The scourge of NYC, the pride of NYU

Sometimes it can seem as if the major institutions of higher education in the northern and southern parts of Manhattan, namely Columbia University and New York University, are locked in an intense competition – not to produce the most important scientific research or to turn out the best educated students, but to be the Big Apple’s undisputed hub of inane and anarchic academic radicalism.

On February 15, the New York Post reported that one of the co-founders and leaders of Decolonize This Place, a gang of misfits who created havoc in the New York subways on January 31 – “destroying turnstiles, stranding thousands of commuters and spray-painting ‘F–k Cops’ on station walls “ – is an NYU professor named Amin Husain. (In fact, Husain’s Wikipedia page identifies him as the “lead organizer” of the group.) The eloquently stated goal of this initiative was to “f-ck sh-t up,” and it must be said that they succeeded: damages came to around $100,000. Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is not exactly famous as a crime-fighter, pronounced himself “repulsed” by the group’s actions, the ultimate goal of which is to obtain free public transport with no cops.

To be sure, the group, which has been described as carrying out “direct actions targeting five issues: Free Palestine, Indigenous Struggle, Black Liberation, Global Wage Workers, and de-gentrification,” didn’t accomplish everything it intended to do. Communicating with one another on social media, members encouraged one another to bring knives and “blind police officers.” The group’s website, as the Post noted, features information on “How to Shut Down the City,” how to kick people “in the face and groin,” and how to make use of nails and glass bottles.

Who is Amin Husain? That Wikipedia page calls him “a Palestinian-American activist” whose courses at NYU focus on “resistance and liberation and postcolonial theory.” For example, he teaches a workshop called “Art, Activism, and Beyond” in which he “interrogates the relationship between art and activism.” (“Interrogates” is a currently fashionable academic synonym for “examines” or “discusses.”) Like many such academic radicals he has founded or been involved with a long list of activist organizations, publications, and movements, among them the Global Ultra Luxury Faction, the magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, NYC Solidarity with Palestine, NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, Occupy Wall Street, the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement. Oh, and Fatah. Yes, at a 2012 OWS rally, he stated that in the Palestinian territories, where he grew up, he was a member of Fatah and took part in the anti-Israeli “resistance” – throwing “rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like” at IDF members – after which “I came over here, searching for an American Dream that has never existed.”

The subway hooliganism wasn’t Husain’s first attempt to create mayhem in New York City. In 2006 he took part in a demonstration at the American Museum of Natural History that “demanded the removal of the now-controversial statue of a horse-borne Theodore Roosevelt flanked by two standing Native Americans at the entrance.” Last year he led a series of weekly protests at the Whitney Museum in an ultimately successful attempt to oust Whitney board vice-chairman Warren B. Kanders, whose company manufactures supplies for law enforcement and military uses.

Will NYU investigate, discipline, or fire Husain? Somehow it seems unlikely. The faculties of both NYU and Columbia are overflowing with haters of Israel, apologists for terrorism, and participants in violent protest. One can’t help getting the impression that it’s easier to get a teaching job at these places – and at many other supposedly distinguished American universities – with a rap sheet than with an award-winning work of scholarship. Husain, alas, is a very little piece of a very big problem that is infecting higher education from sea to shining sea.

Posted on February 25, 2020February 18, 2020 by usefulstooges 3

Playing tunes, calling for bloodbaths: Rage against the Machine

As we reported on Monday, the veteran rock band Rage against the Machine is going on tour next month, making this the perfect occasion for an overview of the band’s politics. We’ve already taken a look at Rage’s afición for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, which exercises administrative authority over much of the Mexican state of Chiapas.

But like every good revolutionary rock group, Rage not only loves but hates. Unsurprisingly, it hates America. The title of its triple-platinum 1996 album Evil Empire, as frontman Zack de la Rocha acknowledged at the time, is a reference to “Ronald Reagan’s slander of the Soviet Union in the eighties, which the band feel could just as easily apply to the United States.” At Woodstock 1999, the band set fire to an American flag. When the band was scheduled to appear on Saturday Night Live in April 1996, its roadies hung two upside-down American flags from the amplifiers seconds before the band was about to play its first song, only to see the flags pulled down instantly by stagehands. When the song was over, the show’s producer cancelled the band’s scheduled second number and threw the guys out of the building. According to a statement issued by the band at the time, bassist Tim Commerford was “so incensed” by this treatment that “he takes one of the torn-down U.S. flags, shreds it up, charges into Steve Forbes’ dressing room [Forbes was that week’s guest host] and hurls it at his entourage.”

