From Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg; pages 190-2:
That violence was central to fascism is often an exaggerated point. Violence has been essential to nearly all revolutionary movements, save the few explicitly nonviolent ones. But the avant-garde fascists idealized violence as an end in itself, seeing it as “redemptive” and “transformative.” Mussolini talked about the power and importance of violence but committed far less of it than you might expect. Yes, his goons beat people up and there were a handful of killings, but mostly Mussolini liked the aesthetics of violence, the sound of brutal rhetoric, the poetry of revolutionary bloodshed. “For revolutions are insane, violent, idiotic, bestial,” he explained. “They are like war. They set fire to the Louvre and throw the naked bodies of princesses on the street. They kill, plunder, destroy. They are a man-made Biblical flood. Precisely therein consists their great beauty.” [Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, p. 62.]
Here again, the similarities to the New Left are striking. Violence suffused their political talk; physical violence merely punctuated it. Violence for the New Left and Fascists alike worked on numerous symbolic levels. It elevated the sense of crisis that revolutionaries crave in order to polarize society. Indeed, polarization was an identical strategic objective for the New Left and the Nazis. Forcing mainstream liberals to choose sides on the assumption that most would follow their sympathies to the left was the only way Hayden and others could usher in their revolution. That was what they meant by “bringing the war home.” (One of Rudd’s comrades who was killed in the Greenwich Village blast, Ted Gold, argued that the only way to radicalize liberals was to “turn New York into Saigon.”*) The Nazis similarly assumed that Germans who favored socialist economic policies but who rejected the idea of thralldom to Moscow would ultimately side with the National Socialists over the International ones. German Communists made a similar gamble, believing that Nazism would accelerate the historical march toward Communism. Hence, again, the German socialist mantra “First Brown, then Red.”
*Gold believed that an “agency of the people” would have to take over the United States once imperialism had been dismantled. When someone said his idea sounded like a John Bircher’s worst dream, Gold replied, “Well, if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.” Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 399.
Somewhat paradoxically, support for violence—even violent rhetoric, as in Rudd’s fondness for expletives—helped radicals differentiate themselves from liberals, whom the hard left saw as too concerned with politeness, procedure, and conventional politics. When “moderates” at the Columbia takeover tried to dissuade a member of the “defense committee” at the Math Hall (where the most radical students were holed up), he responded, “You fucking liberals don’t understand what the scene’s about. It’s about power and disruption. The more blood the better.” At the march on the Washington Monument to end the war in 1965, Phil Ochs sang his contemptuous “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”* Saul Alinsky, whose Rules for Radicals served as a bible for the New Left (and who later became one of Hillary Clinton’s mentors), shared the fascist contempt for liberals as corrupted bourgeois prattlers: “Liberals in their meetings utter bold words; they strut, grimace belligerently, and then issue a weasel-worded statement ‘which has tremendous implications, if read between the lines.’ They sit calmly, dispassionately, studying the issue; judging both sides; they sit and still sit.” [Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, pp. 120-21.]
Substitute the word “fascist” for “radical” in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference: “Society has good reason to fear the Radical . . . He hits, he hurts, he is dangerous. Conservative interests know that while Liberals are most adept at breaking their own necks with their tongues, Radicals are most adept at breaking the necks of Conservatives.” And: “The Radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks. He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.” In other words, they’re not people but dehumanized symbols. “Change means movement,” Alinsky tells us. “Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
New Left violence also supported numerous other fascist themes, from the cult of unreason, the lust for action, the craving for authenticity—talk was cheap—to a sense of shame about the martial accomplishments of the older generation. Just as many Nazi youth missed the Great War and were desperate to prove their mettle to their parents and themselves, many in the New Left had “issues” with their parents’ participation in World War II (and for many Jews, their parents’ Holocaust ordeal). In addition, many radicals were desperate to prove they weren’t cowards for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
*I vote for the Democratic Party
They want the UN to be strong
I attend all the Pete Seeger concerts,
He sure gets me singing those songs.
And I’ll send all the money you ask for
But don’t ask me to come along.
So love me, love me, love me—
I’m a liberal.
(Gitlin, Sixties, p. 183.)
