up. She had seen and experienced real suffering and couldn’t care less about making momentarily uncomfortable a crowd of a few thousand financially comfortable people who had never known real material deprivation and whose only crisis each morning was traffic or a long line at Starbucks.
She returned to that selfishness point:
“By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems. [Abortion is] really a war against the child, and I hate the killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? . . . Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another, but to use violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”
The little nun was doing what pro-choicers find unacceptable and might have booed out of the room if not for her moral authority. She kept describing abortion as “killing.”
She concluded by asking for prayers for her ministry, by asking for the blessing of God’s love and by telling the 3,000 that she would pray for them and their families: “God bless you all.” She then parted as she came, through the curtain behind the platform.
Throughout the talk’s high points on abortion — the raw nerve — the Clintons and Gores remained in stone silence. One attendee, a pro-life Catholic and high-level appointee in the Reagan administration, later told me:
“It was an outrage, an abomination, very rude. Mrs. Clinton in particular just sat there. I will never forget that moment. It told me all I needed to know about her.”
To his credit, Bill Clinton realized that his behavior and that of his wife and the others was indeed rude. According to Spink, he apologized to Mother Teresa after the speech.
Hillary responded later that day — sort of. In commenting on Mother Teresa’s remarks, she must have briefly given the nun hope that she, too, would speak on behalf of the unborn when she began, “I have always believed that Christ wanted us to be joyous, to look at the face of creation and to know that there was more joy than any of us could imagine.”
As the “Champion of Calcutta” held her breath, however, she was disappointed, as Mrs. Clinton did what she has long done — applied the thought very selectively, restricted it solely to her understanding of economics, not unborn life, as she followed:
“Or as Mother Teresa told us this morning, to see the joy on the face of a homeless beggar, who is picked up off the street and brought in to die, says joyously, ‘Thank you.’”
Hillary’s remarks were an extraordinary example of psychological-ideological compartmentalization, a surreal mastery of ignoring the obvious, of hearing only what one wants to hear.
Mother Teresa had come to give a major moral statement on abortion and did so in a way that shocked the entire crowd. And then Clinton flatly ignored the entire message in her follow-up remarks, carefully lifting a smaller item from the nun’s address, one with which she agreed, then placed it fully out of its context and used it for an entirely separate political purpose with which she was politically satisfied. Her reaction was inexpressibly strange, but no surprise.
And it was not like Clinton did not get the point.
“She [Mother Teresa] had just delivered a speech against abortion,” explained Clinton in assessing the keynote address in her memoirs, almost 10 years later. In the minutes after the talk, said Hillary, the nun persisted, taking the abortion issue directly to Hillary’s face: “[She] wanted to talk to me,” said the first lady. “Mother Teresa was unerringly direct. She disagreed with my views on a woman’s right to choose and told me so.”
In other words, there was no mistaking the message that day, nor that Hillary got it unerringly.
On the other hand, Hillary later, perhaps upon further reflection with the help of an aide, identified a crucial component of the speech that she did not need to take out of context to find common ground: Mother Teresa had said:
“Please don’t kill the child. I want the child. Give me the child. I’m willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.”
Echoing the Malcolm Muggeridge phrase that introduced her to the West, Mother Teresa said, “I will tell you something beautiful. We are fighting abortion by adoption.”
Now that was something that Hillary could applaud. Babies outside the womb, by her reckoning, merit her and society’s protection.
In the course of one of their subsequent conversations, Clinton made clear to Mother Teresa that while she supported legalized abortion, she also wanted to see more adoptions, presumably as an alternative. The nun told the first lady she had placed more than 3,000 orphaned babies into adoptive homes in India. Hillary said she would like to visit the orphanage in New Delhi. A year later, she and daughter Chelsea did just that, visiting one of the Missionary of Charity homes in New Delhi, a facility that, said Hillary, “would not have passed inspection in the U.S.” because there were too many cribs crowded together.
Mother Teresa informed the first lady of her goal of establishing a home in Washington, where mothers could take care of their babies until they found adoptive or foster homes. In turn, Hillary went to bat for her, rounding up pro bono lawyers to do legal work, fighting through the bureaucracy of the District of Columbia and doing what she could to lend a hand to create a home for infant children near Chevy Chase Circle, just over the Washington, D.C., line. She telephoned community leaders and pastors from nearby Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, calling them to the White House to see where and how they could help. Moving the bureaucracy, said Hillary, turned out to be harder than she had imagined.
Regardless, Hillary Clinton apparently helped quite a bit.
Mother Teresa was equally relentless on her end. When she felt the project was lagging, she sent a letter to the first lady, checking on the progress. “She sent emissaries to spur me on,” recalled Hillary. “She called me from Vietnam, she called me from India, always with the same message: When do I get my center for babies?”