Rage performing on the steps of Federal Hall

In January 2000, the band shot the music video for the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” on the steps of Federal Hall in New York and then, along with about 300 fans, stormed the doors of the New York Stock Exchange across the street. The NYSE had to close temporarily and stop trading; Michael Moore, the radical left-wing documentary maker who directed the video, was taken in custody. During this whole drama, the cameras kept rolling, and footage of the fracas was used in the video. “We decided to shoot this video in the belly of the beast,” Moore later said, “and for a few minutes, Rage Against the Machine was able to shut down American capitalism — an act that I am sure tens of thousands of downsized citizens would cheer.”

Zack (second right) in 2008 Denver protest

Rage followed a similar game plan later that year, holding a concert at a Los Angeles venue across the street from the Staples Center, where the Democratic National Convention was underway. During the concert, the band members stirred up the audience’s anger at the political system, and after the concert a group of Rage fans threw rocks and other objects at cops outside the Staples Center, leading to several arrests. Eight years later de la Rocha led thousands of Rage fans in a march from a Rage concert in Denver to the Denver Coliseum, where the DNC Convention was underway; that same year, the band descended on Minneapolis for the Republican National Convention, where “post-concert rioting” by fans led to about 70 arrests. While performing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2007, vocalist Zack de la Rocha told the audience that the Bush Administration “needs to be tried, hung and shot…We need to treat them like the war criminals they are.” During a 2008 show in Reading, England, de la Rocha also called for Tony Blair to be executed.

And this is only a brief overview of Rage’s decades of political engagement. (We didn’t even mention the band’s longtime support for Black Panther and cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, for whom they wrote the song “Voice of the Voiceless.”) As Irving Berlin wrote, there’s no business like show business.

Posted on February 20, 2020February 15, 2020 by usefulstooges 1

Getting rich on rage

Founded in 1991, the rock band Rage Against the Machine has broken up and reunited several times over the decades. Most recently, the group disbanded in 2011, only to come back together last November for a world tour that will begin next month and continue through September. With a total record sales of around 16 million, Rage is perhaps as well known for its politics as for its music.

That music has been described as everything from “punk” to “hip hop” to “hard rock” to “nu metal.” There is less confusion about the nature of the band’s politics. They are radical, although even that word doesn’t quite do it. The four band members – singer Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford, guitarist Tom Morello, and drummer Brad Wilk – are so revolutionary in their political views that sometimes it can seem as if these guys have spent the last three decades doing a brilliant parody of ignorant rockers who live in mansions and ride in limousines all the while thinking of themselves as courageous insurrectionists on the barricades.

But you’ve got to give them credit for a certain degree of originality. While other politically active showbiz folk focus on issues like gun control and global warming, Rage against the Machine celebrates the cause of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a far-left group of indigenous Mexicans and their allies that has technically been at war with the Mexican government for many years, but that has long controlled much of the state of Chiapas with the government’s tacit acceptance. (Last August, when the Zapatistas expanded the area under their control, President Andrés Manuel López said that this was just fine, so long as they exerted their authority without violence.)

Rage’s song “People of the Sun,” which appears on the band’s 1996 album Evil Empire, is about the Zapatista cause. The cover of the single features an image of a sickle, an ammunition belt, and a corn cob that is suggestive of the Soviet hammer and sickle. Rage’s YouTube page features an interview with a gun-toting Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a Maoist, children’s book author, and former philosophy major at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who, under the noms de guerre Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos and, more recently, Subcomandante Galeano, is the Zapatistas’ longtime spokesperson. In the areas of Chiapas under Zapatista control, images of Subcomandante Galeano alongside Che Guevara and the Mexican Revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata are apparently ubiquitous.

So devoted is Rage to the Zapatistas that the band flies the insurgents’ flag at its concerts. But the EZLN isn’t the band’s only cause. More about that to come.

