At some point the conversation turned even more personal. “I feel comfortable with you guys,” said one, as he proceeded to tell us his coming out story. It was a fascinating and heartfelt account of a teenager who was dating a classmate, only to find himself attracted to her brother. The other, inspired by his colleague, also began spilling the beans on his very recent coming out. His was a relatively late confession for a gay man in his late 20s living in Los Angeles. Both accounts were different in many ways but carried a common theme – fear of judgment. Each had worried about how those around them would react to their admission. One had even lived among some who outwardly expressed, in vulgar terms, their vehement disgust for the gay lifestyle – an intimidating environment for anyone that has yet to publicly divulge their sexuality. The fear of losing friends and alienating family members was at times crippling, they both conveyed. There was a constant concern of whether those around them would shun, or embrace, who they were.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a coming out story, but this time something was different – their experience felt a lot like mine.

If you have a right-of-center worldview and live in Hollywood, you can understand what I’m saying. Coming to the realization that you don’t think the same, politically, as most of the people around you was a truth I came to just recently. When you first recognize this fact, one learns pretty quickly to tread lightly when the topic of politics is broached. There is nothing so telling as the look on the face of a liberal-minded Angelino as they first learn that you are from that other camp. That glazed look is unmistakable. At best, they are guarded when they speak to you next. At worst, they spread the word to those on their team, dinner schedules no longer show availability, and calls are no longer returned. It’s a soft bigotry that you have to experience to fully comprehend.

The ubiquity of intolerance to right-wingers can be felt in almost every influential enclave of Los Angeles. I’ve experienced it thoroughly in the short time that I’ve come out as a libertarian-leaning conservative. In one incident, I was attending a parent assembly for my daughter’s first school. Given that it was the initial gathering of the year, it was a full house and many of the new parents were excited, including my wife and I, to enter a new community of families. What would the teachers and parents be like? How could we get involved in the school? What new friends would come into our lives? It was an exhilarating time to say the least.

At the assembly, the school director stood at the lectern and cheerfully announced the demographics of the parents – the number of families of multi-racial origin, Hispanic origin, Black families, and same-sex households. The place was dripping with pride, clapping with approval for each statistic. But nothing received applause more loudly than the absence of diversity in a particular domain. “One area that we lack diversity is political affiliation,” claimed the school director. The crowd of parents cheered as if their child had just scored the winning goal in the World Cup Finals. A few parents even gave a standing ovation to add an exclamation mark. No one had to say which political affiliation was lacking – everyone knew. It was an intimidating moment for my wife and I. We were just two parents trying to find a safe and comfortable learning environment for our little girl – in a city with few good school options. I looked at my wife with, no doubt, a hint of despair in my eyes. Adding irony to the situation was that the blind bias was being celebrated in front of the school director, an openly gay man, and was expressed by parents that were purposely avoiding the liberal-controlled public school system by enrolling their children in a private school.

The environment would eventually lead to us pulling our daughter from their program.

On another occasion, the sentiment toward right-wingedness was a bit more direct. In route to an afternoon birthday party, breaking news hit the radio airwaves. A congresswoman had been shot in the head and reports were unclear as to whether she was still alive. It was Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, and I knew her to be a Democrat.

As we arrived at the party, small talk ensued. Not knowing the attendees well, I reverted to the news of the moment to spark conversation.

“Did you hear about the Arizona congresswoman,” I asked a reality TV producer I’d become nominally acquainted with.

“No. What happened,” he asked.

“Well, apparently she was shot point blank in the head.”

“Was she a Republican,” he inquired.

“No. It was Giffords. She’s a Democrat,” I replied.

“That’s too bad. It would have been nice to have one less Republican in the world,” he said with no hint of compassion for the victim in his voice. Deer caught in headlights was surely a good description of my expression.

Each of these events made me think back to that tasting I had just a few months earlier, and how similar my world was to those two gay men. Being caught in an environment where most of the people around you don’t think like you do, and some thoughtlessly despising your kind, is not a fun place to visit let alone live. Ever present is the concern that people you’ve grown to like won’t return that feeling if they learn about a particular facet of your life. The worry that even your loved ones could be affected if the community’s decision makers don’t approve of who you are is a constant backdrop.

As I witnessed the reaction at both the parent assembly and afternoon birthday party, I was completely taken aback at the unabashed bigotry displayed by each. They couldn’t have felt more comfortable expressing it. How would my beliefs affect my daughter if I were outed or if just one industrious parent Googled my name? I can clearly remember the feeling that I had at the appetizer tasting as the two gay gentlemen told me about their early fear of being discovered – and as I sat there, at that very moment, I was experiencing the same exact fear they were describing. “What if they move on to a discussion of politics – how will they react,” I thought. Would I have to start the conversation by quickly admitting that I’m for gay marriage? Would they even hear me when I recite the fact that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the legal action against the California ban on same-sex matrimony, and the passage of New York City’s gay marriage law all include prominent Republicans leading the way. Would I be brave enough to say that I didn’t think thoughtful social conservatives were “homophobes” because of their opposition to these efforts?