On June 19, 1995, the shelter for children opened, the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children. This led to a photo op of Hillary and Mother Teresa clasping hands in the newly decorated nursery and smiling at one another. A reporter could not resist asking the uncomfortable question: Yes, conceded the first lady, of course they had discussed their “philosophical differences” over abortion.
Mother Teresa, ever the peacemaker, stepped in to underscore where the focus should be at that particular moment, namely, on where they agreed: “We want to save the children,” she said. The nun, slow and frail, held Hillary’s arm as they toured the facility, examining the freshly painted nursery and rows of bassinets awaiting infants.
This was not the end of the relationship, which Hillary has always looked back upon with fondness. In the short time she had left on earth, Mother Teresa continued to try to change Clinton’s view on abortion. According to Hillary, “she sent me dozens of notes and messages with the same gentle entreaty.” She dealt with the first lady with patience and kindness, but firm conviction: “Mother Teresa never lectured or scolded me; her admonitions were always loving and heartfelt,” wrote Hillary, adding that she had “the greatest respect for her opposition to abortion.” Mother Teresa saw in Hillary a potentially huge convert to the pro-life cause, and never gave up, but to no avail.
Two years after their tour through the foster home in Chevy Chase, on a Friday, Sept. 5, 1997, Mother Teresa’s heart beat its last. The funeral Mass was held at St. Thomas Church in Middleton Row, Kolkata. Hillary Clinton was there.
After the memorial service, Clinton unexpectedly found herself invited to a private meeting at the motherhouse, the headquarters of the order founded by Mother Teresa. As the nuns formed a circle around the coffin, where they stood in silent meditation, one of them, Sister Nirmala, mother’s successor, asked the first lady if she would offer a prayer. Later confessing to feeling inadequate to do so, Hillary hesitated and then bowed her head and thanked God for “the privilege” of having known this “tiny, forceful, saintly woman.”
It was a complex, intriguing, touching, but also frustrating relationship. What to make of all of this today?
Well, tragically, Hillary Clinton has become far more fanatical for “abortion rights” (and for redefining marriage and the ever-expanding “LGBTQ” agenda) — and at the expense of religious liberty — than Mother Teresa could have foreseen. Or maybe she did foresee it. Maybe the little nun saw it coming. Maybe she perceived that Hillary Clinton was poised to one day have an even greater impact. Perhaps something spoke to her. And perhaps a sign of her genuine saintliness was her vigorous attempt to reach out to Hillary Clinton and try to salvage, if not improve, the road ahead.
With her canonization, Catholics might look to Mother Teresa now for some formal intercession, as Mrs. Clinton’s trajectory increasingly foreshadows a dark future for the unborn and for religious liberty in America. *
Kengor Writes . . .
Paul Kengor
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist — Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Western Civ in the Crosshairs — and a Glimmer of Hope
Students at Indiana University-Bloomington recently went into panic mode at the sight of a Dominican friar, who they mistook for a Ku Klux Klan member. Funny? Yes, but also sad. It is a further sign of the state of our universities, and what is and isn’t being taught.
For starters, let’s get this on the blackboard: For a really long time, there have been religious guys in robes, flatly unmistakable in their appearance. This year, 2016 A.D. (Anno Domini, Latin for “In the Year of Our Lord”), just happens to mark the 800th anniversary of the Dominicans. The Dominicans, named for their founder, Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest and contemporary of another giant of the faith, Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscans, long pre-date the KKK. These “orders” preceded Luther’s Reformation by three centuries, and themselves were a vital reform in rekindling and sustaining the faith against some significant heresy.
(A related funny-but-sad story on the Franciscans: A Franciscan friar told me about an encounter he had on the New York subway. A young woman looked at him in his garb and smiled and said: “Okay, I get it — you’re a Jedi Knight, right?”)
The Dominicans far pre-date the American university. Not unrelated, our universities once taught what we commonly call “Western Civ,” or “Western Civilization,” where students learned the elemental facts of their Western world, and where contemporary campus oddities like religious figures were not alien to their mind’s eye. But such is not the zeitgeist of the modern university, where today’s typical student is enmeshed with a thoroughly secular worldview where a trinity of race, gender, and sexual orientation account for what is held sacred. They are carefully trained to be ever-vigilant for the slightest whiff of racism, sexism, and “homophobia” or (the latest rage) “transphobia.” Their “education” is such that an ancient religious order is utterly unrecognizable.
That brings me back to what happened at Indiana University-Bloomington.
The mysterious robed intruder shuffled his way on to campus in the dark of night. “U students be careful,” Tweeted one vigilant student, “there’s someone walking around in kkk gear with a whip.”