- Page 18:
A particular paranoia about the influence of the “Jewish lobby” has infected significant swaths of the campus and European left—not to mention the poisonous and truly ******ian anti-Semitic populism of the Arab “street” under regimes most would recognize as fascist. My point isn’t that the left is embracing ******ite anti-Semitism. Rather, it is embracing populism and indulging anti-Semites to an extent that is alarming and dangerous. Moreover, it’s worth recalling that the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany partially stemmed from the unwillingness of decent men to take it seriously.
There are other similarities between German and Italian Fascist ideas and modern American liberalism. For example, the corporatism at the heart of liberal economics today is seen as a bulwark against right-wing and vaguely fascistic corporate ruling classes. And yet the economic ideas of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Robert Reich are deeply similar to the corporatist “Third Way” ideologies that spawned fascist economics in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, contemporary liberalism’s cargo cult over the New Deal is enough to place modern liberalism in the family tree of fascism.
- Pages 22-3:
Liberalism, unlike conservatism, is operationally uninterested in its own intellectual history. But that doesn’t make it any less indebted to it. Liberalism stands on the shoulders of its own giants and thinks its feet are planted firmly on the ground. Its assumptions and aspirations can be traced straight back to the Progressive Era, a fact illustrated by the liberal tendency to use the word “progressive” whenever talking about its core convictions and idea-generating institutions (the Progressive magazine, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress, and so on). I am simply fighting on a battleground of liberalism’s choosing. Liberals are the ones who’ve insisted that conservatism has connections with fascism. They are the ones who claim free-market economics are fascist and that therefore their own economic theories should be seen as the more virtuous, even though the truth is almost entirely the reverse.
Today’s liberalism doesn’t seek to conquer the world by force of arms. It is not a nationalist and genocidal project. To the contrary, it is an ideology of good intentions. But we all know where even the best of intentions can take us. I have not written a book about how all liberals are Nazis or fascists. Rather, I have tried to write a book warning that even the best of us are susceptible to the totalitarian temptation.
This includes some self-described conservatives. Compassionate conservatism, in many respects, is a form of Progressivism, a descendant of Christian socialism. Much of George W. Bush’s rhetoric about leaving no children behind and how “when somebody hurts, government has got to move” bespeaks a vision of the state that is indeed totalitarian in its aspirations and not particularly conservative in the American sense. Once again, it is a nice totalitarianism, motivated no doubt by sincere Christian love (thankfully tempered by poor implementation); but love, too, can be smothering. In fact, the rage that Bush’s tenure has elicited in many of his critics is illustrative. Bush’s intentions are decent, but those who don’t share his vision find them oppressive. The same works the other way around. Liberals agree with Hillary Clinton’s intentions; they just assert that anyone who finds them oppressive is a fascist.
page 236:
The Methodist youth magazine motive—a major influence on the young Hillary Clinton—featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh in one issue and advice on how to dodge the draft in others.
- Pages 240-1:
A more practical irony of the transformation of American liberalism is that it had fallen into the pre-fascist logic of the Bismarckian welfare state. Bismark had pioneered the concept of liberalism without liberty. In exchange for lavish trinkets from an all-powerful state, Bismarck bought off the forces of democratic revolution. Reform without democracy empowered the bureaucratic state while keeping the public satisfied. Blacks in particular married their interests to the state and its righteous representatives, the Democratic Party. Blacks and the Democrats meet each other service for service, and so ingrained is this relationship that many liberal black intellectuals consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be, quite literally, a form of racism. Liberals also entered a Bismarckian bargain with the courts. Facing mounting disappointments in the democratic arena, liberals made peace with top-down liberalism from activist judges. Today liberalism depends almost entirely on “enlightened” judges who use Wilson’s living Constitution to defy popular will in the name of progress.
All of this is traceable back to the Kennedy assassination, in which a deranged communist martyred a progressive icon. In 1983, on the twentieth anniversary of the murder, Gary Hart told Esquire, “If you rounded us [Democratic politicians] all up and asked, ‘Why did you get into politics?’ nine out of ten would say John Kennedy.” In 1988 Michael Dukakis was convinced (absurdly enough) that he was the reincarnation of Kennedy, even tapping Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate to re-create the “magic” of the Boston-Austin axis. In 1992 the high-water mark of the Clinton campaign was the Reifenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy. John Kerry affected a Kennedy accent in school, went by the initials JFK, and tried to model his political career on Kennedy’s. In 2004 Howard Dean and John Edwards also claimed to be the true heirs of the Kennedy mantle. As did past candidates, including Bob Kerrey, Gary Hart, and, of course, Ted and Robert Kennedy. In 2007 Hillary Clinton said she was the JFK in the race.
