Month: October 2017

Catching up with the selectively proud Hanoi Jane

That famous picture

Last year, as a service to young people who were born long after Jane Fonda (she’s an elderly movie actress, ICYDK) made a fool of herself in Vietnam, we revisited that reprehensible 1972 incident, when – in the midst of a proxy war between her own country and its totalitarian foes – she traveled to North Vietnam, chummed around with its soldiers, read their propaganda aloud on the radio for an audience of American servicemen, praised the murderous North Vietnamese dictator Ho Chi Minh, called U.S. troops war criminals, urged members of the U.S. Air Force to disobey orders, and (last but not least) had her picture taken on an anti-aircraft battery.

Fraternizing with the enemy

Fonda has claimed innumerable times that the last-named action, which earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” was “a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever.” But it was more than a matter of just two minutes. And it was no lapse. At the time of her visit, Fonda was already a dyed-in-the-wool antagonist of her own nation and an outspoken friend of totalitarian Communism. “If you understood what communism was,” she told an audience in 1970, “you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist.” In her extensive whitewash of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, Fonda lied about their brutal treatment of American POWs – and then, after those POWs returned home and called her a liar, she had the nerve to call them liars. In more recent years, she’s taken part in Communist-led rallies, shared stages with Saddam Hussein’s chum George Galloway, vilified Israel, and said that her “biggest regret” was that she “never got to fuck Che Guevara.”

With Ted Turner. Communism pays off!

As we pointed out last year, authors Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer published a whole book in 2002 in which they showed that Fonda’s actions in Vietnam amounted to treason. In Fonda’s own 2005 memoir she rewrote the whole episode, depicting herself as a tribune of peace rather than a Communist traitor. Of course, she’s a Communist traitor with a difference: for ten years, she was married to CNN honcho Ted Turner, one of the most powerful men in America as well as America’s largest private landowner. So she’s not just a world-class Communist; she’s a world-class Communist hypocrite.

Giving Megyn Kelly the evil eye earlier this month, in response to a question about plastic surgery

Since we dropped in on Hanoi Jane last year, she’s been in the news several times. At the Emmy Awards, on September 17, she and Lily Tomlin, with whom she appears in a Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, joined in calling President Trump “a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” (Their 9 to 5 co-star Dolly Parton, standing onstage between them, looked distinctly uncomfortable.) But that was relatively nothing. Later Fonda made headlines when, on The Today Show, Megyn Kelly dared to ask her about plastic surgery. Well, Fonda may believe in Communism, but it’s clear she also believes that the entertainment-media serfs shouldn’t dare pose certain questions to cinema royalty such as herself. She shot Kelly a look that could kill.

Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Fonda at the 2017 Emmys

But let’s set that aside too, and move on to earlier this month, when she sat down for an interview with the BBC. Asked whether she was “proud of America today,” she replied with a quick, firm “no.” But, she added, “I’m proud of the resistance. I’m proud of the people who are turning out in unprecedented numbers and continue over and over and over again to protest what Trump is doing.” The topic of Vietnam came up – and again the lies came out. Rejecting the idea that she had been “siding with the enemy,” she claimed that after being photographed on that anti-aircraft battery, she’d thought: “Oh my gosh. It’s going to look like I am against my own country’s soldiers and siding with the enemy, which is the last thing in the world that was true.” Fonda is 79 now; presumably she will continue to promote this lie until she dies.

Still fabulous. And still dishonest!

But that wasn’t all. She actually tried to sell the idea that her trip had helped save “two million people who could have died of famine and drowning.” We don’t remember hearing her make this claim before. Fonda still looks fabulous, but perhaps the years are taking their toll on the old noggin. Or maybe it’s just another example of Celebrity Narcissism Syndrome, the symptoms of which do tend to intensify as time goes by. In any case, here’s her logic: “The United States was bombing the dikes in North Vietnam….If the dikes had given way, according to Henry Kissinger, somewhere around 2 million people could have died of famine and drowning. And we were bombing, and it wasn’t being talked about. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m a celebrity. Maybe if I go, and I bring back evidence.’ And it did stop two months after I got back, so I’m proud that I went.”

Another recent glamour shot

As far as we can tell, there aren’t any serious historians who feel that Fonda had anything to do with an end to the U.S. bombings. On the other hand, her visit didn’t exactly enhance American morale, and it could be that, in the long term, Fonda’s PR job for the enemy helped tip the balance toward ultimate U.S. withdrawal. But if you’re going to make that argument, you’re going to have to give Fonda a share of the responsibility for the fact that after the U.S. pulled out of Indochina, the Viet Cong murdered tens of thousands of South Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge exterminated 1.5 to three million Cambodians. Are you proud of that, Jane?

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Catching up with Yvette Felarca, fascist “anti-fascist”

Yvette Felarca

In April, we spent most of a week here discussing Yvette Felarca, a leader of “The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights, and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary,” known, for short, as “By Any Means Necessary,” and, for shorter, as BAMN. It’s a California group, founded in 1995, that has spent the last two decades holding protests, bringing lawsuits, and committing acts of violence – or, to use a word that both the FBI and the Defense Department have used to describe its activities, terrorism.