The “kkk gear” was the friar’s robe. The “whip” was presumably either his belt or his rosary, the latter an 800-year practice likewise started by Dominic.
Residential hall advisor Ethan Gill zapped an email to his peers, warning them of the ominous “threat” marching across the quad:
There has been a person reported walking around campus in a KKK outfit holding a whip. . . . Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight.
Later in the evening, a relieved Gill retracted his warning, but not before recounting the sense of horror unleashed by the unsuspecting friar:
Then my residents, terrified, come running to me, saying yeah the report must be true, they saw him and couldn’t believe there was a klans member with a whip. . . . (he explained) And I see this picture. It’s a priest. With a rosary.
In short, it’s no surprise that today’s college students would be dumbstruck at the image of a religious figure in a robe. Such is completely symptomatic of the life and learning of the cultural asylum we call the modern American university, where — in the name of secular liberalism, multiculturalism, diversity, and “tolerance” — a relentless battle has been waged upon Western civilization for decades. In fact, consider this irony: fittingly, mere days after this incident in Bloomington, students at Stanford University resoundingly rejected — by a margin of six to one — an effort to add a required course on Western Civ to the curriculum. The campus secularists can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that a dangerous Western Civ requirement will not cut into enrollment for courses like “Narrating Queer Drama“ at Stanford’s department of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
And here’s the height of the irony: If students at Stanford, and at Indiana University-Bloomington and elsewhere, would dare explore Western civilization, they might discover that their entire educational tradition owes quite a debt to these arcane men with robes and beads. The reality is that it was the monks, starting with the Benedictines (founded in the fifth century), who preserved crucial ancient texts and were the educators who established the model and laid the foundation for the universities. We arguably would not have the modern university without monks, certainly not how and when we did. The founder of the Benedictines was Benedict of Nursia (480-547 A.D.). He arrived in the world only a century after the birth of Augustine (354-430 A.D.) and the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.), which, among other things, affirmed the literal belief in the Trinity (no small thing).
Picking up with the Dominicans and their influence: Dominic died in 1221, only to be followed by Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) and the Scholastics. Aquinas himself was a Dominican. Also seizing the torch at the time were the likes of Bonaventure (1221-74) and the great writer Dante (1265-1321). They all not only fought the heresies of their day, from Gnosticism to Albigensianism, but they were the teachers of their day, holding forth in historic universities from Oxford to Paris.
Secularists need not approve of these things, but they ought not be embarrassingly (and even deliberately) ignorant of them.
Needless to say, college students will not learn any of this in their courses on “Transgender Studies“ or “Gay Autobiography.” The progressive professors running these courses are championing the thoughts of Harry Hay (the Marxist gay-rights pioneer) rather than Francesco Bernardone. And I assure you that to the legion of contemporary American progressives, “progress” is indeed a vigilant sophomore more attuned to suspecting a klansman than recognizing a friar.
In the ashes of the Judeo-Christian values and timeless absolutes they have set ablaze, our modern progressives in the academy have instead fashioned a molten calf of politically and culturally correct nostrums. They peddle false faiths full of contradiction and selective application, such as their “tolerance” and “diversity” heresies — carefully applied only to things they want to tolerate. It is tolerance and diversity for me but not for thee. They denounce the “bigots” who oppose transgender bathrooms while they resist the Christian teachings that have beautifully transformed and redeemed the lives of billions. And thus, when these late-adolescent products of contemporary academia look at a Dominican brother with confused fear, we shouldn’t be surprised. This is a direct extension of their “higher” education. This is what they and their parents have paid for at great financial and moral cost.
May I point to what has been a light in the darkness? Here at my college, Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, we not only respect Western civilization but teach it. It is the root of our five-course Humanities curriculum, which every student is required to fulfill—covering art, music, literature, history, and sacred ideas and texts — and one of the courses is even unashamedly titled, “Western Civilization.”
We are striving to maintain Western Civ, not kill it. How counter-culture is that these days? It is indeed. As our college president, Paul J. McNulty, observes, “We are the counter-culture at Grove City College.”
Yes, we are. In the 1960s, the campus “counter-culture” had decidedly different overtones than it does now, fifty years later. To be counter-culture in the twenty-first century means to fight to retain the best of the timeless Western Judeo-Christian values that got us here. And it certainly means knowing the difference between a priest and a klansman.
The Communist Party Feels the Bern — U.S. Communists Couldn’t Be Happier About the Democratic Party’s Direction
As it has for months now, The People’s World again this past week carried a headline hailing Bernie Sanders’ “revolution.” As the successor to the Soviet-funded and directed The Daily Worker, and as the ongoing house organ of Communist Party USA, The People’s World is pleased with the long march of “progress” in the Democratic Party. The far-left lurch of today’s Democratic Party is lovingly in line with what the comrades have long desired. These inheritors of the Soviet experiment see Bernie Sanders as an exciting culmination of what they have been fighting for. And they view Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the Democratic Party as having made a candidate like Bernie possible.