pages 318-333 (Ch. 9—Brave New Village):
Hillary Clinton is a fascinating person, not because of her dull and unremarkable personality, but because she is a looking glass through which we can see liberal continuity with the past and glimpse at least one possible direction of its future. She and her husband have been like Zeligs of the liberal left, appearing everywhere, interacting with everyone who has influenced liberalism over the decades. Because she is smart and ambitious, she has balanced idealism with cynicism, ideology with calculation. This, of course, is true of a great many politicians. But to the extent Hillary Clinton deserves the fame and attention, it is because observers believe she has the insight, advisers, and institutional power to pick the winning combinations.
If Waldo Frank and J. T. Flynn were right that American fascism would be distinct from its European counterparts by virtue of its gentility and respectability, then Hillary Clinton is the fulfillment of their prophecy. But more than that, she is a representative figure, the leading member of a generational cohort of elite liberals who (unconsciously of course) brought fascist themes into mainstream liberalism. Specifically, she and her cohort embody the maternal side of fascism—which is one reason why it is not more clearly recognized as such.
What follows, then, is a group portrait of Hillary and her friends— the leading proponents and exemplars of liberal fascism in our time.
THE POLITICS OF HUMAN RECONSTRUCTION
Hillary Clinton is conventionally viewed by her supporters as a liberal—or by conservative opponents as a radical leftist in liberal sheep’s clothing; but it is more accurate to view her as an old-style Progressive and a direct descendant of the Social Gospel movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Nothing makes this clearer than the avowedly religious roots of her political vocation. Born to a Methodist family in Park Ridge, Illinois, she always had a special attachment to the Social Gospel. She was an active member in her church youth group as a teenager and the only one of the Rodham kids to regularly attend Sunday services. “She’s really a self-churched woman,” the Reverend Donald Jones, her former youth minister and mentor, told Newsweek.
Jones was being humble. The truth is that he was a major influence, the most important person in her life outside of her parents, according to many biographers. A disciple of the existential German émigré theologian Paul Tillich, Jones was a radical pastor who eventually lost his ministry for being too political. Hillary wrote to Jones regularly while in college. When she moved to Arkansas, Clinton taught Sunday school and often spoke as a lay preacher on the topic “Why I Am a United Methodist” at Sunday services. Even today, Jones told Newsweek, “when Hillary talks it sounds like it comes out of a Methodist Sunday-school lesson.” [Kenneth L. Woodward, “Soulful Matters,” Newsweek, Oct. 31, 1994, p. 22. Jones has stayed involved in her life. During the Lewinsky scandal he reacquainted Clinton with a sermon of Tillich’s—“Faith in Action”—and served as a spiritual adviser during her 2000 Senate campaign.]
Jones bought Hillary a subscription to the Methodist magazine motive as a graduation present just before she went off to Wellesley. Spelled with a lowercase m for reasons no one but the editors probably ever cared about, motive in the late 1960s and early 1970s (when it folded) was an indisputably radical left-wing organ, as mentioned earlier.
Three decades later Clinton recalled for Newsweek that her thinking about the Vietnam War really changed when she read an essay in motive by Carl Oglesby. Newsweek chose to portray this as an endearing remembrance by a spiritual liberal, describing Oglesby as a “Methodist theologian.” But this description is highly misleading. [I can find no reference to Oglesby being a theologian of any kind. The title of his article, according to Newsweek, was “Change or Containment.” But it was actually “World Revolution and American Containment” and came from the SDS pamphlet by the same name. Oglesby co-wrote a book with an expert in liberation theology, Richard Shaull, called Containment and Change, which may be a source of the confusion. Clinton told Newsweek, “It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War.” This seems unlikely since even if she’d been reading motive and nothing else, Oglesby’s article was hardly the first anti-Vietnam piece to appear in that magazine (it became known for advising young people on how to escape to Sweden to avoid the draft). In time Oglesby became something of a New Left libertarian, believing that the New Left and the Old Right were kindred spirits—or at least should be.] Oglesby, elected president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1965, was a leading antiwar activist. His argument against Vietnam was theological only in the sense that liberal fascism is a political religion. Communist countries were good, according to Oglesby, because they were pragmatically trying to “feed, clothe, house and cure their people” in the face of persecution by a “virulent strain” of American imperialism and capitalism. Violence by oppressed peoples in the Third World or in the American ghetto was entirely rational and even commendable.*
*“I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who assassinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victim’s personal innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations.” It was Oglesby’s idea for the SDS to send “Brigades” to Cuba in solidarity with the regime. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1993)
Hillary Clinton saw such radical politics as cut from the same cloth as her religious mission. After all, she was reading this material in an official Methodist publication given to her by her minister. “I still have every issue they sent me,” she told Newsweek. . . .
