Finally, it’s worth noting that Yoda Lakoff generally steers clear of issues involved with the abortion movement. I guess it’s hard to find anything “nurturant” about that.
Now—and this may surprise you—I do not think George Lakoff is evil, or even devious. He is simply wrong, and history has proved that over and over again. There is no doubt in my mind that he and the S-P foot soldiers who follow him believe they own the high moral ground. In theory, you see, the S-P movement has it all: equality, humanism, generosity, and universal empathy. That’s the theory. But in the real world, the S-P platform would be impossible to carry out because of one inconvenient natural impediment: human nature.
If greed, venality, fanaticism, sociopathy, sloth, and emotional illness did not exist, then the S-P vision might have a chance at success. But as we’ve seen throughout history, utopian philosophies are impossible to impose and totalitarianism is often the result of trying. Hello, Soviet Union, Cuba, and Maoist China.
Professor Lakoff is not some wide-eyed nut sending out Marxist propaganda on a low-rent Web site. He’s a realist. He readily admits his S-P movement has so far failed to win over the hearts and minds of the majority of Americans. He blames this on the dishonest conservative movement that intimidates politicians, and on the sheer stupidity of the regular folks. But Lakoff advises his S-P soldiers never to say that in public. Instead, the radical professor issues the following dicta in his book to progressives who engage in public debate:
• “Never answer a question framed from your opponent’s point of view…this may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap.” (Now you know why I have instituted a “No Spin Zone” on my TV and radio programs—the S-Ps have been taught to dodge questions and recite rehearsed answers. I stop that cold, inspiring Lakoff’s next offering.)
• “Stay away from setups. Fox News shows and other rabidly conservative shows try to put you in an impossible situation, where a conservative host sets the frame and insists on it….” (That would be me, and the “impossible position” is that the S-Ps have to answer my direct questions or be labeled a dodger. That’s okay on the ball field in Los Angeles, but death on a national talk program.)
My question is this: Why would Lakoff tell his acolytes not to answer direct questions, since, as he claims, they hold all the moral high ground? Well, the answer is simple: The secular-progressive movement is so radical and desires such a departure from American tradition that once the folks understand the implications of implementing the S-P agenda, rather than simply debating the utopian theory behind it, they will recoil. Therefore, stealth and subterfuge must be used by the S-P armies of the night if they are to have any chance of succeeding in altering the social landscape of the country.
I enjoyed reading Lakoff’s book, because he is so honest on the page. He makes no pretenses. He wants a new America, free from the old traditions that he feels do not “nurture” the individual. The guy’s a fanatic, no question, but at least he doesn’t hide behind a façade.
Lakoff is godlike to the S-P faithful, and it’s easy to understand why. He’s a stealth warrior, a battlefield theorist of the first order. The committed S-Ps march to his drumbeat all day long. Howard Dean even wrote the introduction to the Elephant book. (Isn’t it amazing how close Dean came to actually acquiring serious power in this country? In 2004, the S-Ps were sooooooo close.)
Anyway, I’d love to get Professor Lakoff on The Factor, but he’s too wily for that. He knows I have his number and he knows the only media game in town that will expose his vision is the Fox Newschannel. So he avoids me and the network.
But he can’t avoid this book.
Far more malevolent and powerful than George Lakoff will ever be is the moneyman of the secular-progressive movement, George Soros. Without this dangerous guy, Lakoff and his crew might as well spit into the wind. Soros is El Jefe of the S-P forces, a man whose vast fortune is directed toward undermining traditional America and replacing it with a so-called Open Society. George Soros is the puppet master, the man with the plan, a ferociously far-left force about whom most Americans know little or nothing.
George Soros, S-P jefe, puppet master, and moneyman.
Born George Schwartz to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1930, Soros assumed the identity of a gentile boy when the Nazis invaded at the start of World War II. Young George survived the Germans but fled Hungary when the Russians occupied the country after the surrender of the Third Reich.
Soros wound up in London, studied at the London School of Economics, then migrated to America in 1956, where he began an investment fund that eventually made him one of the richest men in the world. Forbes magazine estimates his personal wealth at more than $7 billion. Along the moneymaking trail, Soros was convicted of insider trading in France in 1988, earning a $2 million fine. He has gained a reputation as a ruthless currency trader who often dances on the edge of illegality. In 1992, he made $1 billion in a single day by betting that England would devalue the national currency.
Now an American citizen, Soros keeps much of his vast fortune in banks on the Dutch island of Curaçao, where his Quantum Fund is registered. That means Soros can dodge many U.S. corporate taxes even though he himself is based in New York City. By the way, George Soros is on record as wanting affluent Americans to pay higher taxes, even as he operates a lucrative real estate company from Bermuda—another place where he can avoid U.S. taxes.
What kind of man is Soros? Well, he does not believe in God, his social philosophy is libertarian, and his political outlook is far, far left. According to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Soros has donated “hundreds of millions of dollars” to American left-wing causes. At this point, he is the prime financier of a number of operations on the Internet that consistently smear conservative and traditional Americans.
