9 October 2007 @ 7:03AM >> The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday by Peter Berkowitz. In it, he mentions the premiere of Indoctrinate U at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and refers to the film as “riveting.”

1 October 2007 >> National Review’s Stanley Kurtz attended the Indoctrinate U premiere:

Last Friday I attended the world premiere of Evan Coyne Maloney’s film, Indoctrinate U, before a packed house of 500 at the Kennedy Center. There were many students, and a number of professors as well. I’d seen the film a couple of times at press screenings, but was totally unprepared for the raucous audience reception.

The press screenings were quiet, with the main response being horror at the nightmarish incidents of political correctness chronicled by Maloney. This time, however, the audience roared with laughter through the first two-thirds of the film-to the point where lines were drowned out by the audience roar. The laughter abated toward the end, from sheer exhaustion. The latter part of the film brought a major applause line-when the topic turned to bans on military recruitment and the Supreme Court Solomon Amendment case. One line about half-way through the film-about what really motivates professors who indoctrinate their students-brought the house down.

Yes, this movie tells a series of heart-breaking tales. But the political correctness on display is ludicrous and laughable-and I can assure you that laugh is exactly what this audience did. So add that point to “Reeducation Camp.” To sign up for a local screening of the film, to follow its film-festival tour, or to order a DVD when it becomes available (soon), head over to the Indoctrinate U website.

15 September 2007 @ 12:13PM >> Syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock discusses Indoctrinate U in his latest piece.

21 August 2007 @ 9:46AM >> Mark your calendars for the evening of Friday, September 28th, when Indoctrinate U will make its public debut at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Tickets are now on sale for the event, which is organized by the American Film Renaissance.

Tickets are also available for the after-party to take place across the street at 600 Restaurant in the infamous Watergate Hotel.

Dates for screenings in other cities will be announced once the details have been set.

Update: The screening has sold out! Sorry to everyone unable to buy tickets.

19 August 2007 @ 2:09PM >> Today’s New York Times profiles Thor Halvorssen, one of the producers of Indoctrinate U.

The piece quotes Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock as saying Indoctrinate U “could be a lightning rod.” Spurlock adds, “Movies that get attention and spark a dialogue, get people talking on news shows, can be profitable at the box office.”

Hopefully the Hollywood gatekeepers will give us a chance to prove him right!

8 August 2007 >> Damian Thompson, a columnist with London’s Telegraph, recently wrote about Indoctrinate U, calling the film “a documentary that all of you should see.”

Mr. Thompson covered this film project in a piece published by the Telegraph two years ago, back when the working title was “Ministry of Truth.”

31 July 2007 @ 12:01PM >> Over at the Indoctrinate U film website, we are starting to post some of the scenes we loved but ended up having to cut from the film.

The first deleted scene is called “Columbia Quiz.”

This less-than-five-minute video may prove embarrassing to the administration of Columbia University, which very clearly did not want me filming—unless I could convince them that my film would paper over the truth and make the university look good.

Sorry, Columbia!

24 July 2007 @ 8:14AM >> Ryan Latimer of the pop culture website 411mania.com recently conducted an interview with me regarding the film Indoctrinate U and the state of America’s campuses. The interview can be read here.

27 June 2007 @ 8:28AM >> Today’s New York Times contains a discussion of Indoctrinate U and the issue of free speech on campus.

Most of the article was spent addressing cases that weren’t in the film, rather than addressing what was in the film. The author also claims that “professors, administrators and students say the national picture is far more complicated than that pictured in ‘Indoctrinate U,’” although I don’t know how they could know that, because none of those people actually saw the film.

One of the examples cited in the article (but not the film) was the case of a student paper published by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent and Conservative Student Alliance. It was an odd selection of cases if the point was to argue that there’s more “nuance” to reality than what is shown in Indoctrinate U, because a close inspection of this case shows that it actually backs up the thesis of my film.

The paper was de-funded and shut down for a year after publishing a piece criticizing the school’s funding of special “social centers” for minority and gay students. But because the paper was eventually allowed to start publishing again—the following year—the Vassar case is presented as one in which “[u]ltimately, free speech was respected.”

Sorry, but shutting down a paper for a year is not a benign event, and it is certainly not one in which we can say “free speech was respected.” If Homeland Security shut down the Times for a year after exposing ways that we track terrorist financing, I’m sure they’d understand my position on this.

Rather than address the multiple cases in the film where people were told to see school psychologists because they had the wrong set of views, rather than address the fact that people’s academic careers were put in jeopardy for things like being registered in the “wrong” political party, this piece ignores the evidence presented in the film to set up an alternative straw man to knock down.

And when the author finally gets around to discussing cases that are actually in the film, he minimizes them by leaving out the most vital information.