Posted on February 18, 2020February 15, 2020 by usefulstooges 1

Another honor for Ms. Davis

Yale University is widely considered one of the world’s leading institutions of higher education. When it wants to celebrate Martin Luther King Day by inviting a prominent individual to give a keynote speech, it presumably has its pick of illustrious black thinkers and civil-rights activists. This year, it chose Angela Davis. Specifically, Davis was selected by Risë Nelson, the assistant dean of Yale College and director of its Afro-American Cultural Center, which co-sponsored the event along with the Department of African American Studies, the Yale College Dean’s Office, and Dwight Hall.

Davis was the CPUSA’s candidate for president

Regular readers of this site will know that this is far from the first time in recent years that Davis has been honored by a major cultural or educational institution. In 2016, the Brooklyn Museum awarded her a major prize for supposedly being a role model for women. In 2017, an Alabama group planned to give her an award for her purported contributions to civil rights, but changed its mind after a Holocaust Education Center, also in Alabama, pointed out that Davis supports the movement to boycott Israel. In 2019, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution honored Davis with a special screening of a film that whitewashes her life story. These were far from her first awards. In 1979, the Soviet Union presented Davis with the Lenin Prize.

We’ve covered the details of Davis’s story more than once on this site. We’ve done it because few Americans are more emblematic than Angela Davis of the perverse post-1960s practice by establishment institutions of honoring thugs, bigots, enemies of freedom, and enthusiasts for totalitarianism as heroes of freedom and human rights. We’ve also returned repeatedly to Davis’s story because, despite all the attention we’ve accorded to the truth about her, mainstream media organs have sugarcoated the reality and millions of Americans remain ignorant of it.

The facts of Davis’s life are incontrovertible. As a young member of the Black Panthers, she acquired the guns carried by a fellow Panther, Jonathan Jackson, when he walked into a California courtroom where yet another Panther, James McClain, was on trial. Jackson handed guns to the defendant and to two convicts who were serving as witnesses, and the four of them then took the judge, prosecutor, and three jurors hostage in an effort to free Jackson’s older brother, George, from prison. There ensured a shootout in which the judge and three of the hostage-takers were killed, the prosecutor paralyzed, and a juror wounded. Placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her role in this crime, Davis took it on the lam. She was eventually captured, but thanks to a campaign funded by an international network of Communists she ended up being freed by a northern California jury containing more than its share of sympathetic radicals. Thanks, moreover, to the leftist slant of the hiring committees at many American universities in recent decades, Davis has been able to make a career in the academy.

We’ve mentioned the widespread tendency to whitewash Davis’s background. In reporting on Davis’s speech at Yale, Ella Goldblum of the Yale Daily News quoted her as saying that “People of African descent in the Americas have embodied the quest for freedom for five long centuries,” but didn’t mention that, back in the day, she was a big fan of the USSR, not known for its freedom, or that she remains an admirer of the Castro regime in Cuba. No, Goldblum chose instead to describe Davis as “a leftist activist, academic, philosopher and author of over ten books on class, feminism and the U.S. prison system,” as a “star of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s,” and as a sometime member of the Black Panther party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the American Communist Party. Here’s how the Goldblum described the episode that defined her life: “She was imprisoned for 16 months for her alleged involvement in the armed seizure of a Marin County Courthouse in California and was released on bail and eventually acquitted.” Ironically, Goldblum’s whitewash of Davis described her as criticizing “the tendency to whitewash [Martin Luther King’s] struggle against ‘unjust peace.’” Goldblum’s article concluded with glowing comments by people who had attended the event. One of them liked how Davis “placed feminism as a central part of all freedom movements”; another said that Davis made her feel “empowered to be more active in her community.” Was any of these people aware of the precise way in which Davis, when she was much closer to their own age, chose to be “active in her community”? Is it really possible to graduate from Yale University believing that Angela Davis is a pillar of freedom?

Posted on February 4, 2020January 29, 2020 by usefulstooges 5

Another Bernie bro who’s a gulag fan

A couple of weeks ago we met Kyle Jurek, an Iowa field organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign who, thanks to the brilliant hidden-camera reportage of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, was exposed as a bloodthirsty Communist who sees the Sanders candidacy as the first step in a much-needed revolution – indeed, as the prelude to a “Reign of Terror” which he and his comrades will kick off by gunning down some of their ideological enemies and shipping others off to a Gulag.