As I sat there through the tasting – inhaling chicken skewers, guzzling down Pinot Grigio, and listening to their coming out stories – the topic of politics never materialized. But one revelation did – Hollywood conservatives and the gay community are more alike than they may care to admit. Hopefully, someday soon, both groups recognize this very poignant fact.

Jill Scott

I’m admittedly a big fan of Jill Scott’s music. Her album Who is Jill Scott? is one of the highest rotated albums on my iPod. But she has also made some controversial comments on interracial relationships that should also be on the First Lady’s radar. In an article Jill Scott published in an April 2010 issue of Essence Magazine, she talked about how, when she found out that a successful black man was married to a white woman, it made her “wince.”

My new friend is handsome, African-American, intelligent and seemingly wealthy. He is an athlete, loves his momma, and is happily married to a White woman. I admit when I saw his wedding ring, I privately hoped. But something in me just knew he didn’t marry a sister. Although my guess hit the mark, when my friend told me his wife was indeed Caucasian, I felt my spirit…wince. I didn’t immediately understand it. My face read happy for you. My body showed no reaction to my inner pinch, but the sting was there, quiet like a mosquito under a summer dress.

Her justification for these feeling were artful and she firmly stated that she was not raised to view people by the color of their skin. But if the same words were put in the mouth of a Caucasian, the viewpoint would wreak of bigotry.

Read full post here.

In a report published on July 21, 2010, the Los Angeles Times incorrectly claimed that an article that I wrote on an August 10, 2009 National Endowment for the Arts conference call was somehow “misleading” and advanced by using a “fragmentary” portion of the conference call.

The Los Angeles Times should make it clear that the White House did not react to my article until AFTER the ENTIRE transcript and audio of the conference call was released. Only after reviewing the ENTIRE transcript and audio did the White House react by conducting new training sessions and issuing a memorandum containing new conduct guidelines for grant making agencies to prevent such a call, as reported by ABC News, “from ever happening again.”

Only after the ENTIRE transcript and audio was released, not a “fragmentary” portion, did the NEA official involved in the conference call fully resign from the agency and the chairman of the NEA issue a statement admitting that some of the comments made during the conference call were “unfortunately, not appropriate.” Also after the entire audio was released, the NEA submitted to a congressional inquiry new actions that it was taking to strengthen its ethics training.

At no time has any legitimate news organization “discredited” the story, as falsely asserted in your writer’s article. He also failed to state that the audio of the conference call was not released until after the NEA lied about its involvement with, and the content of, the conference call. Releasing the audio is an act that any writer would have done if a federal agency blatantly lied about the factual content of their article.

The Los Angeles Times’ claim that Andrew Breitbart somehow perpetrated a “bogus attack” on the NEA is an inaccurate, sophomoric attempt at historical revisionism.

If the Los Angeles Times still retains journalistic integrity, it will either publish this response or issue a correction stating the documented fact that the White House reacted to the release of the ENTIRE transcript and audio of the National Endowment for the Arts conference call, and not some “fragmentary” portion as your writer would have your readership believe. The Times should also back up its claim of the story being “since-discredited” by citing one legitimate news organization that has successfully discredited the story – an impossibility given the response and reaction by both the White House and the NEA to the release of the full transcript and audio of the conference call.

Thanks for your consideration to this matter.

Sincerely,
Patrick Courrielche

But if you haven’t thought of the labor movement as a cerebral bunch, think again. Meet Peter Dreier, Donald Cohen, Nelson Lichtenstein, and their syndicate of progressive university professors – the “intellectual infrastructure” of the progressive labor movement.

It is no secret that progressives have created a self-cloning machine by hijacking our educational system. Their indoctrination efforts are well documented. But we rarely think of research institutions as propaganda factories. A Request for Proposal (RFP) — see document above — recently obtained by Big Journalism gives us a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.

And their process? you may ask. Use the credibility and resources of the American higher education system to create researchprop – biased collegial research papers that serve as propaganda to support political policies.

Entitled Cry Wolf, the RFP proclaims a desire to look “for faculty and graduate students… interested in writing short (2,000 word) policy briefs” that “construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration” of conservative claims. Writers of briefs selected by the project coordinators will receive 100,000 pennies for their thoughts.

Their hopes with this researchprop is for these papers to “become the basis for opinion pieces designed to run in the mainstream media, on line, on the air, or in the press,” with the end outcome of building the following narrative in the public consciousness: that conservative objections to their policies are just the old dirty tricks of the right-wing.

If executed successfully, the “first reaction of millions of people, as well as opinion leaders, will be, ‘there they go again’,” reads the RFP – a clear attempt to label any right-leaning objection to progressive policy as another case of crying wolf.

This is what our higher education system has become – a publicly funded amplifier of progressive ideology.

If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama’s alma mater – Occidental College.

Distributed by Peter Dreier, Professor of Politics and Director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College, the request for proposal asks for help “in an important project in the battle with conservative ideas.” Drier is a frequent collaborator with the California AFL-CIO and the infamous ACORN.

The project’s union and progressive ties are seen throughout the bios of its coordinators and advisory board. It is sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego based non-profit headed by co-founder and Cry Wolf project coordinator Donald Cohen – a 25-year community organizing veteran and former Political Director for a division of San Diego’s AFL-CIO.