One student, he says, “underwent a daylong disciplinary hearing for posting a flier.” Actually, that student had the police called on him, he was ordered to see a psychologist, he was questioned by an attorney without being allowed to have one of his own, he was threatened with expulsion, and he was “convicted” by the university for an offense that they couldn’t even define when asked.

The student’s crime? Posting a flyer which promoted an upcoming speech by an author named Mason Weaver. It merely had a picture of him, the title of his book, and the date, time and location of the event. Yet university regarded the flyers as “literature of an offensive racial nature,” and used it to railroad a student whose views they didn’t like. This case lasted 18 months and ended up in federal court before the student finally prevailed.

I think all that amounts to a tad more than “a daylong disciplinary hearing.”

To be honest, I expected worse treatment from the Times. And being written about in the Times—even negatively—is probably better than being ignored, so on the whole, I’m happy that this piece ran.

But I just wish the author addressed cases that I actually covered in the film, rather than ones I didn’t.

21 June 2007 @ 10:06AM >> MSNBC took a detailed took at political contributions made by reporters and found some numbers that, to me anyway, aren’t terribly surprising:

[We] identified 144 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 17 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

[...]

The pattern of donations, with nearly nine out of 10 giving to Democratic candidates and causes, appears to confirm a leftward tilt in newsrooms — at least among the donors, who are a tiny fraction of the roughly 100,000 staffers in newsrooms across the nation.

The donors said they try to be fair in reporting and editing the news. One of the recurring themes in the responses is that it’s better for journalists to be transparent about their beliefs, and that editors who insist on manufacturing an appearance of impartiality are being deceptive to a public that already knows journalists aren’t without biases.

“Our writers are citizens, and they’re free to do what they want to do,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick, who has 10 political donors at his magazine. “If what they write is fair, and they respond to editing and counter-arguments with an open mind, that to me is the way we work.”

The openness didn’t extend, however, to telling the public about the donations. Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.

Several of the donating journalists said they had no regrets, whatever the ethical concerns.

“Probably there should be a rule against it,” said New Yorker writer Mark Singer, who wrote the magazine’s profile of Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, then gave $250 to America Coming Together and its get-out-the-vote campaign to defeat President Bush. “But there’s a rule against murder. If someone had murdered Hitler — a journalist interviewing him had murdered him — the world would be a better place. As a citizen, I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don’t regret it.”

Ah yes, the fine reporter would have killed President Bush—who is just like Hitler—but darn it, that’s illegal. So instead he gave $250 to a left-wing group.

[Note: After publishing this post, a reader pointed out that the Mark Singer quote I originally cited no longer reflected the quote contained in the article on the MSNBC website. However, the Wayback Machine indicates that the original version of the MSNBC article was as I quoted it.]

There’s a longstanding tradition that journalists don’t cheer in the press box. They have opinions, like anyone else, but they are expected to keep those opinions out of their work. Because appearing to be fair is part of being fair, most mainstream news organizations discourage marching for causes, displaying political bumper stickers or giving cash to candidates.

Appearing to be fair is about as related to being fair as appearing to be pregnant is to actually being pregnant. A woman I know was once asked how far along her pregnancy was. She wasn’t pregnant. And she was not amused.

If Mark Singer had not contributed $250 to America Coming Together, he would appear to be more fair. But in the absense of that contribution, he would still be a journalist who implies that President Bush should be murdered because he’s morally equivalent to Hitler.

Sure, Singer might appear more fair, but would you trust him to actually be fair?

Me neither.

---

Related: A study on party affiliation of New York Times editorial staffers.

20 June 2007 @ 5:33PM >> In today’s New York Post, film critic Kyle Smith interviews me about Indoctrinate U, which he declares “alarming and funny.”

3 June 2007 @ 1:39PM >> On Friday, the 20,000th person requested a screening of Indoctrinate U. And yesterday, another positive review of the film was published, this time in the Rocky Mountain News, courtesy of columnist Linda Seebach who called the film “excellent.”

I will take those two developments as an excuse to kick back and relax a bit. Posting may be light during the upcoming week. (Then again, blogging is an addiction with severe withdrawal symptoms, so we’ll see...)

Update: An e-mailer asks the current count of screening requests: 21,255 as of this writing on Sunday afternoon.

23 May 2007 >> Stanley Kurtz of National Review, who wrote a piece about Indoctrinate U after our Tribeca Film Center media screening at the end of April, has now published a much longer review. Here’s a taste:

Why do people see campus “political correctness” so differently? Conservatives know it’s a problem. Even some on the Left recognize that the campus marketplace of ideas has been replaced by a monopoly (and they’re fine with that). Others of good will don’t quite know what to make of the many highly publicized “anecdotes” about campus P.C. Are these merely isolated incidents, or symptoms of a pervasive problem? One of the virtues of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s powerful new documentary, is that it helps us answer the “isolated anecdote” argument — both intellectually, and at a gut level.