Up until the attacks on 9/11, Soros was just another ideologue screaming for legalized drugs (Joseph Califano calls him “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization”), euthanasia, and “progressive” taxation. But after the Al Qaeda attack, Soros became even more radicalized and more motivated. Through his Open Society Institute, which operates in at least fifty countries, he began funneling millions to groups opposed to America’s war on terror and especially to those who criticized President Bush. According to the Center for Public Integrity, Soros spent $24 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.
But most disturbing are his statements about the terror war and his support for a convicted terrorist enabler, New York attorney Lynne Stewart, who is currently in prison. More on her in a bit. Soros wrote the following words in the Atlantic Monthly: “Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular.”
Yeah, so what? The billionaire followed up that observation by taking out an ad in the Wall Street Journal that stated: “The war on terror as we have waged it since 9/11 has done more harm than good.”
To whom? Whom exactly is Soros pulling for? It isn’t the United States, as he has compared the Bush administration to the Third Reich, according to an article written by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post. And in a New Yorker magazine profile he opined that the statements then–attorney general John Ashcroft made after 9/11 reminded him of how Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels jazzed up the German people’s hatreds and insecurities before World War II.
Soros expanded on his post-9/11 angst in an interview with Fortune magazine: “The crisis now is the crisis of global capitalism and a political and military crisis. It has been brought about by the exploitation of September 11th by the Bush administration to pursue its policy of dominating the world in the guise of fighting terrorism.”
In no-spin words, George Soros believes that the United States does not have the right to act unilaterally to fight terrorism, although, to be fair, he did not object to the removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A signi
ficant hallmark of the S-P movement, by the way, is that, with rare exceptions, a world consensus is needed in order to use military force. (Thank you, President Hernandez.) This, of course, is off-the-charts dangerous, because much of the world despises America and is decidedly not looking out for us.
And if all this weren’t disturbing enough, George Soros then took it a step further by actually helping an aforementioned terrorist enabler. On February 10, 2005, radical New York City lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, defrauding the United States, and making false statements.
A jury found that Ms. Stewart had smuggled messages from her jailed client—Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman—to his Islamic terrorist supporters in Egypt. As you may remember, Rahman is the blind Muslim cleric who was convicted of plotting to blow up the United Nations and planning the first bombing of the World Trade Center, among other things. He had also urged his followers to kill all Jews. Rahman is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado.
Anyway, the sixty-six-year-old Stewart, who had openly advocated violence in the past, is now a convicted felon essentially for helping her pal Rahman. And guess who paid some of her legal bills: George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Nice. One footnote: Both Soros and Stewart come from Jewish backgrounds, which is peculiar in light of their support for radical Islamists who want to re-create the Holocaust.
Continuing to operate pretty much under the radar, Soros has cemented his alliance with another billionaire, seventy-year-old Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Insurance Corporation. These guys are working feverishly to ensure that the secular-progressive battalions are supplied with plenty of resources and firepower by which to pursue their global foreign-policy strategy and radical domestic agenda. Their primary attack vehicle is the far-left Web site MoveOn.org, which routinely slanders and smears perceived opposition. With MoveOn as a conduit, Soros and Lewis funnel money to other smear Websites that target individuals in the media and politics for personal attacks. This is a nasty, nasty business and one that is constantly “evolving.”
Peter Lewis, another major funder of S-P causes.
Even with the MoveOn hatchet machine in good fighting trim, both Soros and Lewis realize that they must reach beyond the Internet to move the S-P movement ahead, so they have mustered various elite media people to carry their water. Aforementioned New York Times columnists Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Bob Herbert have all referenced far-left Web site postings in complimentary terms in their articles. Harvard pundit Alan Dershowitz used Internet smear material in a Los Angeles debate. New York Daily News entertainment columnist Jack Matthews and the paper’s vicious gossip writers routinely use smear items fed to them by radical-left guttersnipes. Dallas Morning News columnist Macarena Hernandez and Denver Post columnist Cindy Rodriguez used information from Web sites under their bylines (Ms. Rodriguez was subsequently embarrassed by corrections printed by her employer). In fact, the far-left Internet smear merchants have solid access to the so-called elite media, something the far-right Internet bloggers will never have.
And these Internet guttersnipes will turn on their own in a heartbeat, as Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell found out in January 2006. Ms. Howell made the mistake of pointing out that indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff funneled money to Democrats as well as Republicans. Even though that is true according to prosecutors, the far-left smear merchants organized a personal attack campaign against Ms. Howell. The result: The Post had to shut down its Web site after Howell was inundated with obscene threats. George Soros must be very proud.
But give S-P general Soros some credit for strategy. In just a few short years, he has developed a defamation pipeline that can instantly injure anyone in the United States. He has also used organizations like the NAACP and, ironically, the Anti-Defamation League to do his bidding, as both organizations have used quotes from far-left Web sites he has funded.