If you think this is hyperbole on my part, you should educate yourself by reading what today’s Communists are writing. As the latest exhibit, consider the instructive words of John Bachtell, Communist Party USA chair, in the latest valentine to Bernie in The People’s World:
The campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders is making a unique contribution to defeating the Republican right and has the potential to galvanize long-term transformative change. The campaign is also a movement. Millions are fed up with the same old establishment politics tied to Wall Street and the one percent. It’s reminiscent of the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. . . . Seeds of change are being sown and foundations are being laid for deeper-going changes in the future. . . .
The campaign is expanding the collective political imagination and injecting radical ideas into the body politic. It has legitimized democratic socialism in the national conversation. Sanders is also influencing Hillary Clinton to adopt more progressive positions on a wide range of issues.
Note the Obama-speak in Bachtell’s rhetoric, from the invoking of “transformative change” and “seeds of change” to pointing to the very model of Barack’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. And observe the excitement about Bernie having “legitimized democratic socialism in the national conversation” and influencing Hillary to adopt “more progressive positions.”
The head of Communist Party USA continued:
But Sanders understands if he is elected his radical economic and social agenda including breaking up the big banks, universal health care, tuition-free university, massive jobs creation, expanding Social Security, and repealing Citizen’s United will go nowhere given the vise grip the GOP and extreme right has on Congress.
The only way to realize a radical agenda is through a “political revolution. . . .” Sanders sees his campaign as part of a much bigger movement that must be built.
A political revolution rests on building a broad coalition. A political revolution will be fueled by ongoing shifts in public attitudes. Majorities of Americans now favor taxing the rich, raising the minimum wage, immigration reform, abortion rights, marriage equality, criminal justice reform, and action to curb the climate crisis. New social movements are influencing millions at the grassroots including the Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, The Dreamers, reproductive rights, marriage equality, and climate justice activists.
A political revolution is based on the idea that majorities make change. It is not enough for majorities to believe in an idea, they must actively fight for it. Movements are acting both within and outside the Democratic Party and comprise many of the key forces in the anti-right alliance.
This pitch for Bernie in The People’s World by the head of Communist Party USA employs the rally cry “political revolution” a dozen times in under a thousand words, plus repeated use of the words “radical” and “progressive.” Make no mistake: the comrades are jazzed for Bernie Sanders. They want, as another The People’s World writer likewise puts it, nothing short of a “Bernie Sanders political revolution.”
Bachtell looks with hope at how Bernie’s struggle could transform the political landscape and further remake the party of Kennedy and Truman:
A political revolution can transform politics if labor, its allies, and the broad left put their stamp on the multi-class alliance, shape its politics and frame the issues debated for the elections. The Sanders campaign is helping do this. . . . It will be transformative if the anti-right coalition is united and mobilized. Polls show that 86 percent of Clinton supporters will support Sanders in the general election if he is the nominee, and 79 percent of Sanders’ supporters will support Clinton if she wins. Sanders will need Clinton’s supporters in order to win.
Note, remarkably, the vast support for Sanders that exists not only among his own comrades but among Hillary Clinton backers. This is support, of course, for a man who has long been an avowed, unapologetic socialist, who was fully sympathetic to the Communist universe.
Also revealing is how today’s Communists have hopped aboard the bandwagon of the new left’s cultural agenda, including on sexual-gender issues. I’ve been pointing this out for some time (see my book on the left’s takedown of family and marriage). The emergent Bernie-Democrat-socialist-Communist-progressive-liberal coalition, advises Bachtell,
. . . must fight uncompromisingly against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attacks and all efforts to divide.
Workers of the world, unite — against “transphobia”! Who would have foreseen that one? Karl Marx, call your office.
Some Democrats reading this will lash out at me, as the messenger. But I urge them to again carefully read the words I’m quoting. They come directly from the head of the Communist Party USA, a man who is the successor to Gus Hall, to Earl Browder, to William Z. Foster, writing in the house organ of CPUSA, The People’s World, successor to The Daily Worker. I ask Democrats: Does it not concern you that your number two for the presidential nomination so fires up these literal Communists? Does that not bother you?
Unfortunately, I fear that many of today’s Democrats couldn’t care less, especially the Bernie millennials educated into pro-socialist imbecility by our public schools and universities. As one reader of The American Spectator put it after reading my previous post on Bernie
I informed my son, now over forty, that Bernie was a Communist. He replied, “So what!”