[...]

At one level, Maloney overcomes the “isolated anecdote” charge by graphically conveying the results of various studies of campus political bias. Over the past few years, these empirical studies have shifted the balance in our public debate over campus political correctness, and Maloney does a great job of bringing it all across visually. Yet the real power of this film lies in those “nightmare” cases. By showing the faces and bringing us the words of the individuals involved — and by describing the battles themselves in some detail — Maloney allows us to see that many P.C. “anecdotes” are anything but isolated.

[...]

I guess it takes a movie to bring across the amazing, campus-wide power of even a single expertly conducted case of P.C. intimidation.

[...]

When the film is over, you’ll feel in the pit of your stomach what the unfortunates on screen already know: what’s happened to them is actually a threat being leveled at you.

18 May 2007 @ 7:14PM >> Earlier today, The Weekly Standard published a nice review of my upcoming film Indoctrinate U. The review was also featured on Drudge Report.

30 April 2007 @ 6:47PM >> Two writers for National Review have commented on the film Indoctrinate U. Stanley Kurtz wrote:

Last week I attended the premiere of Indoctrinate U, Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary about campus political correctness. It’s a fun and powerful piece of work that deserves a wide audience. The film features plenty of encounters between Maloney and college officials who, after being embarrassed by Maloney’s questions, invariably summon police to have him evicted. These confrontations are entertaining, but the real force of this film flows from Maloney’s recounting of a series of incidents of campus political correctness. I had never heard of any of these cases. Yet each of them is remarkable.

[...]

The end result of this torrent of outrages is that foes of campus PC have grown jaded. That’s where Indoctrinate U comes in. This film hits you in the gut, in a way that no column or blog post can.

Meanwhile, Carol Iannone called Indoctrinate U “a terrific must-see” and added:

It is sound, shocking—even to someone who knows a lot about political coercion on today’s campuses—and also, amazingly, highly entertaining. It is both amusing and sobering at once. It deserves widespread distribution in theatres across America.

18 April 2007 >> New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine suffered severe injury in a car accident last week, and I wish him the quickest, most pain-free recovery possible. I feel for the friends and relatives forced to watch him suffer through his treatments as the doctors try to repair the damage. A car accident of that magnitude is a horrific trauma for anyone to go through, much less someone who must do so while under the media’s microscope.

It’s a bit crass to use a human tragedy to make a political point. But I’ve noticed no commentators mentioning the Obvious Unsaid of this case. Corzine, who governs a state with a seatbelt law and a strictly-enforced speed limit, disobeyed both. Plenty of us violate traffic laws, so I’m not criticizing Corzine for that.

When we have laws that regulate every minor detail of our lives, we break them. That’s not shocking. But having such laws in the first place corrodes the authority of all laws by encouraging disrespect for the law in general. If we assume that most people break minor laws, can we assume they will always obey major laws? And if we have a legal system that encourages us to distinguish between the laws we’re allowed to break and those we’re not, doesn’t that leave a lot of room for untrustworthy people to interpret things in a way we’d rather they didn’t?

The problem isn’t that Corzine was in a car going 91 miles an hour, it’s that the car was being driven by a member of the very police force that penalizes his state’s citizens for doing the exact same thing. And in a car going at that speed, the officer driving the car allowed Corzine to ride without a seatbelt after his state announced a “click it or ticket” crackdown on seatbelt scofflaws.

Again, I am not criticizing Governor Corzine for doing something that most of us also do at times. If he wants to drive around like that, then my biggest hope for him is that he gets home safely.

My problem is not with the governor or his actions, it’s with the Nanny State mentality that politicians like Corzine, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer promote. Once we start giving government the power to regulate the manner in which we conduct one part of our personal lives, it becomes much easier for the next politician to argue that people should also support banning his pet irritant.

We’re already seeing that happen. First it was smoking, then it was foie gras, soft drinks, trans-fats, incandescent lightbulbs and aluminum baseball bats. The list of things politicians want to ban is growing at an alarming rate, and nothing seems to be standing in the way.

We don’t live under prohibition anymore, but the mentality that spawned it is alive and well. Today, it’s a prohibition on the margins of life, a prohibition of a thousand cuts. And for each new flag planted by the Nanny Staters, it becomes ever easier to seize additional territory.

And to add insult to injury, the people who set these rules always seem to avoid them.

That’s how we end up with politicians like Al Gore and John Edwards scolding middle-class Americans for their energy use while they occupy energy-guzzling mansions with multi-car garages that dwarf my apartment.

Hey, if they earned it, they deserve it. I won’t begrudge them their palaces if they’re willing to pay for them. But it would be nice if they took a break from acting like the enlightened ones who are going to save the world by telling everyone else how to live.