In many respects, Alinsky’s methods inspired the entire 1960s generation of New Left agitators (Barack Obama, for years a Chicago community organizer, was trained by Alinsky’s disciples). It’s worth noting, however, that Alinsky was no fan of the Great Society, calling it “a prize piece of political pornography” because it was simultaneously too timid and too generous to the “welfare industry.” Indeed, there was something deeply admirable about Alinsky’s contempt for both the statism of elite liberals and the radical chic of the New Left. “Spouting quotes from Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara, which are as germane to our highly technological, computerized, cybernetic, nuclear-powered, mass media society as a stagecoach on a jet runway at Kennedy airport?” he once complained.
Still, there’s no disputing that vast swaths of his writings are indistinguishable from the fascist rhetoric of the 1920s and 1930s. His descriptions of the United States could have come from any street corner Brownshirt denouncing the corruption of the Weimar regime. His worldview is distinctly fascistic. Life is defined by war, contests of power, the imposition of will. Moreover, Alinsky shares with the fascists and pragmatists of yore a bedrock hostility to dogma. All he believes in are the desired ends of the movement, which he regards as the source of life’s meaning. “Change means movement. Movement means friction,” he writes. “Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.” But what comes through most is his unbridled love of power. Power is a good in its own right for Alinsky. Ours “is a world not of angels but of angles,” he proclaims in Rules for Radicals, “where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles.”
Hillary turned down Alinsky’s offer in order to attend Yale Law School. He told her it was a huge mistake, but Hillary responded that only by marching through America’s elite institutions could she achieve real power and change the system from within. This was a typical rationalization of upper-class college students in the 1960s, who prized their radical credentials but also looked askance at the idea of sacrificing their social advantages. It’s significant, however, that one of Hillary’s chief criticisms of Alinsky in her thesis was that he failed to build a national movement based on his ideas. But Hillary, more than most, did not give up the faith. She remained true to her radical principles. Thus at Yale—where she eventually met Bill Clinton—she quickly fell in with the leftist fringe.
There is an almost literary synchronicity to the overlapping of narratives and ideas at Yale in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton was taught constitutional law by Charles Reich, the “Level III consciousness” guru. Reich, in turn, had served as a partner to the famed New Deal lawyer and intellectual Thurman Arnold—a disciple of the Crolyite liberals of the New Republic—who championed a new “religion of government.” In the 1930s critics saw Arnold’s work as one of the linchpins of American-style fascism. He went on to co-found the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter.
Hillary helped edit the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which at the time was a thoroughly radical organ supporting the Black Panthers and publishing articles implicitly endorsing the murder of police. One article, “Jamestown Seventy,” suggested that radicals adopt a program of “political migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment.” An infamous Review cover depicted police as pigs, one with his head chopped off. The Panthers had become an issue on campus because the “chairman” of the Panthers, Bobby Seale, was put on trial in New Haven along with some fellow goons for the murder of one of their own. Hillary volunteered to help the Panthers’ legal team, even attending the trial to take notes to help with the defense. She did such a good job of organizing the student volunteers that she was offered a summer internship in the Berkeley, California, law offices of Robert Treuhaft, one of Seale’s lawyers. Treuhaft was a lifelong member of the American Communist Party who had cut his teeth fighting for the Stalinist faction in the California labor movement.
Hillary’s attraction to radical groups and figures such as the Black Panthers, Alinsky, and—according to some biographers—Yasir Arafat is perfectly consistent with liberalism’s historic weakness for men of action. Just as Herbert Croly could make allowances for Mussolini and countless others applauded Stalin’s “tough decisions,” the 1960s generation of liberals had an inherent weakness for men who “transcended” bourgeois morality and democracy in the name of social justice. This love of hard men—Castro, Che, Arafat—is clearly tied to the left’s obsession with the fascist values of authenticity and will. [As Allan Bloom wrote, “I have seen young people, and older people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest of reasons.” He continued: “They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts.” Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 221.]