Indeed, the Sanders campaign could mass-produce bumper stickers boldly touting “Bolsheviks for Bernie” sandwiched between grinning faces of Marx and Lenin and our contemporary products of the American university would shrug and cheer.
Returning to the appraisal of Communist Party USA, John Bachtell finished with this:
A political revolution will help establish the foundations for a real people’s party, whether it results in a breakaway from or a takeover of the Democratic Party. Regardless of whether Sanders wins or not, the politics of the nation will never be the same and the fight for a political revolution will continue.
There we are, ladies and gentlemen. The new political revolution that “will continue” must come either with a breakaway from the Democratic Party or with a “takeover of the Democratic Party.” Once upon a time in America, it seemed it could have only come with a breakaway. But now, in the Obama-Bernie America, a takeover of the Democrats has greater promise than ever. Just ask the literally millions of modern Democrats pulling the lever for a 74-year-old socialist as their next president. And just ask Bernie Sanders’ advocates in the Communist Party USA. They, too, feel the Bern.
Having a “Trump Talk” with Your Kids
I was watching a Republican presidential debate as my eight-year-old, John, sat next to me. Donald Trump, the front-runner, looked left and ripped Ted Cruz as a “liar” before seamlessly pivoting right and skewering Marco Rubio as a “sweating choke artist.” “Lying Ted!” Trump barked. “Choking Marco!” he shouted.
My eight-year-old son laughed at the buffoonish spectacle, as if we’d just tuned into the Cartoon Network. “No, John,” I told him. “That’s not funny. We shouldn’t treat people that way.”
“Is that man going to be our president?” John asked. “I don’t know,” I replied.
I decided to turn off the TV while John was in the room with Donald Trump. Who knows what might come next?
In addition to Trump mocking Rubio and denouncing Cruz, he labeled George W. Bush a “liar” and Jeb Bush a “joke.” As for Mitt Romney: dumb, stupid, “loser.” Megyn Kelly: a “bimbo” with “blood coming out of her eyes.” He doesn’t like her. And if Donald Trump doesn’t like you, he lets you know.
The American Founders extolled the virtue of prudence to our leaders and citizenry. They underscored the cardinal and theological virtues. Trump eschews virtue, embracing vice instead, and his supporters reward him by the millions.
And thus, Trump excoriates his detractors: liars, losers, morons.
“Look at that face!” yapped Trump of Carly Fiorina, a successful businesswoman. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that the face of our next president?”
Again, push the children away from the TV.
Yet another occasion: I check the latest headlines. The cable news station shows a Trump rally. Protesters speak up. This wasn’t the organized protest in Chicago, which Trump blamed on professional left-wing agitators; no, this is a typical political event. But Donald Trump is no typical candidate. Not one for criticism, Trump instructs his supporters how to respond to the dissenters: “Knock the crap out of them!” Don’t worry, the millionaire ensures: “Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees, I promise. I promise.”
The cable news station shows repeated examples of such Trump bombast. Then follow clips of Trump supporters roughing up protesters in what could be a superb DNC ad against Trump in November.
One Trump supporter, 78-year-old John McGraw, sucker-punched 26-year-old Rakeem Jones, with no regrets. “You bet I liked it,” McGraw growled to the press. “Knocking the hell out of that big mouth.” (Note how McGraw used Trump’s exact words: “knock the hell.”) Asked if Jones had it coming, McGraw affirmed, “Yes, he deserved it. The next time we see him, we might have to kill him.”
Again, I turn off the TV before the kids see. Even more unsettling, the man behaving this way could be my kids’ next president, and from my own political party — the party of Lincoln and Reagan.
As I write, Trump is raising the prospect of riots if unjustly denied the Republican nomination. One of his surrogates tells CNN that “riots aren’t necessarily a bad thing.”
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg with Donald Trump. I was talking to my friend Mark, a Hollywood evangelical. He has five daughters. I asked how he intends to explain Trump to his girls. Trump is not only repeatedly divorced, but left his wives for mistresses and brags about his sexual conquests (including with married women). The casino mogul has strip clubs under his belt. We thought Bill Clinton was bad. At least Bill had the political discreetness to deny his escapades. (How’s that for a new standard?) Trump boasts.
Mark told me that he has had the “Trump talk” with his daughters. He has told them that, sadly, all morality could be out the window this election. Among the Republicans, there still are solid family men in Ted Cruz and John Kasich (as was “Choking Marco”). Unfortunately, with Trump, the moral character that Republicans have demanded in their leaders has become an utter non-issue to angry advocates. This year, Democrats will be able to tell Republicans that all their past talk of family values and criticisms of Bill Clinton was a bunch of rotten hypocrisy.