Of course, as we pointed out in our account of Jurek, the fact that this nutbag is a fan of totalitarianism who looks forward to putting into practice the most sanguinary lessons of Lenin and Stalin doesn’t necessarily mean that Bernie shares his views. Then again, it says something that the Sanders campaign would have a guy like this on the payroll – and it said something, too, that, after the Project Veritas exposé of Jurek, the campaign refused to comment. At this writing, there’s no indication that Jurek has been cut loose.

And now there’s this. Jurek, it turns out, is not unique. The other day, after releasing two mind-blowing reports on Jurek, O’Keefe put out one about another Sanders staffer – namely, one Martin Weissgerber, who works as the campaign’s South Carolina field coordinator. This guy, it turned out, made Jurek look like an amateur. “I’m a communist,” Weissgerber told Project Veritas’s hidden-camera operative, who was posing as a journalist who shared his views. Weissgerber said that after Sanders’s inauguration, the Senate, House, and judiciary should be dissolved and Sanders should assume dictatorial powers. He said that he looked forward to “send[ing] the rich to the guillotine” and that he planned to “learn how to shoot” so that he could take an active part in the coming revolution. In this connection, he praised the Soviet Union for having developed the greatest gun ever, the AK-47, “the destroyer of imperialism and colonization.”

Like Jurek, Weissgerber is a fan of the gulags, which, he said, were much more humane that they’re given credit for. They were, he claimed, “re-education camps.” Like Jurek, he wants to bring them back, and fill them with Republicans and billionaires. Indeed, Weissgerber maintained that the USSR generally has been given a bum rap. “The Soviet Union was not horrible,” he claimed. It had great “women’s rights.” It was “progressive.” Weissgerber made it clear that he’s all about “complete seizure of the means of production.”

Who is this Weissgerber? He provided his interlocutor with a bit of personal history. He studied Soviet history in college. Both his parents are Communists, too. His dad is a Belgian who “took part in Paris 1968.” His mother, Kathleen McKenna, works for WBUR, an NPR station in Boston, where she is obliged to “keep her politics to herself.”

Weissgerber adores Bernie. He finds only one problem with the old fella: he’s not far left enough. Still, he’s a big step in the right direction.

And what does Bernie think of Weissgerber? Valerie Richardson answered that question in The Washington Times on January 23. When Project Veritas called a Sanders field office in South Carolina to ask for a comment on the staffer’s remarks, the Sanders people phoned the North Charleston police and accused Project Veritas of harassment. A police officer then called Project Veritas and told them that the Sanders people would have no comment. “They are aware of videos you guys took, the undercover stuff,” said the cop. “It’s one of those things where they wish he hadn’t said that, but they’re still standing by him or whatever.” As for Jurek, Richardson reported that “Sanders state director Missy Rebik tweeted last week that Iowans ‘don’t care about political gossip.’” In short, the Sanders campaign is standing by both of these Communists. What more do we need to know?

As we said in our piece on Jurek, we’re not in the habit of taking sides in elections. But the Sanders outfit isn’t just another campaign. Jurek and Weissgerber are useful stooges of the first order. How many more of them are there in the ranks of Sanders’ people? If we feel obliged to help draw attention to O’Keefe’s revelations, moreover, it’s because virtually the whole mainstream media has done its best to ignore them. And if there’s one thing we know at this site, it’s that ignoring useful stooges in positions of power is never a good idea.

Posted on January 28, 2020January 24, 2020 by usefulstooges 2

Proof: SF wants to be Venezuela

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s account was matter-of-fact. Chesa Boudin, wrote Michelle Robertson on November 10, had won the election to become San Francisco’s next district attorney. Robertson described Boudin as “the most progressive candidate on the ballot,” and in other references to him – the kind used in newspapers to avoid repeating a person’s name over and over – Boudin was identified as “[t]he 39-year-old” and as “[t]he former deputy public defender.” Boudin was described as having promised in his campaign to “address racial disparity in the criminal justice system, mass incarceration and police accountability” and quoted him as tweeting “We are all feeling the momentum for change in this city!”

Well, that’s one way of looking at Boudin. Reporting on his election at American Thinker, Monica Showalter led with a few teeny little details that Robertson had managed to skirt. For one thing, Boudin “was quite literally Hugo Chavez’s trusted propagandist, translator and advisor, Cuba-groomed from the start.” He’s “been photographed in Venezuela wielding an assault rifle, and getting guerrilla training, according to Venezuelan sources. He literally hung out with the Chavista goon squads known as ‘colectivos,’ the same thugs who drive around in motorcycles and shoot into crowds who protest. Those are his homies.”