Oh, and one other thing...they can pry my incandescent bulbs from my cold dead fingers.

18 March 2007 >> I just got back home from taping Hannity’s America a little while ago. It airs tonight on Fox News.

Knowing the show airs tonight gave us a hard deadline for finally completing the Indoctrinate U website. So while a total lack of sleep over the last 3 days probably didn’t help my coherence with Sean Hannity (I don’t even really remember what I said, but hopefully it made sense), at least we were able to get everything working on the site, including the trailer and an innovative sign-up feature that gave me a chance to write some code for Google Maps. More on that later. For now, I’m going to start a belated St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

Update: Wouldn’t you know it, my cable is out. So I guess I won’t be taping it... Thanks, Time Warner!

9 February 2007 @ 9:18AM >> Investor’s Business Daily on the “two Americas”:

As reported by Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, the richer half of the American population pays almost 97% of income taxes. And most of that — 54% — is paid by those in the top 5%. Those ranked in the top 1% — the richest of the rich — pay more than 34% of all personal income taxes collected by Uncle Sam.

What’s more, the Congressional Budget Office last month found that the after-tax income of those “superrich” actually declined after the Bush tax cuts by 8.3% from 2000 to 2004.

Hand in hand with these trends, about 14 million Americans at lower incomes have been removed from the federal income tax rolls since 2000 because of the earned income tax credit and the per-child tax credit.

“John Edwards actually got it right,” Tax Foundation President Scott Hodge told IBD. “There are two Americas: a taxpaying America and a non-taxpaying America.” That means the recent increases in tax burden are actually understated for those still paying income taxes.

Despite this, Democrats in Congress are paving the way to raise taxes yet again. “The rich” need to pay their “fair share,” the argument goes. But I wonder: what exactly is a fair share? If I pay 40% of my income in taxes, is that fair? What about 50% or 75%?

No matter how much “the rich” pay—and according to the tax code, “the rich” includes plenty of middle class people—the taxers never seem satisfied.

This country was founded on the notion that it is immoral to tax people without giving them a say in how the government is run. Yet today, 14 million Americans are receiving representation without paying any taxes, while 50% of the population pays 97% of the taxes. That means there are 14 million free-riders who have a vote that enables them to call for taxes to be raised on everyone else.

There’s an old saying that simple democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. That’s why individual liberty is an important component of true freedom; it prevents tyranny of the majority.

The founders rightly decided that taxation without representation is unjust. But is representation without taxation any less unjust?

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Update: The problem of tax free-riders is worse than the report above indicates.

7 February 2007 @ 9:02AM >> Democrats love to talk about our supposed lost freedoms in the wake of September 11th. But they have no problem trying to regulate the most mundane details of our day-to-day lives. In California, a Democrat-sponsored bill would outlaw incandescent lights and force everyone to live in homes with doctor’s office lighting. And now, a New York Democrat is trying to make it illegal to cross a street while listening to music or talking on the phone.

Add that to the growing list of other ways the nanny-politicians want to regulate our lives (banning the use of trans-fats in restaurants, removing foie gras from the menu, outlawing smoking in your home and your car, etc., etc.), and it’s pretty clear where our freedoms are really being lost.

But if you think about it, we should really be grateful. We’re too stupid to make these decisions on our own. We might hurt ourselves. Or someone else. Or maybe even a poor, defenseless goose. Thankfully, we have the crushing embrace of the nanny state to protect us from the horrors of the world.

The question is, does all this really go far enough? Why waste years and years making incremental changes? Think of all the people who might get hurt in the meantime. We need something comprehensive, something that’ll start saving lives today.

In that spirit, I propose the Universal Safety Act (USA). It’s a very simple three-step plan to ensure that everything is always safe. All corners must be rounded, all objects must be encased in rubberized protectant, and all citizens must wear head-to-toe suits made out of bubble wrap.

So, support the USA, and do it for the children: us.

16 January 2007 >> Britain’s Observer reports that “[a]n undercover investigation has revealed disturbing evidence of Islamic extremism at a number of Britain’s leading mosques and Muslim institutions, including an organisation praised by the Prime Minister.”:

Secret video footage reveals Muslim preachers exhorting followers to prepare for jihad, to hit girls for not wearing the hijab, and to create a ’state within a state’. Many of the preachers are linked to the Wahhabi strain of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, which funds a number of Britain’s leading Islamic institutions.

A forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches programme paints an alarming picture of how preachers in some of Britain’s most moderate mosques are urging followers to reject British laws in favour of those of Islam. Leaders of the mosques have expressed concern at the preachers’ activities, saying they were unaware such views were being disseminated.