After law school, however, Hillary eschewed such radical authenticity in favor of pragmatism. She worked as a lawyer in Little Rock and as an activist within the confines of the liberal establishment, chairing the state-funded radical organ the Legal Services Corporation, as well as the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund. Before that she’d been a Democratic staffer for the House Judiciary Committee. Her marriage to Bill Clinton, arguably the most relentlessly dissected union in American history, need not occupy much of our time. Whatever their romantic feelings toward each other may have been or continue to be, reasonable people can agree that it was also a deeply political arrangement.
The most revealing aspect of Clinton’s career prior to her arrival in Washington was her advocacy for children. Clinton wrote important articles, often denounced by critics as advocating the right of children to “divorce” their parents. She never quite says as much, though it seems undeniable that she was pointing down that road. But the child-divorce debate was always a side issue. What is more important, Hillary Clinton’s writings on children show a clear, unapologetic, and principled desire to insert the state deep into family life—a goal that is in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past. This is hardly a view unique to myself or to the denizens of the American right. As the late Michael Kelly wrote in an influential profile of the then-new First Lady, she is the heir to “the politics of do-goodism, flowing directly from a powerful and continual stream that runs through American history from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Jane Addams to Carry Nation to Dorothy Day . . . [T]he world she wishes to restore... [is] a place of security and community and clear moral values.”
The late Christopher Lasch came to a similar conclusion. Lasch, one of the most perceptive students of American social policy in the twentieth century, and no partisan right-winger, reviewed all of Clinton’s relevant writings for an article in the left-leaning journal Harper’s in 1992. The result is a sober (and sobering) discussion of Clinton’s worldview. Lasch dubs Clinton a modern “child saver,” a term critical historians apply to Progressives eager to insert the Godstate into the sphere of the family. While Clinton cavils that she wants the state to intervene only in “warranted cases,” her real aim, as she admits, is to set down a full and universal “theory that adequately explains the state’s appropriate role in child rearing.” To this end, she advocates the abolition of “minority status”—that is, the legal codification of what distinguishes a child from an adult. This would be a great Progressive leap forward in line with—Clinton’s words—“the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of married women.” Finally, “children, like other persons,” would be presumed “capable of exercising rights and assuming responsibilities until it is proven otherwise.”
Tellingly, Clinton focuses on Wisconsin v. Yoder, a 1972 Supreme Court case that permitted three Amish families to keep their kids out of high school, defying mandatory attendance laws. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, noting that nobody ever asked the kids what they wanted. The “children should be entitled to be heard,” he declared. Clinton takes Douglas’s dissent and builds an argument claiming children should be “masters of their own destiny.” Their voices should be weighted more heavily than the views of parents in the eyes of courts. Observing that in order to become “a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer” a child must “break from the Amish tradition,” she concludes that a child “harnessed to the Amish way of life” would likely lead a “stunted and deformed” life. Lasch offers a devastating conclusion: “She condones the state’s assumption of parental responsibilities... because she is opposed to the principle of parental authority in any form.” Clinton’s writings “leave the unmistakable impression that it is the family that holds children back, the state that sets them free.” In Clinton’s eyes, Lasch concluded, “the movement for children’s rights... amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy.”
Since Plato’s Republic, politicians, intellectuals, and priests have been fascinated with the idea of “capturing” children for socialengineering purposes. This is why Robespierre advocated that children be raised by the state. ******—who understood as well as any the importance of winning the hearts and minds of youth—once remarked, “When an opponent says ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already . . . You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community.’ ” Woodrow Wilson candidly observed that the primary mission of the educator was to make children as unlike their parents as possible. Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day,” the feminist icon proclaimed, “than this new thought about the child... the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny . . . of the private home.”
Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergartens was the dogma that “the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.” The Progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning “fun,” “relevant,” and “empowering.” The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric is a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other Progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.
National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, gradeschoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, “We no longer have rights over our children.” According to the historian Michael Burleigh, “Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeantmajors... Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled ‘What does your family talk about at home?’ ”
Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to ****** and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist Progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both. The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of Communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both Communist nations. ****** wanted to wipe out the Jews, Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling them both fascists. Liberal fascists don’t want to mimic generic fascists or Communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them—and this is the most crucial difference of all—is how they act upon that temptation.