So much for Showalter’s summing-up of Boudin’s career. But for those of us at Useful Stooges, Boudin’s surname rang a bell and inspired us to dig further. It couldn’t be true, could it? Ah, but it was: Boudin is the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, the notorious Weather Underground members who, after taking part in the 1981 robbery of a Brink’s truck in Rockland County, New York, were found guilty of the murder of two police officers and a security guard. While his parents were carted off to prison, Chesa, a toddler at the time, was handed into he custody of two even more famous members of the Weather Underground: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who became his stepparents. Among the items on Ayers’ resume is his participation in bombings of the New York City Police Department headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972; Dohrn, aside from having played a role in these endeavors, was also, along with Boudin’s mother, partly responsible for the unintentional March 1970 explosion of a bomb while it was being assembled in the basement of a townhouse at 18 West 11^th Street in Greenwich Village. The explosion totally destroyed the townhouse and killed three Weather Underground comrades.

In short, Chesa Boudin is a member of domestic terrorist royalty. His parents and stepparents are to deadly, irrational totalitarian violence what the Barrymores were to the theater. In these perverse times, of course, prestigious establishment institutions routinely reward people with such backgrounds: Dohrn now teaches law at Northwestern; Ayers, celebrated for his friendship with Barack Obama and for the rumor that he is the real author of Obama’s Dreams from My Father, is a retired professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Boudin is an adjunct professor at Columbia; Gilbert is still behind bars, but we’re sure Harvard or Yale will have something waiting for him if he lives long enough to serve out his sentence.

And now, following in the grand post-Sixties American tradition of proceeding from the world of violent revolutionaries dedicated to the overthrow of the American system to the world of credentialed authorities within that very system, Chesa Boudin has been elected San Francisco DA. Not that he hsn’t earned it: like the progeny of other radical dynasties, he’d led a life of privilege, attending Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning a J.D. at Yale, and writing, translating, or co-editing several books celebrating the chavista regime. Well, given his own background with that regime, which turned Venezuela from a free and prosperous country into an oppressive nightmare of grinding poverty, Boudin should be completely at home in the corridors of power in the city by the Bay, that onetime civic gem that, thanks to the Chavez-style ideology of its overlords, is fast turning into the Marxist hellhole of America’s Pacific coast.

Posted on November 26, 2019November 12, 2019 by usefulstooges 5

Chavismo: one man’s story

Over the last few years we’ve covered the steady descent of socialist Venezuela into the maelstrom. What more is there to say? Well, there used to be an old anthology TV series set in New York City. It was called Naked City, and every episode ended with a voice intoning: “there are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

Well, there are 28 million stories in Venezuela. One of them is that of a fellow named Christian K. Caruzo, who recounted his own experiences recently at the Breitbart website under the headline “My Socialist Hell: 20 Years of Decay in Venezuela.” “Hell”? “Decay”? Is he exaggerating? In his opening sentences he also uses the word “tragedy.” And he sums up the country’s current conditions in the bleakest of terms: “toilet paper shortages, desperate people scavenging through garbage to find food for their families, bread lines, a systemic failure of our public utilities, dogs flayed in broad daylight for meat, corruption, lack of proper medicine and health access, weighing stacks of cash, and so much more.” Its all true, he says, and it’s all “a product of 20 years of socialism.”

Eleven years old when Hugo Chávez took power, Caruzo has spent his adult life under chavismo. Chávez, he writes, turned Venezuela into a country where “you’re no longer a citizen — you’re merely a survivor.” A country where he’s “a lesser version of what I could’ve been.” A country where you stand in line for bread and where you barter for the meds you need. “Socialism,” he writes, “has slowly eroded the functional existence of every aspect of our lives, from our freedom of speech to our economic liberties, our access to healthcare and personal documents to our water supply.” Yes, the same socialism that, thanks to disinformation by media and faculty ideologues, has millions of young American fans.

Caruzo recalls how, around the year 2007, Chávez’s title morphed from “President” to “Commander-President”; and how, after the caudillo’s death, he officially came to be known as “Supreme and Eternal Commander of the Bolivarian Revolution.” Today, Chávez is a semi-divine figure. Reruns of his old TV show are still broadcast and are treated as “gospel.”

