Tom Shadyac was a movie director who was on top of the world in comedy, thanks to his frequent blockbuster collaborations with Jim Carrey. Starting with the two “Ace Ventura” comedies and moving on through “Liar Liar” and “Bruce Almighty,” with detours to make “The Nutty Professor” and “Patch Adams” in between, Shadyac appeared that he could do no wrong at the box office and applied his fortune to owning a 500-acre estate on the eastern edge of Pasadena.

But then in 2007, a double-whammy hit him when his “Bruce” sequel “Evan Almighty” became one of the biggest comedic box-office bombs of all time, and then he suffered severe head trauma in a bicycle-riding accident. The side effects included blurred vision and severe migraines that never seemed to go away, and Shadyac – who had been a lifelong Catholic – thought he was going to die.

Then suddenly, his life-threatening symptoms miraculously healed, and Shadyac decided to radically transform his lifestyle. He embarked on a spiritual and philosophical quest that took him around the planet while he explored the answers that the various world religions and most famous philosophers had to offer. And as a result, he wound up feeling that his wealth and extravagant professions were a form of mental illness in a world where millions of people go to sleep hungry every day.

Shadyac decided to take radical measures to change his life and his mindset, and wound up selling off his land and his house – as well as his private jet – and downsized to live in a mobile home at a community on the Malibu coastline. He gave away most of his wealth, but also spent $1 million of it to finance a highly personal documentary called “I Am,” which put his quest on film and offers a heady yet often compelling mix of insights and analysis into the meaning of life and whether there’s an afterlife.

“I Am” is playing in Los Angeles and New York City now, but will be rolling out to theaters around the country in coming weeks. It’s a compelling look at Shadyac’s big changes, and offers plenty of fodder for viewers to consider their own lives as well. However, be warned that a lot of his interview segments are with Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and the like. They aren’t focusing on bashing America but talk about the excesses of wealth in the West.

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So a new Gallup poll just came out, reporting that socialism was viewed positively by more than one-third of Americans. That’s a lot of people, if you could call them that.

But I’m not surprised.

Think about it for a second. Since when has socialism ever been accurately portrayed in American pop culture or academia? I’ve never seen it covered in “Facts of Life,” and I’ve watched every episode. And Rage Against the Machine, one of the most successful leftwing buckets of noise on the planet, never really explained how they spent their millions. Although I’m guessing it’s not just on Rogaine and trucker hats.

Fact is, because socialism is a lie, people have to keep pushing the lie. When someone says, “Hey, my brother is a socialist,” they never follow it with, “you know, that ideology based on envy that’s responsible for the deaths of millions.” No instead it’s, “He sells Che shirts out of hemp, when he isn’t recycling sex toys for the homeless. God he’s so caring.” (more…)

Twelve years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in Good Will Hunting, struggling fresh-faced actor Matt Damon sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f__kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f__kin’ knock you on your ass.”

The political left loves shout-outs, and this was a direct one to Zinn himself, whom Damon actually lived next-door to as a child, and whose book apparently knocked the actor on his own behind. “Ben (co-screenwriter Affleck) and I were laughing our asses off writing that,” he recalls. (What is it with Damon and the word “ass”?) ”We liked it that the smartest guy in Boston was reading Howard Zinn.”

Self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, 87, is arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the so-called “Great Men” theory, which actor Josh Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” The Boston University professor wasn’t the first academic to pioneer this approach, but he is no doubt the first to dispense with tedious scholarly ballast like footnotes and citations, and to have pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin and Pearl Jam running interference for his openly politicized agenda. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to Damon’s shout-out, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. (more…)

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability. 

Sometime between when I finished the critique and when it went live online, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”  (more…)

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America.  One minute, it seems, the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration.  Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education. 

If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools.  America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics.  What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian, studies.  And, then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents. 

One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter.  “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”.  I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it.  In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”  (more…)