THE FIRST LADY OF LIBERAL FASCISM
When Bill Clinton was elected president, his wife arrived in Washington as arguably the most powerful unelected—and unappointed—social reformer since Eleanor Roosevelt. She admitted to the Washington Post that she’d always had a “burning desire” to “make the world... better for everybody.” She had had this desire ever since the days when Don Jones showed her that the poor and oppressed didn’t have it as good as she did. And for Hillary, healing this social discord required power. “My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good,” Jones told Michael Kelly. “You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.” The echoes of Alinsky are obvious. Less obvious are the questions of who determines what the social good should be and by what means it should be achieved.
But Hillary didn’t frame her mission in overtly Christian terms save, perhaps, when speaking to avowedly Christian audiences. Instead, she fashioned the quintessential expression of liberal fascism in modern times: “the politics of meaning.” Now, when I say that the politics of meaning, and Hillary Clinton’s ideas in general, are fascist, I must again be clear that they are not evil. Nor do they sound fascist to modern ears—indeed, that is the whole point. Today we equate fascism with militaristic language and racism, but war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a great many of the metaphors for political discourse and for everyday conversation in general. So many of these words and phrases are part of the vernacular today that we don’t even realize their roots in battle and blood (“entrenched positions,” “storm fronts,” “hot shot,” and so on). Liberal fascism isn’t militaristic, but the same passions that prompted Progressives to talk in terms of “industrial armies” and “going over the top” for the Blue Eagle lurk beneath today’s liberal rhetoric. War was seen as a communal, unifying experience that focused the public’s mind on the common good and whose passions and discipline could be harnessed to socially “useful” ends. Today the modern left is in many ways openly antiwar and avowedly pacifist. But liberals still yearn nostalgically for the unifying experiences of the labor and civil rights movements. The language is obviously nicer, and the intent is objectively “nicer,” too. But at the most substantive level, the politics of meaning stands on Mussolini’s shoulders.
As for racism, there is a great deal of racism, or perhaps a more fair word would be “racialism,” in liberalism today. The state counts “people of color” in different ways from how it counts white people. Further to the left, racial essentialism lies at the core of countless ideological projects. Anti-Semitism, too, is more prominent on the left today than at any time in recent memory. Obviously, this is not the same kind of racism or anti-Semitism that Nazis subscribed to. But again, Nazi racism does not define fascism. Moreover, Nazi racism—quite in sync with Progressive racism, let us remember— was an expression of a deeper impulse to define the individual by his relationship to the collective.
Let me anticipate one last criticism. Some will say that Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning is old hat. Clinton hasn’t mentioned the phrase in years, swept under the rug by political expediency like the memory of her disastrous health-care plan. This would be a more salient critique if my aim was to offer anti-Clinton talking points for the 2008 presidential campaign. But that’s not my concern. What I find interesting about Clinton is her ability to illuminate the continuity of liberal thought. If what liberals thought and did in the 1920s is relevant today—as I believe it is—then surely what liberals thought and did in the 1990s is relevant as well. Moreover, there is no evidence that she’s been chastened ideologically. In her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, Clinton hardly backed off her radical views on children, even though those views were a political liability in 1992. She did, however, repackage her message in more palatable ways, thanks to the help of a ghostwriter.
Lastly, Clinton’s politics of meaning was arguably the most interesting and serious expression of liberalism in the 1990s, delivered at the apex of liberal optimism. Since Bush’s election and the 9/11 attacks, liberalism has been largely reactive, defined by its anti-Bush passions more than anything else. Hence, it seems worthwhile to investigate what liberals were saying when they were dancing to their own tune. In April 1993 Clinton delivered a commencement address to the University of Texas at Austin in which she declared, “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
The phrase “fills us up again” is particularly telling—in 1969 she had talked of how we needed a politics to make “hollow men” whole. She seems to be suggesting that without a social cause or mission to “fill” her, Hillary’s life (and ours) is empty and purposeless. Hillary has seemingly put pragmatic concerns ahead of everything else her whole life, but whenever she’s given a chance to express herself honestly, the same urges come to the fore: meaning, authenticity, action, transformation.