To sum up, Soros is a smart, ruthless ideologue who will stop at nothing to advance the secular-progressive offensive. He has no scruples, ethics, or sense of fair play. The guy reminds me of Colonel Banastre “Butcher” Tarleton, the most justly hated Redcoat during the Revolutionary War. Soros and Tarleton can both be associated with take-no-prisoner policies: In both cases, their prey, whether traditionalists today or colonial rebel fighters in the eighteenth century, were simply people trying to strengthen their country.
I mean it. For traditional-minded Americans, George Soros is public enemy number one. Without his unlimited cash (along with that of Peter Lewis), the S-P movement could not attack so readily and so effectively—and with such venom. Soros envisions a libertine society that soaks the rich (except for him) and forms no judgments on personal behavior. His one-world philosophy would obliterate the uniqueness of America and downsize its superpower status. His secular approach would drastically diminish Judeo-Christian philosophy in America and encourage his own spiritual philosophy: atheism. George Soros is truly an imposing force, and his elite media allies are making him even more so. We ignore him at our peril.
He who controls the air is likely to win the battle.
—THE ART OF CULTURE WAR, O’REILLY TZU
Most politicians in America, with the obvious exception of the President, hold only casual power; that is, they can make small changes and minor contributions to the country in their various capacities. The media hold the ultimate power to persuade. Without control of the mass media, the secular-progressives will never achieve power in this country, because, as I’ve mentioned earlier, most Americans are traditionalists and don’t want drastic change.
But guess what? The mass media are not “most Americans.” They consider themselves smarter than the average bear (that’s you) and are tilting toward the S-P agenda more than ever before. The battle over Christmas in 2005 was the most illuminating example of this; we’ll deal with that incredible controversy shortly.
Over the past ten years, I have fought scores of battles against my peers in the media, and, as mentioned, I put their support of the S-P agenda at about 75 percent. My analytical conclusion was reached the hard way—I have been hammered each time I put forth a traditional point of view or championed a traditional cause.
For the past thirty years, television news has been dominated by left-leaning individuals who gave the S-P leadership hope. If the TV big shots sympathized with liberal causes, the S-P generals rightly reasoned, then the door was ajar for a more radical message, but that message had to be marketed with a delicate touch. Full-blown radical thought along the lines of Noam Chomsky, for example, would be impossible to place on the TV news. No, small doses of secular-progressive philosophy would be presented under the guise of liberal politics, and gradually the nation would be more open to things like gay marriage and legalized drugs. The strategy has worked very nicely, indeed.
Just for fun and insight, let’s profile some of America’s most powerful electronic media people vis-à-vis the culture war. As the title of this chapter says, some of these are the “enablers at the top”—people whose S-P proclivities set the tone and agenda for their powerful news organizations. I will analyze only people I know personally. We begin at the very top—the network anchors.
Dan Rather: A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Rather is an emotional reporter who often does not even attempt to hide his feelings. He lost his job on The CBS Evening News because of the President Bush/ National Guard fiasco. You could not have missed this debacle, but most of the public read the situation wrong. True, Rather too eagerly smelled a huge story and has little use for George W. Bush, but he did not intentionally put a fake report on the air, as alleged in many conservative precincts. Instead, Rather left the micro work to his producer, Mary Mapes, who, in the end, could not authenticate key documents essential to proving the main point: that President Bush had used connections to avoid going to Vietnam in the sixties. As you know, Mapes was fired over the botched story, Rather demoted. Sad, but a fair outcome, because the
stakes on that story were so high. It could have tilted the presidential election.
Dan Rather’s S-P leanings overrode his basic instincts for impartial reporting.
Some believe what happened to Dan Rather was his karma. I can’t argue with that. Rather did have it in for the committed right wing in this country much more so than he did for the committed left. I believe he thought he tried to be fair, but his emotions and the liberal culture he worked in often overrode that effort.
Here’s some personal backup for that opinion. As a young correspondent working for CBS News in the early eighties, I put together a tough report on the summer homosexual invasion of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Every weekend in the season, thousands of gays would descend on this small Cape Cod town, which was originally a Portuguese-American fishing village. While most of the gay visitors behaved themselves, some partied very publicly and explicitly. My crew filmed some pretty shocking stuff in the streets, and then we interviewed people in both camps. Predictably, most Provincetown officials back then were outraged at the sexual carnival, while gay leaders defensively chalked it up to a few idiots. Besides, they said, don’t heterosexuals exhibit similar behavior on spring break?
My report was fair and balanced, but the footage of gay misbehavior was disturbing even though we blurred it on the TV screen. Dan Rather and his executive producer, Howard Stringer (now CEO at Sony), watched the piece, then promptly killed it. One of their minions told me it was too explosive and Rather and Stringer simply did not want the heat they anticipated from gay activists. End of story, literally.
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