In fact, every person associated with this project has either spent a lifetime glorifying the work of labor unions through their writings, or has published work that supports the policies that further Big Labor’s agenda.

Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara and Director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy — and “America’s foremost Wal-Mart expert” — is also a Cry Wolf project coordinator. He is the author of numerous books designed to raise the awareness of the labor cause. While at the University of Virginia, Lichtenstein was involved in an organization known as Labor Action Group. “Our task was to insert and raise the labor question into the consciousness and politics of the university,” wrote Lichtenstein in the preface of his book State of the Union: A Century of American Labor.

Lichtenstein

Gerald Markowitz, Professor of History at CUNY’s John Jay College, and David Rosner, Professor of History and Public Health at Columbia University, are both on the advisory board of Cry Wolf. They have co-authored various books on occupational health and in their book, Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-Century America, they wrote:

We begin with the premise that the exploitation of labor is measured not only in long hours of work and lost dollars but also in shortened lives, high disease rates, and painful injuries.

Project advisor Janice Fine, Assistant Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers, has worked as a community, labor and electoral organizer for more than twenty-five years prior to teaching at Rutgers, and has even contributed to AFL-CIO’s website.

Then there is Jennifer Klein of Yale who has written extensively on labor unions and the struggle for employer-based health care. And William Forbath of the University of Texas, who’s written about the legal struggles of the labor movement. And Tom Sugrue, Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. Sugrue isn’t the only recipient of this labor history award. Lizabeth Cohen, a Cry Wolf advisory board member and chair of the History Department at Harvard, also received the award for her 1990 book Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago.

These professors’ ties to the labor movement and the glorification of its struggles are indisputable – which is fine, being that their interests reside in that area. But it does lead to the question: Should these professors be allowed to use our higher education system to push their progressive political ideologies in the guise of disinterested academics?

I think most would answer simply: no. Our publicly funded schools should be institutions of unbiased research, not propaganda vehicles for a particular ideology — especially one with longstanding and well-documented ties to the Communist movement.

James P. Cannon (center) and friends

Indeed, all colleges and universities are funded by tax dollars, whether public or private institutions. Public institutions receive 80% to 90% of their funding from public sources, according to Inside Higher Education. However, private institutions are not private in the same sense as private industry – they also receive substantial public funding, especially in research areas.

In addition to the federal gift that non-profit status brings in the form of no real estate taxes and no taxes on gains (including the billions in earnings on endowments), students who attend private institutions receive federally subsidized loans for college tuition, set at an arbitrarily high price. Additionally, private institutions receive billions (upon billions) in federal research grants from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, et al. Private and public universities exist because of public funding – they are both a public trust.

Our higher education system should be used as a battleground for competing ideas – not a fifth column for biased political talking points. Unbiased research must be its cornerstone; without valid, unbiased studies, our society cannot make grounded, well-founded decisions about public policy.

Entirely neutralizing bias in research is likely an impossible endeavor given the nature of the human mind. But an RFP of this nature, sent out from a group of educators – using publicly funded networks and the prestige of their schools – to students and faculty of publicly funded institutions, is an exercise in educational malpractice. It gives politically biased professors a rationale for a one-sided curriculum, and teaches students that it’s acceptable to infuse ideology into research.

This attempt to use our higher educational system “to give substance and scholarly integrity to this ‘crying wolf’ argument,” as stated in the RFP, is intellectual and moral subversion. The creation of this intellectual network within our school system is specifically for the purpose of constructing leftist policy “narratives.”

In a 2009 article that affixes the entire blame of the 2008 financial crisis on the failure of the free market system, Donald Cohen, sponsor of the Cry Wolf project, wrote that their network is in place to effectively push their reform policies:

Fortunately, the progressive intellectual infrastructure, more developed and more capable than even just a few years ago, is ready to drive a new New deal.

Do these prestigious institutions know that they have become part of the progressive labor movement’s “intellectual infrastructure” to create biased research? Let’s hope that if they are oblivious, they will take the appropriate action to be removed from this effort.

Stay tuned.

Please follow the ongoing “Cry Wolf” expose at Big Journalism.

The article, riddled with factual errors and omissions characteristic of a student and/or mainstream media, lays out a revisionist’s version of what happened behind the scenes of the scandal. During the interview, conducted by a journalism graduate student and admitted “close friend” of the former White House appointee, Sergant states that he was called to a meeting in the West Wing at the end of his four-month stint in the White House’s Office of Public Engagement. The White House, fully aware of his role as an art activist during Obama’s election campaign, offered Sergant two jobs. One was to continue at the White House, and the other was as the Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Sergant selected the NEA.

President Obama and Yosi Sergant

“I think [the West Wing] made a bad decision to put me in a job without giving me any kind of guidance, not providing me with any kind of mentorship,” said Sergant in the interview. He continued, “That was a bad decision. I’d never worked in government before.”

However the White House knew where Sergant’s expertise resided, and how he would potentially put it to use in an arts position. He was the promoter behind the now famous Obama Hope poster. Sergant indicated in the interview that he was given some direction by the White House in his new position at the NEA. “The idea was that Yosi would help pave the way for the new director’s arrival,” wrote Hillel Aron, referring to Rocco Landesman, incoming Chairman of the NEA. On paving the way, Sergant said, “I started working on things that I knew were happening, that I thought would be safe… and I was wrong.” 