Meanwhile, Chávez’s successor Nicolas Maduro has introduced something called the “Fatherland Card” program, which was created with the help of Communist Chinese experts and based on China’s own “Social Credit System.” The program employs a massive database containing detailed personal data about Venezuela’s citizens, and the idea is that unless your personal record is perfect by chavista standards you’ll be denied access to job bonuses, welfare benefits, medicines, and the like.

Venezuelan refugees pouring into Colombia

In Venezuela, even as you’re forced to endure shortages of almost everything, you’re being fed massive doses of propaganda telling you that the system that’s starving you is, in fact, saving you, and that what they’re saving you from is American-style capitalism – which, of course, is exactly what is needed to turn your grinding deprivation into prosperity and your oppression into liberty. It’s pure Orwell, of course – war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Posted on November 5, 2019October 20, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

John Cusack, antisemite

Now 53, John Cusack has been a well-known film actor since he was a teenager. He’s starred in dozens of big pictures, including Grosse Point Blank, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Pushing Tin, High Fidelity, Runaway Jury, 1408, and The Butler.

But like many of the other actors we’ve discussed on this site, he’s also politically active. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he supported the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and backs him in the current presidential contest as well.

He didn’t pick up the activist stuff in Hollywood; he was raised on it. His parents were political activists too; he has described himself as having grown up with Philip and Daniel Berrigan, the radical Roman Catholic clerics the latter of whom had the distinction of being the first priest on the FBI’s “most wanted” list and ended up behind bars. Cusack has spoken of them in such a way as to suggest that they were role models for him.

Cusack shares his views regularly on Twitter. He is not known, shall we say, for his subtlety of thought and expression. In 2017 he tweeted a photo of President Trump alongside the quote “YER DEAD – GET YERSELF BURIED.” When it caused something of a controversy, he took it down.

Then, a couple of months ago, he retweeted an image of a giant hand crushing a bunch of people; on the shirtsleeve from which the giant hand protruded was a Star of David. Accompanying this Der Stürmer-type image was the following quotation, which was attributed to Voltaire: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Cusack supplemented the quotation with his own comment: “Follow the money.”

The point was clear: Jews run the world. Jews are all about money. Jews are crushing the rest of us. The tweet could hardly have been more stunningly antisemitic. Add to that the fact that the line he quoted about “find[ing] out who you are not allowed to criticize” was a statement not by Voltaire but by an American neo-Nazi named Kevin Alfred Strom.

When he was widely denounced for this breathtakingly obscene tweet, Cusack doubled down. “You think Israel isn’t commuting [sic] atrocities against Palestinians?” he wrote. “What planet are you on?” Eventually, however, the criticism got to be too much. At first, bizarrely, and pusillanimously, Cusack blamed his retweet on a bot. “How,” wondered Jewish writer Elad Nehorai, “does a bot get you to write ‘follow the money’ after sharing an overtly anti-Semitic image?” Eventually Cusack owned up to having posted the retweet and issued a wimpy sort-of-apology that only served to prove that he really isn’t terribly sharp. That apology was so lame that he then issued another apology, which also was lame. The response from David Baddiel, a Jewish comedian in the UK, was succinct and right on the mark: “John Cusack says he didn’t at first realise that the image was anti-Semitic. My, it’s a troublesome old blind spot for progressives, isn’t it?”

Meanwhile, in a Boston Jewish publication, a woman named Judy Bolton-Fasman posted an open letter to Cusack. Confessing to having had a crush on him in the 1990s, she said that while she too was a critic of some Israeli actions, “it must be said that Israeli citizens have died in Palestinian suicide bombings on buses, in malls and cafes just because they were Jews. There are frequent rocket attacks out of Gaza.” She asked him: “Have you been to Israel?….I’m not happy about walling off the West Bank where it divides neighborhoods and families. However, Israelis call it a security barrier with good reason. Even the most dovish Israeli will tell you the barrier has drastically reduced the number of terror attacks in Israel proper.” She added that she had “met incredible Israelis and Palestinians who are dedicated to achieving peace” and encouraged him to travel to Israel and meet them instead of just demonizing Jews. Good advice. But since the politics of a man like Cusack have less to do with the real world than with blind, stubborn ideological devotion, Ms. Bolton-Fasman is likely whistling in the wind.

