At the heart of the dispute is Pilate’s question “What is truth?” To the revolution, Lake County was contradicting the truth, i.e., all cultures are equal; none is superior. By claiming America’s culture was superior, Mrs. Hart’s board had committed heresy. The revolution could not permit open defiance of a core dogma to be taught as truth to children in Lake County. So it went to battle stations. In the fall election, in a huge turnout, all supporters of the “America first” policy were defeated.
“The people turned out the extremists,” said Mr. Mullins.28
The episode exposes the true character of our new dominant culture. About its core beliefs, it is deeply intolerant and will not abide challenge or contradiction. Anyone who would teach children that America’s culture is superior is an “extremist” teaching a lie, who has no business in the public schools of the new America.
AS EQUALITY IS its core principle, the cultural revolution teaches that the real heroes of history are not the conquerors, soldiers, and statesmen who built the Western nations and created the great empires, but those who advanced the higher cause—the equality of peoples. Thus, the end of segregation in the South and of apartheid in South Africa are triumphs greater than the defeat of communism, and Mandela and Gandhi are the true moral heroes of the twentieth century. Thus, Martin Luther King stands tallest in the American pantheon, and any state that refuses to set aside a holiday to celebrate his birth is to be boycotted. As for George Washington, if his name is removed from schools, so be it. Was he not an owner of slaves? Did he not participate in America’s most egregious violation of human equality?
As equality is a first principle, one-person, one-vote democracy is the highest form of government and the only truly legitimate form. It alone may be imposed by force, as it was upon Germany and Japan, and should have been upon Iraq. Military intervention for national interests is selfish and ignoble, but moral intervention that sheds blood in the cause of democracy, as in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans—nothing is more pure.
By this standard, the revolution judges the morality of America’s wars. The War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Indian wars, and the Spanish-American War may have secured a continent at a tiny cost in lives, but these wars are forever sullied by the annexationist and chauvinist spirit of the America that fought them. And though Korea and Vietnam were fought to save small nations from murderous Asian communism, they were unwise or unjust wars. For we were allied with corrupt regimes and fought to keep those countries in our camp in a Cold War that never had the moral clarity of the war against fascism.
President Nixon’s support for General Pinochet’s overthrow of the Castroite Salvador Allende in Chile was an outrage. So, too, was Ronald Reagan’s assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting to recapture their country from the pro-Soviet Sandinistas. As for Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, to rescue that tiny island from the Stalinist thugs who murdered its Marxist ruler, Maurice Bishop—that was American aggression. But Clinton’s invasion of Haiti to restore to power the Marxist defrocked priest, Father Aristide—that was intervention on behalf of democracy and fully justified.
And so long as it is a “good war,” the end justifies the means in the catechism of the revolution. That Mr. Lincoln made himself an absolute dictator, trampled on the Constitution, imprisoned dissidents without trial, and unleashed Generals Sherman and Sheridan to burn the South to ashes was fine. The eradication of slavery justified the means employed, even if fellow Americans suffered terribly. As for “the Good War,” World War II, allying ourselves with the mass murderer Stalin and firebombing cities like Nagasaki, killing scores of thousands of women and children in hours, were acceptable, because our hearts were pure and our enemy was evil.
Richard Nixon is denounced for the “murder bombing” of Hanoi to free our POWs, bombing that North Vietnam said killed 1,900 people over thirteen days. Yet, Harry Truman is forever a hero even though he ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 140,000 civilians, and sent 2 million Russian prisoners of war back to be tortured and murdered by Stalin in Operation Keelhaul.
FOR THE CULTURAL revolution the enemy is always on the Right, and the revolution does not forgive or forget. Compare the remorseless pursuit to his grave of General Pinochet, the dictator who crushed Castroism in Chile, with the expressions of sorrow at the deaths of Mao’s partners in murder, Chou En-lai and Deng Xiaoping.
Byron De La Beckwith, charged with assassinating NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963, is tried, retried, and tried a third time, thirty years later, and dies in prison, as the revolution demands, even as it pleads for clemency for Leonard Peltier, who murdered two wounded FBI agents after a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation. The latest cultural icon is Mumia Abu-Jamal, who is on death row for murdering a policeman in Philadelphia in 1981 by emptying his gun into the wounded officer, who lay bleeding. One hundred academic historians have urged that Mumia be given a new trial and that the killing of that policeman be “viewed in the light of history.”29 As Peltier is an Indian and Mumia is black, they qualify as members of a victim class. But two dead FBI agents and a dead cop—three white males—do not.
THE EQUALITY THE revolution preaches is a corruption of Jefferson’s idea “All men are created equal.” Jefferson meant that all were endowed by their Creator with the same right to life, liberty, and property, and all must be equal under the law. He rejected egalitarianism. As he wrote John Adams in 1813: “I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent.”30
Measured by virtues and talents, it is more true to say that “no two men were ever created equal.” What America is about is not equality of condition or equality of result, but freedom, so a “natural aristocracy” of ability, achievement, virtue, and excellence—from athletics to the arts to the academy—can rise to lead, inspire, and set an example for us all to follow and a mark for us all to aim at. Hierarchies are as natural as they are essential. Consider the American institutions of excellence, from Microsoft to the New York Yankees, from the U.S. Marine Corps to the Mayo Clinic. How many are run on a one-person, one-vote principle?