And, frankly, why wouldn’t he have thought it to be safe – he was working with the White House at the time. The project that Sergant was referring to was United We Serve, a national service initiative orchestrated by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the Corporation for National and Community Service. Among the many controversial comments during the call, Sergant stated, “I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. And then my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”

It was this encouragement, at a time when town halls had gone nuclear over the issue of health care, which ultimately put Sergant in hot water.

Following a statement made in my first article regarding the invite coming from the NEA, the Washington Times reported that Sergant claimed he did not send out the invite. After revealing that the invite I received was in fact sent directly from Sergant, on September 1st the Washington Times published an article entitled “Official Dishonesty.” Aron reports that Sergant called the White House the next day asking if he should resign. Sergant stated, “They did not think that what I did merited the response of the media.”

However, at the time Sergant contacted the White House, they were unaware of exactly what the conference call revealed about their arts effort. In an email marked “Importance: High” and sent on September 11^th, Kalpen Modi, Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, asked, “Do either of you have a recording or transcript of the CNCS call you did with Yosi & NEA on 8/10.” The response from two federal officials at the Corporation was that they did not have a transcript or a recording of the call:

The full transcript was released on September 21st, revealing controversial conduct by not only Yosi Sergant, but Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Engagement, and Nell Abernathy of the Corporation for National and Community Service. In reaction to the conduct on the call, including comments I highlighted by a White House employee Buffy Wicks, the following day the administration backpedaled from an earlier claim that I had “misconstrued the purpose” of the call. The administration issued new guidelines, as reported by ABC News’ Jake Tapper, “to prevent such a call from ever happening again.” The memo, written by White House Counsel Gregory Craig, provided new guidelines to all federal agencies for public outreach meetings. “We regret any comments on the call that may have been misunderstood or troubled other participants,” said White House spokesman Bill Burton in an issued statement. “We are fully committed to the NEA’s historic mission, and we will take all steps necessary to ensure that there is no further cause for questions or concerns about that commitment.” This White House statement appeared to concede that the effort was outside of the NEA’s original purpose.

To date, Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy still remain in their positions while Sergant has been left with Michelin stains.

Sergant seems to disagree with the White House’s actions. “I don’t believe that what I did was wrong,” Sergant stated in his interview with Aron. “I believe that what I did came at a time when all the focus was on health care reform, and [that's] where they needed to put their time and energy… could they have stood up for me if they wanted to? Sure. Am I worth the political capital? They had just lost Van Jones.”

Why would Sergant feel as if he did something wrong – he was in fact working with the White House on this arts effort.

Writer Hillel Aron and Yosi Sergant

The writer and Sergant claim that there was no political advocacy on the call. However, both the NEA and the White House have released separate statements stating that some of the language was “not appropriate” and admitting that there were “appearance issues,” respectively. During the interview Sergant stated that he never mentioned “Public Option” in his encouragement, but rather offered “blood drive” posters as an example of the type of art that he hoped would come out of the meeting. But that does not pass the smell test for what actually happened. The example that Sergant and the other federal employees highlighted during the conference call was a Rock the Vote project designed to “engage young people, in particular, on the issue of a new environmental movement.” Given that the call participants were avid Obama supporters, the art that came out of the meeting was, unsurprisingly, highly political in nature – a fact that cannot be changed by a friend attempting to rewrite history. Also omitted from the story was the fact that after resigning, one of the first projects Sergant worked on with another activist call participant was called “Public Option Please” that attacked Joe Lieberman’s wife in hopes of getting his vote for the senate’s version of health care reform.

The writer also claims that Sergant “simply copy / pasted the text from a United We Serve e-mail.” However FOIA documents clearly show that Sergant helped develop and edit the invite with Nell Abernathy, a fact that Aron’s graduate journalism professors may like to know if he is being graded on accuracy. If Aron’s article was written for his fiction professors, I retract this criticism.

I’ve stated throughout my articles that the White House was ultimately to blame for this controversial arts effort. The administration was fully aware of Sergant’s activist affinity and placed him in a position to put that skill to work. Unfortunately, political activity at a federal agency, indirectly or otherwise, is prohibited. The fact that the NEA and the White House threw Sergant under the bus is not a fact lost on the person left smelling like rubber.  When asked by Aron if he thought someone from the White House was going to stick up for him, Sergant responded, “I knew they wouldn’t.”

It would appear through these new statements, Mr. Sergant, in part, agrees with me that the White House has mud on their hands – albeit for different reasons. The only question left for Sergant is, how much longer will he let the White House affect his integrity and blame him for actions he was appointed to perform.

In the first nationally televised interview with the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts since the infamous August 10th conference call, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown got straight to the heart of the controversy that many of us at Big Hollywood have been so diligently covering – its involvement in propaganda. How did NewsHour broach this topic, you may ask – by actually participating in propaganda.