Felarca, who is also a middle-school humanities teacher in Berkeley, has participated fully in BAMN’s storm-trooper-type brutality – beating, rock-throwing, setting fires, breaking store windows, and so on – which she excuses as a legitimate means of defending America against the words of Nazis and fascists.

In June of last year, she was arrested at a demonstration in Sacramento; at her arraignment, which didn’t take place until August of this year, she was charged with “felony assault by means of force likely to inflict great bodily injury and two misdemeanor counts of inciting and participating in a riot.” (Reportedly, she had punched a man in the abdomen and told him to “get the fuck out of our streets.”)

This past February, Felarca was in the center of the action when vioent BAMN members managed to keep journalist Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at UC Berkeley. Appearing on Fox News afterwards, Felarca charged Yiannopoulos with leading “a movement of genocide.”

Felarca experienced no professional blowback for her arrest in Sacramento or for her participation in the violence in Berkeley. At the latter event, the Berkeley police stood down. The mayor of Berkeley, asked for a comment, echoed Felarca’s absurd claim that Yiannopoulos was a white supremacist. Despite calls for Felarca’s firing, the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) kept her on. So things stood when we last looked in on Yvette.

Felarca being taken into custody on September 26

Here’s an update. On September 26, members of “Patriot Prayer” – a conservative Christian group based in Portland, Oregon – held a small, peaceful rally at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way in Berkeley. The speakers were “quickly…drowned out by protesters” from BAMN and another group, Refuse Fascism. (The latter is a campaign run by the Revolutionary Communist Party; BAMN itself is an RCF spinoff.) The “Patriot Prayer” contingent then marched down Telegraph Avenue to People’s Park, only to be trailed by the leftists; arriving at People’s Park, the conservatives began holding speeches, in response to which the BAMN and Refuse Fascism members heckled them. And worse.

By the end of the day, Felarca – who at the time was out on bail – was in cuffs, arrested on suspicion of rioting, obstruction, and battery. Along with two fellow BAMN members, both male, she was held at Santa Rita Jail. Her bail was set at $20,000. (The bail for her BAMN colleagues, who had apparently wreaked less havoc, was set at $10,000 for one and $5,000 for the other.) That evening, a spokesman for the school district replied to a query about Felarca by saying that it was “monitoring developments” and that, “[s]hould an occasion arise for the District to take action, we will respond in an appropriate manner, in keeping with federal law, the California Education Code and the BUSD collective bargaining agreement with our teachers.”

In other words, when a Berkeley schoolteacher is arrested at multiple public events for committing acts of violence, that, in itself, isn’t enough reason for school authorities to “take action.” One wonders what BUSD’s response would’ve been if Felarca had been on the other side.

Felarca will be arraigned on November 8. In the meantime, presumably, she’s still spending her weekdays in front of a Berkeley classroom. One can only imagine what she is cramming into her pupils’ heads in the guise of “humanities.”

 

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Catching up with Sally Kohn, consummate hater

Of all the people who make a living these days spouting opinions, perhaps none are dumber and more clueless than Sally Kohn.

Sally Kohn

We discussed Sally, a community organizer turned CNN commentator, in September of last year. Over the course of a week, we learned that she’s incredibly ignorant of a staggering range of things, from the fundamental tenets of Islam to basic facts of European history and geography. She didn’t know Amsterdam was in the Netherlands. She bragged that if she had an adopted Moroccan son, she’d raise him as a Muslim, not grasping that a devout Muslim male might disapprove of her lesbianism, her Judaism, her failure to wear a head covering and subordinate herself to men. It’s shocking to discover that she actually has a law degree, because she gives no indication of ever having studied anything. She knows nothing but politics and never has anything to say that isn’t right out of the PC handbook.

Linda Sarsour

We thought we’d do an update on old Sally. First we should mention her support for sharia devotee and sham feminist Linda Sarsour, an organizer of the Women’s March on the day after this U.S. year’s presidential inauguration. In April, we included Sally on a list of Sarsour’s admirers but we didn’t quote any of her tweets in Sarsour’s defense. Here you go: “#IStandWithLinda today & always! Her every word is being picked apart and contorted. I know @lsarsour to be a defender of justice FOR ALL!” This wasn’t exactly a surprise: Sally has consistently stood up for sharia law and has refused to listen to reason about it. On some mental level she has to be aware that she’s misrepresenting it, but her determination to be foursquare PC in every possible way makes it impossible for her to criticize it.

Kurt Schlichter

One person she has been able to criticize is one Kurt Schlichter. When Schlichter tried to explain to her, via Twitter, that Sarsour is “an Islamic fanatic,” Kohn replied: “I feel sad for you and everyone who thinks like you. It must be hard having your heart filled with so much blind hatred.” Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, replied with a photograph of himself, in uniform, presumably in Iraq or Afghanistan, in the company of several Muslim youths, all of them smiling and happy. Schlichter’s comment: “Here’s me showing my ‘blind hatred’ while deployed away from my family protecting Muslims from genocide. Where’s your pic?”

