Does the silence equal complicity in the unspeakable crime?
Not to be outdone in academia’s woke Olympiad, Allyn Walker, an Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University, has coined the term “minor-attracted person” in order to destigmatize the word ‘pedophile.’
Finally, we must not forget the radical cultural milieu that the film Sound of Freedom is attempting to crash: LGBTQ parades, Drag Queen Story Hour and discussions at the elementary school level about transgender and alternative sexual lifestyles have all come to dominate the national conversation in the United States, and this makes a film that takes aim at child predators actually seem like a menacing thing to a large part of the population.
A new American film that reveals the brutal reality of child sex-trafficking has been greeted with muted enthusiasm from the political left, which begs the question: does the silence equal complicity in the unspeakable crime?
Tim Ballard is an American anti-human trafficking activist, author and founder of the non-profit organization Operation Underground Railroad, an anti-sex trafficking organization. A former special agent at the Department of Homeland Security who now works independently, Ballard’s life’s work is being immortalized in a Hollywood film, entitled Sound of Freedom.
The film, which stars Jim Caviezel in the role of Ballard, leads audiences through the harrowing twists and turns of Ballard’s true life experiences where he works to rescue children from the nightmare of sex slavery. Despite receiving mixed reviews from critics, the film has grossed over $140 million in the United States against a $14.5 million budget, while audience reception has been highly positive, scoring 99% on the Rotten Tomatoes film review site, and for apparently good reason.
According to estimates by the International Labour Organization, there were 24.9 million victims of human trafficking around the world in 2016. Yet for reasons known only to them, the left-leaning media and other institutions appear to be strangely anxious to draw the curtain on the Angel Studios production.
Writing in Variety magazine, Owen Gleiberman observed, “Let’s assume that, like me, you’re not a right-wing fundamentalist conspiracy theorist looking for a dark, faith-based suspense film to see over the holiday weekend. Even then, you needn’t hold extreme beliefs to experience ‘Sound of Freedom’ as a compelling movie that shines an authentic light on one of the crucial criminal horrors of our time, one that Hollywood has mostly shied away from.”
At a time when the question of sexual misconduct inside of the entertainment industry continues to grab headlines, as witnessed by the #MeToo movement, Hollywood’s indifference and even aversion to the subject of pedophilia and child sex-trafficking is strange to say the least. After all, as this cinematic biopsy rightly reveals, there are more people enslaved now, by sex trafficking, than there were when slavery was legal. And while allegations of sexual abuse committed by Hollywood bigwigs (amongst consenting adults) is highly disturbing, even the hint that America’s leading industry could be defending or even participating in child sex-trafficking seriously challenges the limits of moral acceptability.
Woke capitalists like Goldman have the best of two worlds, as noise-making radicals who live in mind-boggling affluence. Let’s lay off Soros! He may be the nicest of this group.
Those who belong to the woke Left are held together by overlapping interests and shared passions. Not all wokesters support the same causes and certainly not with equal intensity. Thus, warriors against climate change like Karl Schwab and Bill Gates don’t often speak up for the sexual transitioning of children or call for allowing biological males claiming to be women to compete in female sports events. One can likewise read the racialist diatribes of Corey Bush, Ibram X. Kendi, or Al Sharpton without likely running into attacks on fossil fuels or gas stoves. The point is not that these allies never agree on anything. It is that their alliance is looser than some might imagine.
It also seems their collaboration is based mostly on what they loathe rather than what they like. Above all, these collaborators share a chief villain, whom all woke leftists can be counted on to hate, namely, a white male Christian, perhaps living in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s postal district and spewing politically incorrect speech, when he’s not reading the Bible or driving his gas-guzzling car.
It also seems necessary for all wokesters to have a large, intrusive state and ubiquitous surveillance agencies for keeping opposition in line. Equally useful, from their perspective, is a centralized educational system that requires compulsory attendance, except perhaps for designated victim groups, who may do as they like. We also supposedly need properly indoctrinated public educators to deal with all the “neo-Nazis,” or, as the Biden Administration classifies such types, “white nationalist terrorists.” While all elements of the woke Left seek to marginalize their shared enemies, some may also be eager to inflict violence on them. And they can do so while the media turn their collective back on the Left’s “peaceful protests.”
Miranda Devine provides us with a particularly revealing case study of a growing subspecies within this woke genus, the socially radical corporate capitalist. Devine focuses on Daniel Goldman, the usually nattily dressed and unfailingly politically correct representative of New York’s 10th Congressional District. According to his critic at the New York Post, Goldman is a “loathsome” example of “‘elite privilege,’ a blue-eyed son of Sidwell Friends, Stanford and Yale” with “entitlement oozing from every pore.”
It is hard for me not to retch as I read Devine’s description of “this heir to the Levi Strauss fortune,” who has become a smarmy defender of the Russiagate hoax, FBI abuses of power, and the New York City criminal class. When Julio Rosas, a senior writer for Townhall, testified before Congress about Black Lives Matter violence that he had witnessed personally and about which he wrote a book, Goldman pounced on him. Goldman scolded Rosas for stating Antifa was an “organization” and not just an idea, and he accused Rosas of inventing his accounts to discredit the FBI.