As history demonstrates, all peoples, cultures, and civilizations are not equal. Some have achieved greatness often, others never. All lifestyles are not equal. All religions are not equal. All ideas are not equal. Indeed, what is true martyrdom but that most eloquent and compelling of all testimonies that all ideas are not equal.
While all ideas have a right to be heard, none has an automatic right to be respected. The First Amendment requires that we tolerate the false as well as the true, the foolish as well as the wise; but nations and societies advance by separating the wheat from the chaff, and discarding the chaff. The revolution’s idea of equality is ideological, utopian, absurd, and ultimately ruinous. Only a society adrift would award the black berets of rangers, who have volunteered to take the gravest risks and gone through the most arduous training, to every clerk, cook, and bottle washer in the army. Was it not Lord Acton who said that if democracy dies it is always equality that kills it?
THIS DEBASED FORM of equality traces its paternity to the French, not the American, Revolution; to nineteenth-century socialists, not to the eighteenth-century American patriots. Indeed, as all men are endowed differently with gifts, talents, and virtues, the only way to achieve equality of result is tyranny. And that is not America. Those who endlessly revise scholastic aptitude tests, because the results collide with their preconceptions, then give extra points to students based on ethnicity, then throw the tests out because they still do not yield the desired results, are hopeless ideologues whose false ideas about human nature will never survive their first collision with reality.
The equality the revolution teaches may be found in the final results of the “Caucus race” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. After all the participants had all run around in circles for half an hour, they asked, “But who has won?”
And the Dod
o said, “Everybody has won and all shall have prizes.”31
MERE TOLERANCE, SAID G. K. Chesterton, “is the virtue of men who no longer believe in anything.” But our new faith is tolerant only about what it considers inconsequential: sex, pornography, filthy language, boorish manners, slovenly dress, and obscene art. It has no tolerance for those who defy its secularist dogmas.
In the new dispensation you can make a movie depicting Jesus Christ as a wimp who lusts after Mary Magdalene, as in The last Temptation of Christ. But suggest a link between heredity and intelligence, as Charles Murray did in The Bell Curve, and you will learn what it means to cross the revolution. A local druggist may sell condoms to thirteen-year-olds, but sell cigarettes to the same kids and you will be prosecuted for endangering their health and imperiling their morals. Books that proclaim that “God is dead,” or that St. Paul was a homosexual, or that celibacy is crippling, or that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” will attract warm reviews for “boldness,” “creativity,” and “irreverence.” But slip and use a racial slur, as Senator Byrd did, or a vulgarism about homosexuals, as Rep. Dick Armey famously did in his malapropism “Barney Fag,” and you will not escape the whipping post.
In the nineteenth century, blasphemy was a crime in many states. Today, blasphemy, vulgarity, and obscenities are acceptable, even on prime time, but ethnic humor is “hate speech” that must be punished severely. We can “save the Baptists,” says Darwinist David Dennett, but “not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.”32 Dennett warns Creationists: “You are free to preserve or create any religious creed you wish, so long as it does not become a public nuisance … . Those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strains of their heritage alive, we shall be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm.”33
There is the militant spirit of the modernist orthodoxy.
HATE CRIMES
Like any religion, the new dispensation has its own catalog of moral crimes. The most odious are “hate crimes,” assaults motivated by hatred of a victim’s color, creed, national origin, or sexual orientation.
Now, clearly, the murders of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard were cowardly and contemptible acts that merit the maximum punishment. But why were these two murders, of the fifteen thousand committed each year, made a cause of special denunciation by our political and cultural elites? After all, the killers were nobodies. In the case of Byrd, ex-cons high on drugs; in the case of Shepard, thugs, nonentities.
True, the killing of Byrd, tied to a truck and dragged to his death, was particularly gruesome, but that did not qualify it as a hate crime. It was a hate crime because Byrd was black and his killers chose him because he was black. Shepard was beaten unconscious and chained to a fence in a freezing countryside after he made sexual advances to one of two thugs, who then decided to rob and kill him. His murder was a hate crime because Shepard was homosexual and his killers were white heterosexuals, enraged that one of them had been propositioned. Had Shepard been murdered in the same brutal fashion by ex-lovers, his killing would not have qualified as a hate crime, nor would his death have gotten presidential notice.
All of us have biases, so let the author concede his. Had the killers of Matthew Shepard chosen a sixteen-year-old girl rather than a twenty-one-year-old gay man, her rape-murder would have been to me an even greater evil. But the killers in both cases should suffer the same penalty. And if the killers of James Byrd had been black, or Byrd white, his dragging-death would have been an equally vicious atrocity, justifying the same penalty.
Why were these two cruel murders singled out by the president and the press? Because they fit the profile perfectly. In the catechism of the revolution, the murder of homosexuals because they are gay, and of blacks because they are black, are the worst of crimes, worse even than the rape-murder of a child. How do we know?