Sally has also called Donald Trump a fascist and totalitarian, has charged Dana Loesch (entirely without justification) with inciting violence, and has accused Paul Ryan of murder (for supporting repeal of Obamacare). Even as she has poured out all this bile, she has repeatedly posed as a model of civility, calling on her ideological opponents to avoid name-calling and stick to respectable lines of argument. She assailed Republicans for using the so-called “nuclear option” to get Judge Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court, tweeting: “Are we really surprised that after Democrats DIDN’T use #NuclearOption, Republicans DID? Perpetual high-road/low-road distinction.” In fact, the Democrats had used the “nuclear option” in 2013 to confirm several Obama judicial appointees.

Corey Lewandowski

Her obnoxiousness is through the roof. On the day of the presidential election, she tweeted that she’d run into former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in a CNN makeup room “and offered my condolences in advance.” A couple of weeks before the election, she published a supposed letter to her eight-year-old daughter in which she described Trump as “a mirror reflecting a dark and dangerous part of our history” and characterized Trump voters as viewing “the equal treatment of women and people of color as a bad thing.”

Donald Trump

Linking Trump and his supporters to slavery, to lynching, and to what she described as the “genocide” of Native Americans,” Sally told her daughter: “As you grow up, it will be easier for you to get into college and get a job and buy a home than it will be for your black friends.” No, not if Affirmative Action is still in effect. Sally went on to write: “You’ve said that if Donald Trump wins, you want to move to India.” She asked her not to do that. (But how did such an idea get into the head of an eight-year-old to begin with?) No, if Trump wins, Sally asserted, “we will not only march in the streets, but we will use our bodies to stop his forces from entering mosques or raiding homes of immigrants.” If Trump symbolized the worst of America, a vote for Hillary Clinton would serve “to uplift the best of America’s values,” including “justice and inclusion and fairness and kindness and equal opportunity for all.”

According to her website, Sally is currently writing “a book about hate – why there’s so much hate in our world today, why it’s getting worse, and what we can do to stop it.” She seems totally blind to the fact that she herself is a geyser of hate, unfairly smearing as haters tens of millions of Americans who hate no one but who are justifiably weary of the obsessive identity politics that are what Sally and her ilk have in place of a mind and a moral compass.

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Catching up with George Ciccariello-Maher, expert on “white supremacy”

George Ciccariello-Maher

Last Christmas Eve, George Ciccariello-Maher, a previously obscure professor at Drexel University and an enthusiastic booster of chavismo, made national headlines with a tweet reading: “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” On Christmas Day, he referred fondly to the “massacre of whites,” explaining that, in his view, the mass murder of about four thousand caucasians during the Haitian Revolution “was a good thing.” Those who looked further into his Twitter feed discovered that earlier in the month he’d proudly boasted: “Sorry, I’m not ‘alt-left,’ just an actual communist.”

When the media got wind of all this, George blamed the fuss on “white supremacists.” If George had written such a thing about pretty much any other identity group, you can be sure he’d have been fired instantly and condemned by Drexel’s administration in the strongest possible terms; instead, the university issued a tepid press release slapping him on the wrist and promised an investigation. In response, George went on the offensive, describing his bosses’ action as a “chilling” and “frightening” reaction to “harassment” by outsiders. When leftist commentators and George’s academic colleagues stood up for him, blaming the media attention on right-wing bigots, the powers that be at Drexel withdrew their plans for an investigation,

Drexel University

In January we devoted a week to George’s case, which provided a perfect example of the double standards that currently rule the ivory tower roost. These days, a public declaration of even the mildest moderate or conservative opinion by a professor can lead to major trouble – to charges of having sown discord among students, caused them emotional distress, committed “microaggressions” against them. A biology instructor who makes even the most innocuous statement of fact about differences between the sexes can find his career in danger. But to express enthusiasm for the massacre of white people is fine – as Drexel’s president ultimately pronounced, George was simply exercising his First Amendment rights.

In March, George’s Twitter feed once again put his name in the headlines. On a plane, he saw a fellow passenger giving his first-class seat to a soldier in uniform. “People are thanking him,” wrote George. “I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”

The notorious tweet

Now George is back in the news. On the morning of October 2, the day after the mass killing in Las Vegas, he took to Twitter again. So far, nobody knew anything of substance about the killer or his motives, but George had all the answers. “Yesterday was a morbid symptom of what happens when those who believe they deserve to own the world also think it is being stolen from them,” he wrote. “It is the spinal column of Trumpism, and most extreme form is the white genocide myth. The narrative of white victimization has been gradually built over the past 40 years. White people and men are told that they are entitled to everything. This is what happens when they don’t get what they want.”

On the far-left TV show “Democracy Now!”

Once again, the authorities at Drexel distanced themselves from George’s views, saying that their thoughts and prayers were with the survivors. There’s no reason to believe, however, that they’ll go any further this time than they did last Christmas. As far as they’re concerned, George has all the right in the world to spread his poison. What is appalling is that this man is responsible for teaching young people, and that the ranks of American university faculties are full of people who share his reprehensible views and have rushed to his defense for expressing them.

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