Posted on August 22, 2019August 23, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Snowflake warriors

A decade or two ago, few would have paid attention to any event held by the Democratic Socialists of America. For almost nobody took socialism seriously. People remembered the USSR; they remembered the captive countries of Eastern Europe; they remembered the Gulag; and the memories were not pretty ones.

But America has changed. Memories of the grim reality of twentieth-century socialism have faded, and the old utopian dreams have made a resurgence. In 2019, in many circles, being a socialist is sexy. Young people who were born after the fall of the Iron Curtain are especially susceptible to its dubious charms. No surprise there: a huge percentage of them have learned their “history” from A People’s History of the United States, a patchwork of anti-American slurs by Howard Zinn, a card-carrying Communist, that is the most frequently assigned textbook in that field. Bernie Sanders’s promises of free this and free that during his campaigns for the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nomination brought him millions of followers who have been convinced that capitalism is a nasty, brutal, and heartlessly exploitative system while socialism is the political equivalent of unicorns and rainbows. A poll released in June showed that no fewer than forty percent of Americans prefer socialism to capitalism, and a majority of women aged 18 to 54 – the exact figure was 55% – said they would rather live under socialism than under the present American system.

So it is that when socialists get together nowadays, people listen. But what exactly are they listening to? On August 2-4, the Democratic Socialists of America held their annual convention. Writing in the Spectator, Will Lloyd provided the following summing-up:

How to give you a flavor of the event? Well, note the rules the convention followed:

Quiet rooms available for all attendees – but no aggressive scents in those rooms!

Use the proper doors and exits – no short cuts from the hall!

Wear proper credentials at all times – right-wing infiltrators might be trying to get in!

Try to be chill – take a deep breath!

Don’t talk to anybody – especially if they don’t have credentials!

Don’t talk to anybody from the press!

Don’t talk to the cops for any reason at all!

Please don’t clap – some comrades have sensitive hearing!

Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds, the epic account of the involvement of American socialist John Reed in the founding of the Soviet Union, portrayed Communist Party meetings, both in the U.S. and Russia, at which actual revolutionaries – some of them highly articulate intellectuals, others tough-as-leather labor-union types – fiercely debated strategies and tactics. Whatever their foibles, many of the real-life men and women depicted in those scenes were selflessly (if naively) devoted to their shared ideology, and had no way of realizing just how tragic the ultimate consequences of that ideology would be.

To watch videos of this year’s DSA convention is to view something entirely different. This was a get-together of trust-fund babies – privileged, cartoonishly self-absorbed brats who were born in the wake of a century of horrors spawned by socialism but who have embraced that ideology nonetheless because, in their spectacular historical ignorance and all-around naivete, they think America under a socialist government would allow them to spend their entire lives enjoying the same kind of total dependence they have enjoyed as children. Whereas Lenin, Trotsky, and their crew were scrappy sons of bitches, the DSA whippersnappers are very much of their own generation: they pose as combatants who are ready to take up arms against the USA – veritable Navy SEALs for the socialist cause! – but in fact (as illustrated by those rules about “aggressive scents” and “sensitive hearing”) they’re a flock of lambs, Gen Z snowflakes preoccupied with such contemporary no-no’s as misgendering and microaggressions.

The whole thing came off like a parody, starting with the silliness of them all calling one another “comrade.” At one point some beta male from Sacramento stands up in the audience and says “guys, can we please keep the chatter to a minimum” because “I’m…prone to sensory overload”; then, because Mr. Sacramento said “guys,” another would-be warrior rises to complain about his “gendered language.” Somehow we have the feeling these kids aren’t going to be running the country any time soon. But excessive sanguinity in the face of this foolishness is inadvisable: as the presence in the House of Representatives of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other young socialists has demonstrated, a handful of aggressive young people of this ilk can shift the center of the Democratic Party considerably leftward. So we shouldn’t be too dismissive about the destructive socioeconomic potential of these puerile puppy dogs.

Posted on August 13, 2019August 13, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Samuel L. Jackson, Twitter militant

We have to admit that we misinterpreted the headline at the Fox News website the other day. “Samuel L. Jackson,” it read, “doesn’t care if his Trump stance costs him fans.” Given that virtually everybody in Hollywood these days is an open, all-out, full-throated, full-time critic of President Trump, we assumed that Jackson must be an exception. Nope! He’s a member of the chorus, accusing Trump of “ruining the planet” and comparing him to a plantation owner.