At the Sparkbrook mosque, run by UK Islamic Mission (UKIM), an organisation that maintains 45 mosques in Britain and which Tony Blair has said ‘is extremely valued by the government for its multi-faith and multicultural activities’, a preacher is captured on film praising the Taliban. In response to the news that a British Muslim solider was killed fighting the Taliban, the speaker declares: ‘The hero of Islam is the one who separated his head from his shoulders.’

Another speaker says Muslims cannot accept the rule of non-Muslims. ‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir [non-Muslim],’ a preacher, Dr Ijaz Mian, tells a meeting held within the mosque. ‘We have to rule ourselves and we have to rule the others.’

Britain’s Jihadists aren’t stupid. They know that the soft underbelly of the West is our blind support of multiculturalism. Assimilation is rejected in favor of each community maintaining its own separate oasis. And thanks to political correctness, anyone who questions the wisdom of this is immediately branded an insensitive bigot. So most Westerners, whose social behaviors have been molded by an educational system in which being labeled a racist is perhaps the worst human offense, keep quiet because the threat of Jihadists among them is not yet apparent. The question is, will the West wake up before it’s too late? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, the video taken from within the so-called moderate mosques is chilling. If this doesn’t serve as a wake-up call, I don’t know what will.

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Update: The entire Dispatches: Undercover Mosque program is now available on Google Video.

11 January 2007 >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

30 November 2006 @ 8:52AM >> The CEO of the world’s largest music publisher is attempting to extract money from everyone who buys a digital music player.

Universal Music Group’s Chairman and CEO Doug Morris said of iPods and similar players, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.”

By accusing everyone who bought a digital music player of piracy, Universal hopes to coerce manufacturers of these devices to pay a per-unit fee, a surcharge that is then passed on to the consumer. (Universal apparently figured out that running a profitable business is much easier without the burden of convincing customers that your product is worth buying.) That’s exactly what the music giant did with Microsoft, which now pays Universal for every Zune music player sold.

Now, Universal is targeting the iPod. And with 25% of the market, Universal has quite a bit of leverage against Apple. The company can threaten to pull all of its music from the iTunes Music Store unless Apple complies with a demand to impose a per-unit fee on all iPods. If successful, anyone who buys an iPod will be considered an assumed pirate, and Universal will receive money, regardless of whether any music from that label ever ends up on one of those iPods.

Is this really a road that music publishers want to go down? Aside from the obvious ill will it engenders from honest customers, such a move runs the risk of changing the purchasing calculations of people who own these devices. In effect, it legitimizes piracy in the minds of consumers.

If you’re an honest customer who purchases music today, your decision making may change if you know that record labels charge you simply for buying a music player. You’re already paying once up front—before you’ve even spent a dime to fill the device with music—so why pay again for the same thing when you want to download music? People will feel entitled to download whatever music they want, because they will know that they’ve already been billed for it.

Treating your customers like crooks is never a good way to encourage repeat business. And imposing a blanket music surcharge simply for buying a player is a surefire way to get people thinking that they’ve got a right to download music that they’ve already paid for.

If record labels wanted to ensure that paying customers today become pirates tomorrow, they couldn’t have designed a better way.

8 November 2006 @ 10:53AM >> “I need some help. I need some mental help is what I need.” Video >>

2 November 2006 @ 10:07AM >>

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.John Kerry

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ choice for president last time around, is the subject of bi-partisan criticism for what sounded like a slap at American troops serving in Iraq. Kerry claimed his statement was a “botched joke,” and his first reaction was to attack anyone who criticized him for it.

A statement on his website attributed criticism to “assorted right wing nut-jobs” and “Republican hacks”:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

In Kerry-land, that’s apparently what passes for an apology. Meanwhile, the “assorted right-wing nut jobs” who asked criticized Kerry included such notable Republican hacks as Hillary Clinton and a number of other prominent Democratic office-seekers.

Kerry complains that the issue is a distration from an administration that “sent our brave troops to war without body armor,” forgetting that he voted for the war and then voted against a package funding the war. (As he infamously said in 2004, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”)

Kerry also criticizes “Republicans [who] want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men,” although it seems like—as in 2004—Kerry still wants to debate Kerry. James Taranto noticed this little contradiction in Kerry’s appearance on the Don Imus radio show yesterday:

KERRY: The people who owe an apology are people like Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t send enough troops, who didn’t listen to the generals, who has made every mistake in the book.

[...]

IMUS: What do you think—I understand about the Bush folks. But Senator John McCain, he seems to think—he seems to agree with the Bush administration about your comments. And you know him, obviously, better than I do, but I know him pretty well. And he probably knows what you meant, too.

KERRY: I’m sorry that John McCain has said what he said. John McCain’s been a friend for a long time. But I have to tell you, I think John McCain is wrong about this.