Goldman was also featured on TV, lacing into the mother of a black U.S. Army veteran who had been murdered in New York City. This happened after Goldman’s pal, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, had released a repeat offender who later committed the murder. According to Goldman, the congressional investigation of Bragg’s practice of putting dangerous, violent criminals back on the street without bail was preventing a respected D.A. from doing something much more important, namely prosecuting Trump for a “felony,” or whatever Bragg claims Trump did to Stormy Daniels, evidence for which doesn’t seem to exist. Like Bragg, Goldman has been an outspoken opponent of imposing bail on those who have been arrested for violent acts.
It is amusing listening to Canadian or French academics explain how their country differs morally and philosophically from the reactionary American empire. Unlike us, these non-Americans feature feminism and gay rights and are vigorously opposing white racism. Why should I believe that we borrowed such stuff from French postmodernists or, as Bloom argues, from exposing youth to the (right-wing) writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? Enough has been going on within our borders to explain the presence of cancel-culture and why we are afflicting ourselves with politically correct nonsense.
Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness.
Looking at Le Monde, one can imagine reading the New York Timesen francais. An attack on Western civilization and French national institutions has been underway in France since the native Left’s outcry against colonialism and the glorification of Third World revolutionaries after World War II. That was also the time when French intellectuals were talking up the Stalinist side in the Cold War and doing everything humanly possible to undermine any defense against a Soviet takeover of Europe. Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals unmasked the antibourgeois radical mindset of the French intelligentsia back in the 1950s. One is struck by a remarkable overlap between these loonies and our own woke crowd.
Moreover, Macron’s party la République en Marche faces persistent opposition from the Right in the form of the Rassemblement National, which does not hide its French patriotism and its detestation of woke intellectuals. Macron and the head of the RN, Marine Le Pen, are now running neck and neck in polls as they prepare for next year’s presidential election.
The recipe for electoral success for the French globalist establishment has been to pick off votes from the Right by sending agreeable messages in that direction before elections. This powerful force works to stay in power, by seeking the votes of the working class and rural Frenchmen as well as those of affluent urbanites. In runoff presidential elections, the French establishment solicits support from the multicultural Left, which stands in fierce opposition to the immigration-critical Right.
Macron is playing the same game as other French centrist politicians, who have complained insincerely about things that concern the Right—e.g., North African immigration—as a timely electoral strategy. Jacques Chirac, while still mayor of Paris, delivered a controversial speech in Orléans in 1991 in which he mocked the “sound and odor” of North African immigrants. But once Chirac moved up to become French president, he worked together with the French Left to keep the rightist National Front from winning any representation in the French assembly.
Despite what I think is the dishonest electoral intent of Macron’s lament, what he is saying is essentially true. The French government is bewailing exactly what I have been saying in books and articles for decades, to the dismay of the American conservative establishment. Since the end of World War II, the United States has dominated the Western world not only militarily and economically but also in terms of popular and academic culture. The notion that American culture fell to the anti-Western Left because of alien German and French ideas, a theme popularized partly through Allan Bloom’s bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, overlooks our capacity to generate our own bad ideas.
In The First Universal Nation, which the late Ben Wattenberg published in 1991, we encounter this astonishing but well-documented fact: the U.S. exports cultural products to Europe relative to what it takes back at the rate of 50-1. From my visits to European and Canadian bookstores, it seems that Wattenberg’s exchange rate has tilted even more decisively in our favor.
It is amusing listening to Canadian or French academics explain how their country differs morally and philosophically from the reactionary American empire. Unlike us, these non-Americans feature feminism and gay rights and are vigorously opposing white racism. Why should I believe that we borrowed such stuff from French postmodernists or, as Bloom argues, from exposing youth to the (right-wing) writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? Enough has been going on within our borders to explain the presence of cancel-culture and why we are afflicting ourselves with politically correct nonsense.
Having spent over 40 years in American universities, it is obvious to me that we have a superabundance of home-grown lunatics to account for these disorders.
I would also like to think that we have enough going for us as a country to overcome this prolonged bout of insanity. I am especially heartened by the fact that about half of our voting population seems unaffected by the madness that Macron has complained about. That percentage is higher than the roughly one-third of the French electorate that will likely cast its vote for the RN in next year’s presidential contest. It is also over 35 percent higher than the percentage of those beleaguered non-leftists who vote for the right-of-center AfD in Germany. In Canada, I am still looking for evidence of a non-leftist electorate, unless I factor in the misnamed Conservatives.
What I am suggesting is that we in the United States not only created much of the poison from which other Western countries are now suffering, we may also be among the very few who can offer an example of recovery.
About Paul Gottfried
Paul Edward Gottfried is the editor of Chronicles. An American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist, Gottfried is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim recipient.