You see, in the almost 8.5 minute interview, Chairman Rocco Landesman was asked a total of ZERO times about the NEA’s involvement in the meeting. He was asked ZERO times about the resignation of his Communications Director. He was asked ZERO times about NEA grantee Americans for the Arts’ involvement in advocating for health care reform legislation after the call.  And he was asked ZERO times about “non-partisan” organization Rock The Vote’s launch of a universal health care campaign only days after the call.

Instead, what the PBS NewsHour chose to use as a theme of the segment was Rocco Landesman’s message that the NEA’s budget is “pathetic.”

“Why do you think the arts are so undervalued in our society,” asked NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. Landesman answered with a list of governments that support the arts with far more taxpayer dollars, concluding, “We are, among all the developed world, the weakest supporter of the arts on a public basis.”

Now PBS will claim that they did their journalistic duty by asking Landesman about his “controversial” Peoria comment. But that whole controversy was nothing compared to the use of an agency to push legislation. It is just a safe way for a journalist to claim that the hard questions were asked.

“The great thing about this particular post, whatever the limitations of the budget, is that it’s a great bully pulpit,” said Chairman Landesman. And with that, the Chairman wraps into one statement what so many limited government types see as the problem with the NEA – it gives the government an opportunity to bloviate on the taxpayer’s dime.

The segment ended with PBS’ Gwen Ifill stating, “For the record, the National Endowment for the Arts is one of the funders of the NewsHour’s arts coverage.”

Wait – What did she just say?!?

A note to Mr. Brown and Ms. Ifill: The elitism witnessed in the Peoria statement is not controversial. Using a federal agency for propaganda, however, is. With your segment, PBS’ NewsHour can be added to the list of accomplices. Don’t you think we know that by making an NEA segment about the “pathetic” funding of the agency, PBS is also making a plea to the public for funding as well?

A taxpayer funded agency uses taxpayer airwaves to broadcast a request for more taxpayer dollars – it would actually be knee-slappingly funny if it weren’t so mind-numbingly infuriating.

Enter Howard Zinn – an author, professor and American historian – who, with the help of Hollywood and the History Channel, intends to change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history. His current curriculum suggestions, like introducing three-year-olds to the lynching of African-Americans, or quizzing seven-year-olds on which Presidents owned slaves, should be a red flag to parents.

Zinn has spent a lifetime teaching college students about the evils of capitalism, the promise of Marxism, and his version of American history – a history that has, in his view, been kept from students. His controversial 1980-book The People’s History of the United States paints traditional American history as a façade – one that has grotesquely immortalized flawed leaders and is based on principles that victimize the common man. In 2004, Zinn wrote a companion book entitled Voices Of A People’s History Of The United States, which includes speeches and writings from many of the people featured in The People’s History.

These two books have now become the basis for a new documentary, entitled The People Speak, to be aired December 13th at 8pm on the History Channel. The trailer portrays the documentary as a collage of compelling one-person readings, told through the words of “ordinary” people who have struggled throughout American history against oppression. Produced by Zinn, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and Chris Moore, the documentary appears to be cloaked, ironically (given Zinn’s admitted socialist agenda), in many of the traditional ideas that were behind our founding. The verdict is still out on the doc, but it is not for the books that inspired the film as well as the educational initiative associated with it.

Perhaps due to their one-sided perspective of America’s past, Zinn’s history books have largely been limited to colleges and universities, until now. In the press release announcing the broadcast, HISTORY introduced a partnership with VOICES Of A People’s History Of The United States, a nonprofit led by Zinn that bares the same name as his companion book, to help get his special brand of history into classrooms.

Delving into Zinn’s nonprofit is where this story gets interesting, and the organization’s grade school educational ambitions concerning.

VOICES’ function is to provide live performances of readings from the book Voices of a People’s History as well as educational materials to schoolteachers. The nonprofit’s site provides teachers with resources, including a teaching guide that explains how to get students excited about Zinn’s history books. Their educational materials also includes the Zinn Education Project, a resource for teaching Zinn’s perspective of American history to – drum roll please – pre-Kindergarten through high school students! Included in the curriculum for pre-K students (that’s three and four year-olds) is “Rethinking Columbus,” which counters “the myth of Columbus.” In Zinn’s view, our pre-K children “need to hear from those whose lands and rights were taken away by those who ‘discovered’ them.”

Another teaching lesson for our three-year-old students is “One Country! One Language! One Flag!” that includes teaching ideas for “examining the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the political milieu in which it was written.” The teaching plan suggests introducing our pre-K-ers to the lynching of African-Americans in the 1880s, and introducing the history of violence and discrimination against minority groups. It also proposes a discussion on an old “One Language!” chant allegedly used in classrooms up until 1942, and poses teachers with the question, “Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the ‘One Language!’ chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge?”

This discussion is proposed for kids age three to seven?

Zinn also includes a youngster version of his influential book entitled A Young People’s History of the United States as an introduction to his untold American History. The publisher of the book highlights a review by the magazine Socialist Review, who proclaimed “Howard Zinn has adapted his People’s History of the United States for younger readers, but in no way do these books pull their punches. Zinn feels the younger reader is entitled to look at US history honestly.”