John McCain has been a cheerleader for a policy that is incorrect. John McCain says we ought to send another 100,000 troops over there. First of all, we don’t have another 100,000 troops. Secondly, if you send them over there, it’s going to do exactly what’s already happened, which is attract more terrorists and more jihadists. Our own generals are telling us that it’s the numbers of troops that are the problem.

There you have it. John Kerry, the man who the Democrats hoped would become president in 2004, articulates his party’s position on the war perfectly. He criticizes the president for not sending enough troops in the exact same exchange that he criticizes a proposal to send more troops. When it comes to the War on Terror, the Democrats seem to stand for nothing besides “no.”

It kind of makes you wonder what the Democrats will do if they ever take the White House. Without someone like President Bush to reflexively oppose, how will they know what positions to take?

In the meantime, for the next two years, President Bush should announce his foreign policy positions to be the exact opposite of whatever he truly believes. Maybe he can trick the Democrats into unwittingly supporting what he really wants.

26 October 2006 @ 8:59AM >> Political rumblings in Amsterdam:

Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk is in favour of imposing a ban on the wearing of a burka in public spaces.

The Liberal VVD told MPs on Thursday night the face-covering clothing is a symbol of division (between the West and Islam) and was not in harmony with the integration of Muslims and the emancipation of women.

[...]

One of the options being studied is whether a general ban on the burka is possible under current regulations. It will then also be assessed whether a ban wearing a burka can be justified based on issues of safety and public order.

The final option is whether a ban can be imposed via existing regulations such as a general local ordinance or compulsory identification laws.

Government ministers had been called back to the Parliament to explain why they had not yet imposed a ban on the burka, as demanded by MPs in December at the initiative of Geert Wilders. It had previously been revealed that the cabinet was divided over the issue.

By itself, the wearing of a burqa in public is not “symbol of division” in a Western society, it’s merely a symbol of that society’s ability to incorporate people from different backgrounds. There’s nothing wrong with a burqa per se, as long as it is worn voluntarily.

A grave threat to Western culture is the murderous intolerance shown by some radical Muslims to our core values, like that of free thought and free speech. But we have other important values, such as the freedom to worship (or not) as we please—as long as one’s actions don’t infringe upon someone else’s rights.

The way to address the fact that there are some Jihadists in the Muslim world who need to be defeated is not to strip all Muslims of their right to wear religious attire. Doing so does nothing to further the integration of Muslims, it only serves as a signal that they are not welcome.

Western cultures will go down a dangerous path if we start outlawing legitimate, non-violent and uncoerced expressions of faith.

2 October 2006 >> The latest book critical of the Bush Administration is from Bob Woodward, the journalist whose work in the 1970s helped take down President Nixon. This morning, Woodward appeared on NBC’s Today show, where Matt Lauer asked about the timing of the book’s release. Editor and Publisher reports:

Lauer had challenged Woodward on the timing, since the charges in the book about the administration allegedly misleading the public on progress in the Iraq war are so significant. How could he hold that for a book? Why didn’t he get them published in his newspaper, The Washington Post, or shout them from a “mountaintop” instead of waiting to “make a splash” with them in a book?

Woodward replied that he had not waited “to make a splash, but to assemble the whole story,” and then go to the White House and Pentagon and CIA and ask, “What did you do?” He added: “Simon & Schuster and my bosses at the Washington Post said the only real obligation here is to tell it before the election.

“That’s what we’re doing. People can judge for themselves.”

I can understand why Simon & Schuster would want the book released in the weeks before the election; they’re publishers, and they want to profit from an atmosphere in which potential bookbuyers are already thinking about politics. Fair enough.

But why would the Washington Post want Woodward’s book published shortly before the election? Theoretically, the folks at the Post are journalists, which means that they should only care about reporting the story, not releasing it at a specific point in the election cycle. The fact that the Post felt Woodward had “an obligation” to publish before the election implies that the paper wanted to affect the election; if the reaction of the voters was of no concern to the Post, it really wouldn’t matter whether the book was released before or after the election.

President Bush isn’t on the ballot in this election, but conventional political calculus asserts that a book damaging to the president would also hurt the president’s party, especially in an election that’s historically dismal for the party occupying the White House. Did Bob Woodward accidentally admit that the folks at the Washington Post want the Republicans to fare poorly in the upcoming elections? Why else would they care when his book got published?

19 September 2006 >> Time and time again, we’re told that there were no connections between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda, and that any such claims are merely Bush Administration fabrications. However, two years before President Bush took office, CNN reported:

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday.

Bin Laden’s whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified.

[...]

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.

Saddam offered asylum to Osama? And Osama openly supports Iraq? That can’t be right, at least not according to the official mantra that the establishment media has been repeating for the last five years.

So what explains this find? The only logical explanation is that President Bush traveled back in time and brainwashed the reporter, or that Karl Rove has been hacking into CNN’s computer system. Either way, it’s all part of the conspiracy!