Berlatsky whined,“parents are tyrants. ‘parent’ is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people.”
Lewis further reveals her intellectual obtuseness and foolish anti-family fanaticism by declaring, “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us… It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”
Michael McCaffrey is a writer and cultural critic who lives in Los Angeles. His work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog. He is also the host of the popular cinema podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota. Follow him on Twitter @MPMActingCo
Children raised in a nuclear family are safer, healthier, happier, and more successful. So, of course, the radicals want to abolish it and raise kids in communes, because “parents are tyrants.”
2020 has been a year of pandemics.
The most prominent of these is coronavirus, which has killed over a million people worldwide and wreaked havoc on the global economy.
But it isn’t the only problematic outbreak to ravage the globe in 2020 – the pandemic of woke idiocy continues to rage unabated.
One particularly imbecilic strain of this vicious virus is the agenda that espouses eliminating the nuclear family.
As a parent and a leftist, I find this assault on parents and nuclear families to be the height of self-serving and self-defeating intellectual masturbation.
A perfect example of this mindless mania is a recent tweet from Noah Berlatsky, a pissant provocateur and philosophical poseur who writes for the Guardian and the Atlantic magazine. Berlatsky whined, “parents are tyrants. ‘parent’ is an oppressive class, like rich people or white people.”
He followed that belch into the woke echo chamber with this equally odious one: “There are things you can try to do to minimize the abuse that’s endemic to the parent/child relationship, but it’s always there.”
Apparently, someone didn’t change baby Berlatsky’s dirty diaper fast enough and now we all have to deal with the stink.
Sadly, Berlatsky’s buffoonery is not an outlier, as this anti-family mindset is rampant among the woke left. Examples of this absurd agenda being aggressively pushed abound.
Black Lives Matter, the standard bearer for woke, fact-free, emotion-fueled idiocy in 2020, and which has garnered establishment support and millions in corporate donations, not only declare that they want to “abolish police,” but also “abolish the family.”
Flagship left-wing publications like the Nation, Vice, and Jacobin have all in recent months and years dedicated time and energy to the malignant anti-family cause.
In addition, Sophie Lewis, a self-described “feminist thinker,” which she proves is an oxymoron, has made a name for herself attacking the nuclear family in her book ‘Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family’.
Lewis, an Oxford-educated bulls**t artist, uses pretentious language and provocative statements to camouflage her laughably pubescent arguments.
An example of Lewis’ utopianist jackassery is found in her article, ‘The Coronavirus Crisis Shows It’s Time to Abolish the Family’, where her “logical” approach to combat the virus is revealed as, “Free all prisoners and detainees now… and dismiss all the workers with full pay so they can… pursue laziness for at least the next decade.”
Lewis likes tilting at windmills as evidenced by her desire to “denaturalize the mother-child bond” and to promote “the idea that babies belong to anyone – the idea that the product of gestational labor gets transferred as property to a set of people.”
Lewis further reveals her intellectual obtuseness and foolish anti-family fanaticism by declaring, “even when the private nuclear household poses no direct physical or mental threat to one’s person – no spouse-battering, no child rape, and no queer-bashing – the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us… It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’”
Individuals? Perish the thought!
Of course, according to the anti-family left, the answer to the parent problem is that, like Hillary Clinton long ago taught us… it takes a village to raise a child.
While it may very well take a village to satiate Hillary’s husband’s gargantuan sexual appetite, history shows us that communes and communal parenting are never a healthy option for children or society.
For instance, a bevy of high-profile Hollywood stars have grown up in communes and cults where the nuclear family was replaced with a communal approach and it was more ordeal than ideal.
The famed Arquette family, which includes Roseanne, Patricia, and David, grew up in a commune, as did Winona Ryder. None of them speak highly of the experience, which included a lack of electricity and running water and rampant drug use.
Rose McGowan, as well as Joaquin and River Phoenix, grew up in the communal, ‘free love’ Children of God sect that was rife with child sexual abuse.
McGowan said of the experience, “There’s a trail of some very damaged children that were in this group… I got out by the skin of my teeth.”
Studies show that stepparents or non-biological guardians of children are astronomically more likely to harm children than biological parents.
Yes, there are certainly awful parents in the world who abuse and neglect their own biological children, but Berlatsky bemoaning parental power dynamics and Lewis lamenting gestational labor are, ironically, the intellectual equivalent of a toddler’s tantrum.
Wanting to eliminate the nuclear family because some people have had traumatic experiences is infinitely asinine and embarrassingly infantile; it is akin to demanding that the Sun stop rising in the east because you got sunburn.
As any parent will tell you, raising a child is a Sisyphean task requiring a Herculean effort, but it is worth it as study after study shows. Growing up in a nuclear family is, contrary to the anti-family left, not an albatross but an advantage in terms of mental, emotional, physical, and social health, as well as education achievement and income level.
What all children need are parents who love, comfort, protect, and guide them. And what these delusional anti-family advocates need is a reality check… and a swift kick in the ass. I’d be happy to deliver both.
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