The presidency is preeminently a position of moral leadership. “Morality,” said our first president, George Washington, is an “indispensable support” to political prosperity. That has not changed. What is changing is the huge number of Americans who suddenly don’t care about moral behavior in their leader, or excuse or justify it.
And so, my advice to parents, especially on the Republican side: If Donald Trump gets the nomination, be prepared to sit down with your kids to have a frank “Trump talk.” Teach them not to be like that man. And always be ready to quickly change the TV channel. *
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science and the executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. Paul Kengor is the author of God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life (2004), The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007), The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan's Top Hand (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The Communist - Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor (Threshold Editions / Mercury Ink 2012).
Some time ago, a former student emailed me a video clip that I now show my Major European Governments course. It's a five-minute news piece by Dale Hurd of CBN News, a conservative Christian outlet - the rare kind of place where you see reports like this. The piece was on radical Islam in Europe, specifically in Belgium, and it was based on Hurd's interview with a Muslim leader in Brussels, the very heart of modern Europe, of secular Europe, of the European Union, and of everything Islamic fundamentalists despise about Europe.
"Allah makes the laws and tells us what is allowed and what is forbidden," Abu Imran told Hurd.
Imran is leader of Shariah for Belgium, and insists there's no such thing as a "democratic Muslim." Such a notion, he maintains, is as absurd as a "Christian Jew" or "Jewish Muslim." "It's impossible."
Imran says that real Islam and Shariah law are "inseparable."
Imran's group wants what it calls "Belgistan," and foresees Brussels as an "Islamic capital" within mere decades. He cites numbers to back his optimism. Imran says that in some cities in Belgium, such as Antwerp, 40 percent of the children in schools are Muslim. And though Muslims compose only 25 percent of religious believers in the country, that is enough to make them the largest religious group, given that Belgium, like most of Europe, has rapidly de-Christianized. Imran's group expects Muslims to be the majority in Belgium within 20 years.
Notably, that rise is coming from nothing unusual among Muslims. They are simply reproducing, whereas natives of Belgium, like natives of Europe, are not. For many modern Europeans, sex is about recreation, about fully separating intercourse from reproduction, about having as much sex as possible without the undesired outcome of a child. For faithful Muslims, sex is still about babies.
Like many major European cities, from London to Oslo, the most popular baby name in Brussels last year was "Mohammed." In fact, reported Dale Hurd, "Mohammed" was the most common baby name in Brussels each of the last four years. I do not see that trend changing anytime soon.
Dale Hurd noted in his report that Shariah for Belgium is a "small group that a lot of people do not take seriously." I bet they are now.
Obviously, I'm sharing this with readers now because the ringleaders of the terrorist assaults in France last week - the worst attacks inside France since World War II - were reportedly based precisely in Brussels.
Unlike Mr. Imran and his group, the ISIS-affiliated Muslims who attacked last week are blatant jihadists. They aren't patient enough to wait for their babies to grow to adulthood. They're not awaiting a demographic time bomb to bring Islam to Europe. They want "victory" now. They are happily (yes, happily) willing to detonate themselves at this very moment. Their method is bombs rather than babies. They don't want victory via life by outgrowing native Europeans. They want victory via death by killing native Europeans.
Regardless of those violent methods, Islam is poised to triumph in Europe in the long run. Over time, a native population that fails to do the most rudimentary thing of any native population - that is, give birth to the next generation - will by sheer sex and math give way to the outsiders who have entered the country and are giving birth to the next generation. Muslims in Europe can make love, not war - love that brings babies rather than blocks babies.
The clashes we are witnessing between ex-Christian Europeans and current Muslim Europeans is just the start. The Europe of the 21st century is going to be extremely chaotic.
While papal visits to the United States are increasingly common, what is uncommon is to see political-ideological battle lines drawn around a pope. The tendency this time is especially acute among liberals, who eagerly frame Francis as one of them - a categorization Francis has resisted. "I'm sure that I haven't said anything more than what's written in the social doctrine of the Church," he said as his plane approached U.S. soil.
To some degree, liberals are certainly justified in linking Pope Francis to many of their concerns - climate change, wealth redistribution, poverty. And even many conservatives seem to concede this pope to the political left. In truth, however, both sides lack a full picture. To illustrate the point, I'll focus on the subject area that [brought] Pope Francis here to America to begin with: a major international Catholic Church synod on family and marriage.
Though Francis is absolutely forgiving and charitable and merciful, including to homosexuals, when it comes to marriage and family, this pope has been unflinchingly orthodox in support of historic Church teaching. Some of his language has been even stronger than his predecessors. The extent to which that is true is at times shocking. Here are just a few examples:
Last January, as nations from Ireland to America looked to redefine marriage, Francis gravely warned of the "forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family" and "redefine the very institution of marriage." Echoing his predecessor, he warned of the forces of "relativism" that would alter family, marriage, and "threaten" society and humanity.