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

22 August 2006 >> Five years ago today, I launched this website with an essay on the Microsoft anti-trust case. Back then, I was a software developer, and I planned on using this site as a platform for discussing technology. (The word “terminal” in the name of the site originally referred the old “green screen” computer terminals, and is not an effort on my part to imply that I’m terminally brain dead, as a number of critics have kindly suggested.)

Less than three weeks after my first post, an event happened that changed the course of many lives. The attacks of September 11th ripped families apart and blasted a still-unfilled hole in lower Manhattan. The attacks also made it impossible to ignore radical Islam, a phenomenon that has been growing and threatening Western society since the 1970s.

Watching the towers burn from the rooftop of my office building re-connected me with my long-held passion for politics and world affairs, and the experience gave me a new purpose for this site.

About a year and a half later, I posted my first of a dozen short videos, and thanks to my run-in with Michael Moore, I stumbled into a career as a documentary filmmaker.

And now, this fall, my first feature-length documentary Indoctrinate U will be released.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Thanks to everyone who’s shared it with me, and to all of you who’ve written in with words of encouragement over the years.

28 July 2006 @ 8:54AM >> Earlier this week, four U.N. officials were killed in Lebanon by an apparent Israeli airstrike. Within hours of the event, U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan announced his belief that Israel had deliberately targeted the U.N. personnel. Annan demanded that “any further attack on U.N. positions and personnel must stop.”

Yesterday, strong evidence came to light suggesting that Hizbollah was effectively using the U.N. position as a shield, conducting attacks against Israel, knowing that any Israeli response was likely to hit the U.N. post. The New York Sun reports that one of the U.N. officials killed in the attack had earlier sent e-mails saying that Hizbollah was “all over” his position. The recipient of those e-mails, a former major-general in the Canadian military named Lewis MacKenzie, described their contents:

“What he was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them, and that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the U.N. They use the U.N. as shields knowing that they cannot be punished for it.”

To Hizbollah, civilians and U.N. positions are strategic assets. The terrorist group routinely launches attacks from residential areas and near U.N. posts. Hizbollah knows that this puts Israel in a bind: if Israel decides to respond, that response will provide a tear-jerking scene for the evening news where the headline will be “Israeli Bomb Kills Civilians,” or “U.N. Officials Killed in Israeli Airstrike.” But if Israel backs down out of a fear of how the media will report the story, then Hizbollah gets a safe haven where they can launch attacks with impunity. Hizbollah wins either way, with a propaganda victory or a military one.

Of course, to any fair-minded person, it is obvious that Hizbollah bears the responsibility for the deaths of those U.N. officials. It’s too bad the U.N. doesn’t have a leader who understands that.

22 July 2006 @ 4:21PM >> Sheesh. I can’t even take a week off without war breaking out.

Of course, to those who’ve been paying attention, this is not a new war. Israel has been under siege since the founding of the modern state in 1948. The war has never been about the plight of Palestinians. If the Palestinians wanted to live side-by-side with Israel in peace, then the Oslo peace accords would have worked. When Oslo didn’t stick, and Israel offered virtually everything Yassir Arafat demanded, the Palestinian leader instead rejected peace and launched an intifada. If Israel’s neighbors truly wanted peace, then why didn’t Israel’s retreat from Palestinian territory secure it? Why is every Israeli compromise and concession followed by more war?

Because Israel’s enemies will not be satisfied with anything less than the country’s complete destruction. They believe Israel is an illegitimate state and that no infidel has a valid claim to what they believe should be Muslim land. But to any fair-minded person, a cursory look at history settles that debate quite easily, as Judith Weiss points out:

Half of Israel’s Jewish population is Arab Jews, not European Jews. How come there are Arab Jews? Because they were in Israel/Judea before Arabs became Muslim. In fact, they were the Jews before various historical events scattered and exiled some of them, one destination being Europe. [...]

The earliest verifiably Jewish artifacts in Israel date to 1500 years before it was conquered by Islam. Contemporary documents and archeological finds verify some Biblical history, and show evidence of Jews in Persia 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, in Babylonia (later Iraq) 1000 years before it was conquered by Islam, and in Egypt (especially Alexandria) during the Roman Empire, before Egypt was conquered by Islam. Even the Koran acknowledges that Jews were living in Arabia before Mohammed decided to create a new religion, and there is evidence for Jewish residence in what are now Arab countries dating back to Solomonic times.

Don’t expect any of this to satisfy the likes of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These facts won’t sway Hamas, the terrorist organization that the Palestinians recently elected to govern them. Nor will these facts stem the never-ending volley of rockets that have been raining down on Israel from Hizbollah-controlled areas in southern Lebanon.