The background of the board of directors and advisers of VOICES’ can only be described as jaw dropping and begins to show a clear motive behind teaching this predominantly anti-American history at such a young age.

Made up of several notables including Zinn, Kerry Washington, and Marisa Tomei, all of whom make appearances in the documentary, the VOICES board also includes radicals who play a role in our public schools. Brian Jones, a New York teacher and actor, is a board member of VOICES and has also played the lead in Zinn’s play Marx in SoHo. You can see Jones speaking about Zinn and the play below, recorded for a performance in Greece, where he extols the benefits of this one man play as a tool to introduce people to Marx’s ideas:

Jones is also a regular contributor to Socialist Worker, International Socialist Review, and speaks regularly on the beneficial principles of Marxism, including this year at the 2009 Socialism Conference. He recently gave a speech on the failure of capitalism, proclaiming that “Marx is back.”

Sarah Knopp, a Los Angeles high school teacher, is also on Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board. Like Jones, Knopp is also a regular contributor to International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, is an active member in The International Socialist Organization, and was also a speaker at the 2009 Socialist Conference. Here is Knopp speaking about the benefits of socialism, how capitalism destroys lives, and how she advocates workers taking over their factories:

Is it becoming clearer why this group might want to teach children to think poorly of the American system?

Then there is Jesse Sharkey, a schoolteacher in Chicago. Sharkey is another of Zinn’s Teacher Advisory Board Members and, completely uncharacteristic of this group, is a contributor to… Socialist Worker.

This is the group that the History Channel is working with “to develop enhanced, co-branded curriculums for a countrywide educational initiative.” If readers choose to watch The People Speak, which we at BigHollywood encourage, keep in mind the context of the documentary’s creator and the pre-K to high school curriculum that the History Channel and VOICES could possibly create given the makeup of the board members.

I am not advocating that we spare our kids the harsh truths of American history, but I am suggesting, given Zinn’s far-left political affiliation, this project is designed to breakdown our vulnerable children’s views of American principles so that they can be built back up in a socialist vision.

Zinn’s one-man play Marx in SoHo provides an example of his attempt to reestablish the socialist ideology. The play, created in 1999, places Marx in New York after bargaining with the authorities of the after-life for a chance to come back to earth to clear his name. At the end of the cold war, Zinn felt that Marxism was unfairly discredited through being anchored to the fall of the Soviet Union. Through the play, Zinn wanted “the audience to see Marx defending his ideas against attack.” Those associated with the play have described it as an attempt to reestablish Marx’s philosophic and economic outlook – a philosophy that views capitalism as corrosive to the human condition. It doesn’t take a great leap to surmise that instilling in children a pessimistic view of the American experience could make his ideas more palatable.

Zinn’s socialist philosophy has definitely made its way into the documentary, including a speech by prominent socialist Eugene Debs. In his speech, which is a prose to the ills of the capitalist system, he speaks to a court that convicted him of sedition:

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man, who does absolutely nothing…to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.”

The promotional videos can be viewed here:

It is not surprising to me that there are groups sympathetic to Marx’s ideas throughout our country. What is surprising is that the most powerful persuasion machine in the world (Hollywood) and the History Channel would provide Zinn such a prominent soapbox to stealthily build a case for a destructive ideology to our children, and as a result mainstream his ideas with the magic of cool music, graphics, and celebrity. Groups that push Marx’s philosophy are like a virtual organism that will not die off even when stung by the undeniable historical evidence showing human behavior makes such a system unsustainable. If we let this virtual organism into our grade schools, it will take decades for our kids to unlearn the ideology.

And if there are any doubts of the intentions of Howard Zinn’s movement, I provide a quote of his in closing. When a reporter asked Zinn, “In writing A People’s History, what were you calling for? A quiet revolution?” Zinn responded:  “A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.”

It appears that Zinn’s ilk have started the institutional phase of their agenda.

Subtlety is necessary if a federal agency intends to incite activists to take action on the hot issues of the moment. This approach is what we see when we look at the most recent documents acquired by a Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) request of the controversial August 10th conference call.

President Obama with Former NEA Communication Director Yosi Sergant

Readers of Big Hollywood may recall an article published in late August entitled “National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?” that described an August 10th conference call organized by the White House, the NEA, and the Corporation for National and Community Service. As stated during the conference call, the goal was to bring together a group of pro-Obama artists to push the President and his agenda, with United We Serve as the first proposed effort. During the call, Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director for the NEA, encouraged artists to create art on the vehemently debated issues of health care, energy, and the environment. 

In the newly obtained documents, Nell Abernathy, a representative of The Corporation, is shown providing the handpicked moderator a list of “concrete asks” to be emailed to the call participants following the conference call. The first concrete ask in the document [document 1] included volunteering on issues that were closely related to legislation being vehemently debated nationally:

“Serve in your community. You are probably already working to improve health care or green a neighborhood. Reach out to friends, colleagues and fans to serve with you. Ask five to pledge to serve with you.”  

Health Care Reform and Cap-and-Trade legislation were both being intensely debated in Congress in August, causing town hall meetings at the time to go nuclear over the proposed health-care legislation. Democrats were widely viewed as losing the debate. Asking a stacked group of pro-Obama art activists to address these issues could only lead to policy advocacy – and it did, as we have shown (here & here).