Shortly before that, in November, he insisted that all "children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother." This followed a vocal statement after the previous synod on the family in Rome, where Francis asserted: "What they are proposing is not marriage; it is an association, but it is not marriage! It is necessary to say things very clearly and we must say this!"
He has always been very clear in saying this. When he was a cardinal in Argentina, he declared same-sex marriage a diabolical effort of "the Father of Lies" (i.e., the devil). This was July 2010, and Cardinal Joseph Bergoglio blasted a bill to legalize same-sex marriage and gay adoption in Argentina. He said:
Let us not be naive: this is not simply a political struggle, but it is an attempt to destroy God's plan. It is not just a bill (a mere instrument) but a "move" of the father of lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God. . . . At stake is the identity and survival of the family: father, mother and children. At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God.
Obviously, liberals will find this extremely troubling. And yet, that's nothing compared to Francis' condemnation of "so-called gender ideology," which would scandalize liberals. "Gender ideology is demonic!" Francis shouted at one interviewer. He has compared gender theory to "the educational policies of Hitler."
Here, too, Francis sees this as another threat to the family. In this, Francis has taken an activist role, serving as the spiritual inspiration for a gigantic June 20 demonstration at St. John Lateran, the official church of his Rome diocese. Its purpose was to halt the introduction of gender theory into Italian public schools. This massive "Family Day" rally was a reflection of Pope Francis' Year of the Family, and it came only four days after the pope's environmental encyclical, Laudato Si. They were marching not against global warming but gender ideology.
This is a mere snapshot of Francis' statements. He has done almost two-dozen general audiences on the family. Tellingly, right before leaving Rome for the synod on the family in Philadelphia, he again affirmed the "image of the family - as God wills it, made up of one man and one woman," which, he said, "is deformed through powerful contrary projects supported by ideological colonizations."
Alas, what I've laid out here on Pope Francis and marriage likewise could be done for the cause of unborn children. His forceful denunciations of the "throwaway culture" of abortion are equally emphatic, as is his belief in forgiveness for those who repent of abortion.
What does this mean? It means you shouldn't cherry-pick this pope. You can't grab this or that statement that fits your personal political-ideological preferences and think you have the full picture.
This pope is neither liberal nor conservative. The Francis picture has many shades.
Pope Francis has returned to Rome after a historic trip to the United States. It was a fascinating endeavor. There have been many papal visits to America in my lifetime - in fact, nearly all have been in my lifetime, the first occurring in 1965, the year before I was born. None of these, however, were so heavily marked by political-ideological battle lines among liberals and conservatives. Really, those lines have been drawn boldly on the left, with liberals eagerly claiming this pope as one of them, and many conservatives granting that concession.
Yet, neither side, in truth, watches this pope carefully enough. If they did, both sides would be surprised, shocked, and one side - liberals - would be horrified.
I'm referring specifically to this pope's remarkably staunch criticisms of the things he sees as threatening the family: What he calls the "throwaway culture" of abortion, the "ideological colonization" and "deforming" of marriage, the "Satanic" adoption of children by homosexual couples, and the "demonic" cult of gender theory.
Yes, those blistering descriptions all belong to Pope Francis.
I could detail any of these here at length and shock liberal sensibilities and claims that this "leftist pope" is one of them. After all, I've yet to meet a liberal who thinks that same-sex marriage is the work of "the Father of Lies."
But I'd like to expend a few words on this pope's ongoing war against gender theory specifically, and namely its attempted introduction in Francis' home diocese of Rome and throughout Italy. This has greatly upset Francis, the extent to which we Americans (Francis' critics and admirers alike) are completely unaware. Now that he is back in Rome, Francis' battle against gender theory will recommence with zeal.
Of course, gender theory, gender ideology, gender studies, even entire gender programs, have been all the rage in American academia for decades. Pope Francis, for one, despises the very concept. He has argued constantly, consistently, that men and women are not only vitally different, but that these differences - ordained by nature and God - constitute an essential complementarity that husbands and wives bring to marriage and family relationships and responsibilities. Under Francis' direction last year, the Vatican held an international-ecumenical conference solely on this complementarity. In a world and culture that argues - and, in fact, teaches - that men and women and husbands and wives and dads and moms are interchangeable, if not inconsequential, Francis insists just the opposite. To say he is adamant is an understatement.
"Gender ideology is demonic!" Pope Francis insists. He says that it militates against "the order of creation." He sees it as so toxic, so destructive, that he has compared gender ideology to "the educational policies of Hitler."