Yes, in the two years since the U.N. flaccidly ordered militias like Hizbollah to disarm, the group has inexplicably failed to do so. It’s almost as if terrorists have no respect for the authority of the United Nations! Shocking, I know; I assumed the threat of more speechifying from Secretary General Kofi Annan would be enough to cause even the most militant fanatic to lay down his arms. But I guess the U.N. isn’t as potent as I thought.

Which leads to the current problem. After Syria—Hizbollah’s terror co-sponsor with Iran—withdrew its occupation forces from Lebanon last year, optimism abounded in that newly-independent state, but the state proved too weak to secure its own southern territory. So Lebanon became a broken nation. And, just as the failed state of Afghanistan made it succumb to the Taliban and al Qaeda, Hizbollah succeeded in turning southern Lebanon into its terror playground.

With the backing of Syria and Iran, the playground bully has become quite strong. Hizbollah has already fired thousands of missiles into Israel, and thanks to weapons from Iran, the group now appears capable of hitting every major Israeli population center. And now that Iran looks to be on a fast track to becoming a nuclear power, within the next five or ten years, Hizbollah—if it still exists—could be dropping Iranian nukes on Israel.

When Hizbhollah operatives recently ventured into Israeli territory to kidnap two soldiers, they weren’t just violating the borders of a sovereign nation, they were trying to show the Israeli people that not only was their military incapable of protecting civilians, they weren’t even capable of protecting themselves. Against the backdrop of the missile attacks, Israel interpreted this as what it was: yet another act of war. And this time, Israel responded with a forceful attack on Hizbollah positions inside Lebanon.

But many are now criticizing Israel, saying that the country’s response is not proportional to the provocation, as if the provocation hasn’t been ongoing for years. Pretending that Hizbollah’s only crime is capturing two Israeli soldiers requires quite a bit of historical amnesia. But to the wishy-washy handwringers at the U.N., that amnesia is required; without it, they might actually be forced to take a stand. They might actually have to do something besides laundering money for Saddam Hussein and selling 12-year-old girls into sexual slavery. But, of course, the U.N. will do nothing useful; what do you expect from a world body where terror regimes like Iran and Syria get the same vote as Canada and Finland?

Cease-fires and negotiated peaces have been tried. Throughout history, world opinion repeatedly forces Israel into bargains with adversaries who use “peacetime” to build strength. No matter how many handshakes, strained smiles and photo ops each new peace deal yields, Israel’s enemies invariably come back and attack later. And no matter how much land Israel gives up—and they’ve given up quite a bit of strategically-important land in their many futile attempts to buy peace—groups like Hizbollah will not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of the Israeli nation.

That’s why a cease-fire, the proposed solution of people who see no moral distinction between the actions of Hizbollah and Israel, has the effect of undermining Israel’s security. Hizbollah won’t perceive a cease-fire as a cooling-off period before joining Israel on a road towards peace, they’ll just see it as a brief pause in a continuing war, a time-out they can use to start rolling more Iranian rockets towards the Israeli border. And if Hizbollah manages to hold on to southern Lebanon until Iran can produce a nuclear weapon, is there any doubt that they’ll use it? Terrorists aren’t usually known for their restraint. And yet the world is demanding restraint from Israel, which is merely trying to prevent that day from coming.

You can’t negotiate peace with an enemy whose only goal is your destruction. The end result of a cease-fire will not be peace. A cease-fire merely puts off the inevitable for a future day when the stakes are higher. If Hizbollah is not destroyed, and if the current regimes in Iran and Syria maintain power long enough to produce a nuclear weapon and a way to deliver it to Israel, you can be damn sure that weapon will be used. Iran’s president has virtually guaranteed it.

So when the rest of the world demands restraint from Israel, it makes me wonder: would any other country put up with living like the Israelis have for decades? If suicide bombs and lobbed rockets were exploding all over France with such regularity, would we expect the French to sit by and do nothing? Okay, bad example. But you get my point.

As long as the mullahs control Iran and the Baathists control Syria, they will use proxies like Hizbollah to wage war on Israel. Unfortunately, the reality is, this war is inevitable. And it goes beyond Hizbollah. Ultimately, Syria and Iran must be confronted. It can happen today, next year, or sometime after Iran has acquired nukes. As far as the fate of Israel is concerned, this war better play out before the mullahs get the bomb. After that, it’ll be too late.

When will the world wake up and realize that ignoring the Jihadists does not make them go away? People don’t seem to learn until the bombs start blowing up their own cities. And even then, the lesson is quickly forgotten. But if the last five years has taught the world anything, it’s that the hatred of the Jihadists isn’t limited to Israel. And this bone-deep hatred won’t magically vanish if Israel disappears under a mushroom cloud. No, if you’re an infidel, you’re on the list. The only question is how long it’ll take them to get to you.