The new documents also show that other efforts were underway. In response [document 2] to the “concrete asks” document, an artist that participated in the call sent the following (emphasis added):

“We’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming about how we can add our skillset to this effort, and here are some of our thoughts…Making prints that subtly encourage the progressive agenda. Health care, Employee free choice, immigration, energy conservation, etc.”

This is the type of propaganda art that Big Hollywood helped stop by publishing the article. The response was sent by a talented print designer (Tugboat Printshops) prior to, but on the same day that, the article was published.

In addition to this email, other documents [documents 4] show that multiple events were in the planning phase leading up to the publication of the article – however all dialogue was abruptly halted the day after its publication. The events revealed in the FOIA documents include a Los Angeles event with hip-hop and indie-rock artists, and a film-screening event with on-air promotions led by Al Gore’s Current TV.

In addition to terminating discussions on these events, the article also halted the NEA’s involvement in another conference call scheduled for August 27th and moderated by Americans for the Arts, a NEA grant recipient. In an email [document 3] dated August 26th, Sergant stated:

“in light of the current situation…I am reviewing the current situation with my team and may or may not be able to participate in the upcoming [United We Serve] call. I will let you know shortly.”

The NEA ultimately did not participate on the conference call due to the article, a fact that was correctly guessed by Lee Rosenbaum, a participant on the August 27th call. One can only wonder how different that call may have been had the NEA participated.

Ultimately Sergant was forced to resign from his post at the NEA and the White House issued conduct guidelines to address the “appearance” issues of the call. However the White House and the NEA both claimed that no laws were violated in this effort.

The obvious question is – if the NEA, the Corporation, and the White House weren’t doing anything wrong, why did this activity abruptly stop?

The Health Reform Video Challenge, launched by Obama’s Organizing for America in September, is a contest “to make the best 30-second ad showing why the President’s plan for reform is so critical.” The winning video, selected by a list of Hollywood elites and Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, will be the basis for a new television ad that will air across the country delivering a clear message to viewers – children will die if health care reform is not passed. The secondary message is only one Defcon level lower on the fear-o-meter – the parents of sick or injured children will go bankrupt or lose their houses for even the simplest of injuries.

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Using children to pluck at the heartstrings of the electorate and further a political agenda is nothing new, but it shifts into the land of Disgustopia when our young are exploited to distort the truth or spread outright falsehoods. The winning video opens with a young boy stating, “A year from now I’ll break my leg and my parents will have to sell our house because we couldn’t afford health care.”

This statement is designed to instill broad fear and disseminate the idea that anyone, even a family faced with the common injury of a broken leg, is susceptible to being thrust from their homes as a consequence of being uninsured. The odds of needing to sell your home to pay for the cost of a broken leg are so remote that it borders on preposterous to use it as an example of why we need reform. House closing costs in almost every scenario would exceed the medical bill, yet this is the video that the President’s organization has selected to justify the need for reform. It’s much easier to sell health care reform if our system is so fractured that a broken leg can expel a family out from under the safety of their roof.

The power of fear to induce submission is one that few can avoid. In researching the twenty finalists for this piece I even found myself second-guessing my position on the health care reform debate. Such is the power of good propaganda.

We have an innate affinity towards altruism. It is a reality of the human condition that Big Government knows and exploits, without conscience, if the means justify its ends. Fear is Big Gov’s most useful tool for expansion. The mounting growth of entitlement programs provides clear evidence of our inability to tame this altruistic affinity.

The power of using children as propaganda tools can also be seen during the last “historic” health care reform debated in our country, a case study that also provides a clear example of the phenomenon of “mission creep” that the current reform bill will surely experience in the long run.

In the wake of their failed attempt to overhaul the health care system in 1993, the Clinton Administration looked for a smaller, targeted initiative that could get bipartisan support. After examining several options in separate efforts, both the First Lady Hillary Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy came to the conclusion that expanding health care insurance to children of the “working poor” would be the most politically popular route. This insight gave rise to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, better known as SCHIP.

SCHIP was signed into law by President Clinton in August of 1997 with the goal of insuring up to 5 million kids whose parents made too much money for Medicaid but could still not afford health insurance. After the first year of the program nearly 1 million children were enrolled.

Flash forward to January of 2009. “Either you are for kids or not for kids,” was the rallying cry of Democratic Senator Max Baucus in the push to expand funding of SCHIP. Similar rhetoric brought 40 House and 9 Senate Republicans over to the majority, and the Democratic controlled Congress presented to President Obama a bill that increased SCHIP funding by over $30 billion – in essence doubling the budget of the program.

SCHIP, which was intended to provide health insurance to the 5 million children of the “working poor”, has the ring of a morally sound program. An argument using children as the beneficiaries is a powerful message that few politicians can counter. But here’s the kicker, the Obama Administration’s SCHIP funding expanded eligibility to children in families earning $84,800 – that’s almost 400% of the poverty income level for a family of four. In some states families with incomes over $100,000 become eligible due to “income disregards” that allow for deductions such as rent, mortgages, and heating bills among others.