In Italy, Francis has become the spiritual inspiration for a nationwide movement to banish gender theory. This culminated in a huge demonstration in Rome this summer. As one article reported:
Hundreds of thousands of people from all over Italy responded to Pope Francis' repeated warnings about gender ideology, by taking part in an enormous demonstration in the square of St. John Lateran in Rome on Saturday. The "Family Day" was aimed at defending the traditional family and stopping the spread of gender ideology in schools.
Some estimates were higher, as organizers hoped to draw a million marchers. "It's fantastic," said one attendee, a father of six from northern Italy. "Finally, people have gathered to fight this terrible ideology." One organizer celebrated from the stage, "The Holy Father is with us," as indeed he was.
"Just existing became what was important."
So said Frank Kravetz, World War II veteran and former captive of Nuremberg Prison Camp, or what Frank called the Nazi "hell-hole."
"Yet even as I struggled with the day-to-day sadness and despair," said Frank, "I never once had any regrets that I signed up to serve."
An extended tour of Nazi camps as a wounded POW scratching for survival wasn't what Frank had in mind when he signed up to serve his country in World War II. The kid from the smoky steel-mills of East Pittsburgh enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a tail-gunner.
Frank's life took a dramatic turn on November 2, 1944, in a bomb-run over Germany. He crammed into the tail of a B-17, wedged inside a flak jacket. The target was Merseberg, a major industrial area. He flew amid an air armada of 500 heavy bombers - each carrying eighteen 250-pound "general purpose" bombs - escorted by 900 fighter planes.
While the Americans were ready for business, so was the Luftwaffe. Frank's plane came under hot pursuit by German fighters. Frank took them on with a twin .50 caliber machine gun. It was a dogfight, and Frank was badly wounded. His B-17 was filled with holes. The crew had to bail, quickly.
Frank was bleeding profusely and could barely move. His buddies tried to get a parachute on him, but it opened inside the plane. They wrapped it around him, taking care not to cross the chords, and tossed him out. To Frank's great relief, the chute opened. Instantly, the deafening chaos quieted, and Frank said he floated like he was on the wings of angels.
The tranquility halted with a rude thump as Frank hit the ground. German soldiers immediately seized him.
Thus began "Hell's journey," as Frank dubbed it. Destination: Stalag 13-D.
Liberation finally came April 29, 1945, by General Patton's Third Army. Frank described the jubilant scene:
After the flag was raised, General Patton rolled in, sitting high in a command car. His very presence was awe-inspiring. I stood there staring at General Patton, our liberator, appearing larger than life.
Thousands of emaciated, ecstatic POWs chanted, "Patton! Patton! Patton!" Some fell to their knees, overcome with emotion. Patton seized a bullhorn and spoke:
Gentlemen - you're now liberated and under Allied control.... We're going to get you out of here.
It finally hit Frank and his remaining 125 pounds: "I'm going home. I'm really going home!"
Frank eventually arrived in New York City and hitchhiked all the way to Pittsburgh. He unceremoniously arrived at his folks' front door - no trumpets, no dramatic music, no parade. He hugged his mom and dad and sat down. He found and married his sweetheart, Anne.
How did Frank survive this Nazi "hell-hole?"
"All I can say is that the good Lord was watching out for me," wrote Frank in a riveting memoir, Eleven Two: One WWII Airman's Story of Capture, Survival and Freedom. There, Frank provided the secret to his survival and success: "Pray. It helps."
It's a message that Frank shared with young people every chance he had: "I prayed throughout my ordeal, asking Him for help." He shared it with me, my sons, and a classroom of my students four years ago.
As Frank prayed, he promised God that he would never complain about anything again if he survived. That's a promise he kept. Our blessings are so bountiful that we need to be grateful, especially compared to the deprivations others have faced - like a Nazi prison camp. We need to be always grateful, said Frank, and always faithful.
That was Frank Kravetz, winner of the Purple Heart.
I've told Frank's story before. I tell it again now for two reasons: First, Veterans Day falls again this November (as does Thanksgiving), a time to remember men like Frank. And second, sadly, this will be a Veterans Day without Frank Kravetz.
Frank died in August, at age 91. He joined his beloved wife, Anne, who died just four months prior. They were married for 68 years.
A mutual friend attended Frank's funeral and the luncheon that followed at the local VFW in East Pittsburgh, of which Frank was a founder. He told me that of the 100 original founding members, only two remain.
Yes, only two.
This Veterans Day, let's take a few minutes from our insanely busy lives and from this insane culture and country - one that those vets would not recognize - to remember men like Frank Kravetz who served with no regrets. The freedoms we have today, many of which we merrily abuse today, are possible only because of the abuse they suffered at the hands of hellacious enemies 70 years ago. *