It’s not clear why this is suddenly news, because a little research shows that Jackson, in addition to being an big Hollywood movie star known for such films as Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Django Unchained, has been pursuing something of a side career as a dyspeptic political commentator for a long time.

And before he was an actor, he wasn’t just a man of words – he was a man of action. At Morehouse College in the Sixties, he was a real live student radical. In 1969, he and several confrères held some of the college’s trustees hostage – yes, you read that right – in an effort to force the administration to make curricular changes. Later he got involved with Black Power leaders like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. “I was in that radical faction,” Jackson told People magazine in 2008. “We were buying guns, getting ready for armed struggle.”

Fortunately for Jackson, his mother slapped some sense in him. He ended up studying drama and “decided that theater would now be my politics.” So instead of ending up in prison, like H. Rap Brown, he now lives in the gated community of Beverly Park, California, in a Tudor-style house that’s been profiled in Architectural Digest, and until last year also owned an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was listed for $13 million. Now, instead of armed struggle, his personal revolution takes the form of political rants delivered via Twitter or in media interviews.

Back in 2012, for example, he told Politico that he’d voted for Barack Obama in 2008 “because he was black.” But in the end Obama hadn’t proven to be black enough for him. “Because, what’s a [N-word]? A [N-word] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [N-words] don’t have beers at the White House. [N-words] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [N-word] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the **** said that?’”

In an interview the next year, however, Jackson seemed to feel that Obama had become too black. According to The Independent, he“took issue with the US President dropping the ‘G’s at the end of his words.” Jackson offered the President this advice: “stop trying to ‘relate’. Be a leader. Be ****ing presidential.” He went on: “Look, I grew up in a society where I could say ‘I ain’t’ or ‘what it be’ to my friends. But when I’m out presenting myself to the world as me, who graduated from college, who had family who cared about me, who has a well-read background, I ****ing conjugate.” Jackson also predicted that “If Hillary Clinton decides to run, she’s going to kick their ****ing asses, and those mother****ers” – the Republicans – “would rather see the country go down in flames than let the times change.”

When Donald Trump stepped onto the political stage, Jackson was quick to compare him to P.T. Barnum. There ensued a Twitter war between the actor and the real-estate mogul, who in more congenial times, it turned out, had been golf buddies. Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jackson said that “If that mother****er becomes president, I’m moving my black [posterior] to South Africa.” (After Election Day 2016, however, he said he wasn’t moving anyplace.) Visiting Dubai in December 2016, Jackson expressed concern that Trump would “destroy Hollywood.” Yes, destroy Hollywood. “Hopefully we will be able to keep working and he won’t shut Hollywood down,” he said. “You know he could say, ‘Hollywood didn’t support me,’ so that’s it. Who knows what could happen.” There was no sign that Jackson was kidding.

In an April 2017 ad for a congressional candidate in Georgia, Jackson said: “Stop Donald Trump, the man who encourages racial and religious discrimination and sexism.” Last June, the actor sent the President a sarcastic happy-birthday tweet in which he implied that Trump and several of his closest associates, including Rudy Giuliani, were gay. In other tweets, Jackson has called Trump a “Hemorrhoid,” a “Busted Condom,” and a “canker sore.”

People with a connection to Trump have also incurred Jackson’s wrath. During the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Jackson tweeted about the judge’s “Lying Fratboy [Posterior].” He’s also harsh on black conservatives, comparing his character in Django Unchained, a house slave who believes in slavery and loves his master, to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Jackson poses as a tough-talking, street-smart guy who’s saying the gutsy things that nobody else dares say. In fact, nothing that he says about politics deviates in the slightest from the Hollywood party line. Nothing he says will ruffle the feathers of any of the friends and colleagues whom he encounters on movie sets and at awards ceremonies and at chic Beverly Hills eateries. But of course he’s not just another Tinseltown robot: he’s a guy who came frighteningly close to having a short and sanguinary career of beating people up and killing cops. So Donald Trump, and others whom Jackson despises, should count themselves lucky that his weapon of choice these days is not a 12-gauge shotgun and a Twitter account.

Posted on March 21, 2019March 17, 2019 by usefulstooges 1