The expansion also has the goal of insuring 11 million children by the year 2013. That is over double the goal of the initial bill. Its also been argued by Republican lawmakers that over half of the newly eligible children already have insurance, which means they will be driven away from private insurance into the government sponsored program, piling on more of a burden to our system. That is the textbook definition of mission creep, a program’s expanding well beyond its original intent.

Here’s the point that we must understand – we cannot let propaganda prey on man’s primitive altruistic instinct in such a way that we burden our system to the point of collapse. Our entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, already account for more than 40% of federal spending! If we keep on the path of endless entitlement expansion we will see a depression the likes of which we have never seen before. That is not a play on the emotion of fear – just an unavoidable law of nature.

Yes we need change to our health care system. The costs of private plans are growing and there are people falling through the cracks due to catastrophic ailments that are of no fault of their own. We need targeted reform that tackles these problems. But what we don’t need is President endorsed propaganda that exploits children and is designed to scare the electorate into submission with distorted information.

Next week NBC is entering their “Green Week” of programming, infusing environmental messages across many of their prime-time shows. But the campaign does not only include entertainment programs – the eco-messaging will also be spread through NBC News’ Nightly News, Meet the Press, and the Today Show.

My question for the NBC News organization is this – will you be discussing the biggest global warming story of the year?

Early this year a study from Oregon State University, entitled Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals, contained the single biggest decision that anyone could make to dramatically lower their carbon footprint. And that decision? Have fewer kids.

The results of the report are actually mind boggling for anyone somewhat informed on environmental policy. The study investigates how the reproductive choices of an individual affects their “carbon legacy”, or said differently, the CO2 emissions attributable to a person’s offspring. What they found was that a US citizen’s decision of having a child adds 5.7 times the expected CO2 emissions for that citizen. Yes, 5.7 times!! This is due to the domino effect of your kids having kids, which have kids, and so on. 

An even more astounding aspect of the report was a comparison of the addition of two children to, say, the standard practices that lower your carbon footprint. For example, if a woman adopted all of the six eco-friendly behaviors highlighted in the report, she would reduce her carbon footprint by 486 tons of CO2 over her lifetime. But if she were to have two children, this would eventually add nearly 40 times that amount of CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere.

The decision of having fewer children decreases the carbon legacy of an individual by a staggering amount and is by far the single biggest decision an individual can make to affect the environment. This finding cannot be overstated. So it begs the question, why hasn’t the report affected global warming legislation?

As Al Gore has stated, “Our world faces a true planetary emergency.” If his apocalyptic vision is true, why has not one piece of legislation adopted an incentive for individuals to have fewer children?

I can think of only one possible answer…there is no emergency.

Around the time my beautiful daughter was born just a few years ago I noticed the increase in “stuff” attributed to her that went into our garbage on a daily basis. This rather obvious phenomenon sparked a question in my head that I shared with an eco-activist working on a “green” project of mine. “Why doesn’t the green movement encourage people to have less children as a solution to this global emergency,” I asked. “Well, we don’t talk about that because it isn’t politically correct,” he responded.

It was this answer, by someone spreading the message of apocalypse, that started my gradual transformation away from the alarmist position of global warming.

Having “fewer children” is not a policy that I am advocating here. I use it merely as a litmus test to the alarmist’s urgency. If China is any example, the “one-child” mandate has horrific social consequences. However, if we truly face the biggest crises we’ve ever encountered, the global warming proponents would surely have the political will to pass controversial legislation. Political correctness should not even remotely be the first concern for this group. In fact, it would hardly be considered controversial if the consequences were actually between life and extinction.

As recently as this past Monday, Senator John Kerry penned a Huffington Post article that read (emphasis added):

Now it’s time for a new generation of Americans to get in motion – because the very survival of our planet depends on them. Now is the time for young people who learned to flex their political muscle last November to shift into high-gear and get Washington to take on our historic legislation to combat global climate change.

For those that feel that our world will literally cease to exist, the findings in this report should have been viewed as the silver bullet to stop or, at the very least, dramatically slow the effects of global warming. But it wasn’t.

Why? Because companies like GE, the parent company of NBC News, doesn’t make a dime from a “solution” such as the one presented in the report. And Big Government can’t tax such a solution either. But both benefit from the “historic” cap-and-trade legislation pushed by Senator Kerry and the like. And if there is no emergency, why not take the money route.

Now of course there are sincere people that have a real concern for our environment and man-made pollution. I know many of them and include myself in that mainstream group. They create low toxicity products, encourage recycling and reuse, and are producing higher fuel efficient vehicles each year. We really do need to pay attention to our natural resources and protect against harmful effects on the environment. But after several years of working in the green movement, I’ve come to a rather cynical, yet I believe accurate, conclusion about global warming alarmism.

And that conclusion – global warming alarmism is a weapon, used by those wielding it, for personal gain.

Few would be surprised that MSNBC has aligned itself with this administration’s climate change legislation. But for non-opinion news organizations, studies like the “carbon legacy” report should provide ample fodder for questioning alarmist environmental policy. It shows just how far the hand of Big Green has reached into our lives when both NBC News and the heralded Meet The Press willfully agree to promote global warming legislation rather than turn a critical eye to alarmism.