Less than a year after Shepard’s murder, two men in Arkansas were charged in the murder of thirteen-year-old Jesse Dirkhising. Here are the details, as reported by the Associated Press:
According to police, Davis Carpenter Jr., 38, and Joshua Brown, 22, drugged and blindfolded Jesse Dirkhising, gagged him with underwear, and strapped him to a mattress face down with duct tape and belts. Then the boy was repeatedly raped and sodomized with various objects before he suffocated because of the position he was in, investigators said.
At the apartment the police found handwritten instructions and a diagram of how to position the boy. Other notes described apparently unfulfilled fantasies of molesting other children …
On the night of Jesse’s death, Brown repeatedly raped the boy while Carpenter watched, police said. Brown took a break to eat a sandwich and noticed the boy had stopped breathing.34
Carpenter and Brown were lovers, and the former masturbated as Brown raped the boy. Yet this torture-rape-murder got almost no national press. Why? Because this was a “sex crime,” not a “hate crime,” and because to show homosexuals in acts of sadistic barbarism does not fit the villain-victim script of our cultural elite. To spotlight the brutality of Carpenter and Brown would have set back the cause. Writes media critic Brent Bozell:
Had Jesse Dirkhising been shot inside his Arkansas school he would have been an immediate national story. Had he been openly gay and his attackers heterosexual, the crime would have led all the networks. But no liberal media outlet would dare to be the first to tell a grisly murder story which has as its villains two gay men.35
When Brown’s trial was held, the Washington Times, almost alone among national newspapers, reported the proceedings. “The discrepancy [in national coverage of the Shepard and Dirkhising murders] isn’t just real,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, a homosexual and columnist for the New Republic, “it’s staggering.”36 Sullivan found three thousand stories on Shepard’s murder in a search of the Nexis database the first month after the killing, but only forty-six stories on the slaying of Jesse Dirkhising. FOX NEWS was the only network to report on Brown’s murder trial and conviction. The Big Media have been converted into a communications arm of the revolution.
SOON AFTER BYRD’S dragging death, six-year-old Jake Robel died the same horrible way. As his mother Christy went into a take-out sandwich shop in Independence, Missouri, Jake was left strapped in his seat belt in the back of her Chevy Blazer. Christy left the keys in the ignition. Kim Davis, thirty-four, just out of jail, watched her go into the sandwich shop and jumped in the driver’s seat. Christy Robel ran to rescue her son, opening the back door to pull him out. Davis shoved the boy out, still tied to his seat belt. Christy Robel screamed hysterically for him to stop. Davis looked into the backseat, then into the rearview mirror, and sped off, dragging the boy five miles until stopped by motorists who spotted the boy’s body being dragged along the highway. Why did this crime not get national attention? Because Jake Robel was white and Davis is black. Hate crimes are the cultural elite’s way of racially profiling white males.
TEN DAYS BEFORE Christmas of 2000, an atrocity more evil than what was done to Matthew Shepard or James Byrd was committed in Wichita.
Five young people were at a party when their home was invaded by brothers, ages twenty-three and twenty. The five were put into a car, driven to an ATM machine, forced to withdraw their money, and taken onto a soccer field. The two women were forced to strip and were raped. Then the victims were forced to have sex with each other at gunpoint. All were made to kneel down. Each was shot in the head. The three young men and one woman died. The other woman, left for dead, ran bleeding and naked for a mile in the cold to find help, as the brothers drove back to ransack the house.
Heather Muller, twenty-five, was remembered for her singing voice. Aaron Sander had just returned from Mount St. Mary’s College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he had decided to become a priest. Bradley Herman, twenty-seven, was Aaron’s friend. Jason Befort, twenty-six, was a science teacher and coach at Augusta High. He had planned to propose
to the woman who survived and had bought a ring and a book on how to go about it. “Jason didn’t get the chance to make the proposal or give her the ring,” writes Frank Morriss in the Wanderer. “The Catholic church in his hometown of Pratt wasn’t big enough for his funeral; so, it was moved to the larger Methodist Church.”37 In the minutes before he died, Jason Befort was forced to watch as the woman he hoped to marry was raped.
What Morriss did not mention was that all the victims were white and the killers black. Had the races been reversed, this would have been the hate crime of the decade. Yet this atrocity never made Brokaw, never made Rather, never made Jennings, never made page one of the national press. Why not? “The story did not fit the politically correct national melodrama of black victimhood, white oppression,” writes columnist and author David Horowitz.38
Mr. Horowitz seems to have a point. According to the 1999 Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, African Americans, though only 13 percent of our population, are responsible for 42 percent of all violent crimes and over half of the murders in the United States.39 The statistics on interracial crimes show an even more shocking pattern of prejudice.
In 1990, Prof. William Wilbanks of the Department of Criminal Justice at Florida International University was angered by a campaign to reduce black-on-black crime, as it seemed to treat assaults on whites as less worthy of condemnation. After an in-depth study of the 1987 Justice Department figures on victims of crime, Wilbanks discovered and reported the following:
The Death of the West Page 7