The politics of meaning is in many respects the most thoroughly totalitarian conception of politics offered by a leading American political figure in the last half century. Hillary’s views have more in common with the totalizing Christian ideologies of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell than they do with the “secular atheism” such Christian conservatives ascribe to her. But they have even more in common with the God-state Progressivism of John Dewey, Richard Ely, Herbert Croly, and Woodrow Wilson and other left-wing Hegelians. Hillary’s vision holds that America suffers from a profound “spiritual crisis” requiring the construction of a new man as part of a society-wide restoration and reconstruction effort leading to a new national community that will provide meaning and authenticity to every individual. Hers is a Third Way approach that promises to be neither left nor right, but a synthesis of both, under which the state and big business will work hand in hand. It is a fundamentally religious vision hiding in the Trojan horse of social justice that seeks to imbue social policy with spiritual imperatives.
To better understand the politics of meaning, we should consider the career of Clinton’s self-anointed guru, the progressive activist and rabbi Michael Lerner. Lerner was born to nonobservant Jews in New Jersey—his mother was the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. A graduate of Columbia University in 1964, he received his Ph.D. from Berkeley, where he served as a teaching assistant to Herbert Marcuse and led the SDS. A fan of LSD, a “progressive drug,” he believed that taking the hallucinogen was the only way to truly understand socialism (the irony clearly escaped him). When his sister married a successful attorney, a number of prominent politicians attended the wedding. Lerner could not let such an opportunity slip by. He interrupted the festivities with a speech denouncing the guests as “murderers” with “blood on your hands” for not doing more to stop the war in Vietnam.
When Cupid aimed his arrow at him, he told his paramour, “If you want to be my girlfriend, you’ll have to organize a guerrilla foco first.” (A foco is a form of paramilitary cadre—much cherished in Marxist-Leninist theory—designed for lightning-fast insurrectionary strikes pioneered by Che Guevara.) When the two were married in Berkeley, they exchanged rings extracted from the fuselage of an American aircraft downed over Vietnam. The wedding cake was inscribed with the Weathermen motto “Smash Monogamy.” (The marriage lasted less than a year.) Lerner claims to have been a leader in the nonviolent wing of the New Left. While a professor at the University of Washington, he founded the Seattle Liberation Front, which he later claimed was a nonviolent alternative to the Weathermen. Nonetheless, he was arrested on charges of incitement to riot as one of the members of the “Seattle Seven.” The charges were eventually dropped, but not before J. Edgar Hoover dubbed him—no doubt hyperbolically—“one of the most dangerous criminals in America.”
In 1973 Lerner wrote The New Socialist Revolution, a clichéd ode to the glories of the coming socialist takeover. The rhetoric was quintessentially Mussolinian: “The first task of the revolutionary movement . . . is to destroy bourgeois hegemony and develop a radical consciousness among each of the potential constituencies for revolutionary action.” Over the years, Lerner’s thinking evolved. First, he became deeply interested in mass psychology (he’s a licensed psychotherapist), imbibing all the Frankfurt school nonsense about fascist personalities (conservatism is a treatable illness in Lerner’s view). Second, he became a rabbi. And while his commitment to progressive politics never waned, he increasingly became obsessed with the “spiritual” aspect of politics. Finally, he cast aside dialectical materialism in favor of attacking consumer materialism and the psychic pain it causes. In 1986 he launched Tikkun, an odd magazine dedicated in large part to creating a new social gospel with heavily Jewish and ecumenical biases.
After Hillary Clinton’s politics of meaning speech, which was partly inspired by Lerner (who’d ingratiated himself with then-Governor Clinton), the radical rabbi psychotherapist went into overdrive, promoting himself as the house seer of the Clinton administration. He was to be the Herbert Croly of the new Progressive Era. Though many in the press recognized a hustler when they saw one, he nonetheless got the attention he wanted. The New York Times hailed him as “This Year’s Prophet.” When it became clear, however, that the politics of meaning sounded too much like New Age hokum, the press and the Clintons turned a cold shoulder. In response, Lerner released his opus, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism.
The book strikes one fascist chord after another. Lerner cites a long, familiar litany of progressive ideas and causes. He speaks about making the powerless more powerful, about throwing off the baggage of the past, about eschewing dogma and embracing national community, about rejecting the overly rational expertise of doctors and scientists. He waxes eloquent about the various crises—spiritual, ecological, moral, and social—afflicting Western bourgeois democracies that must be remedied through a politics of redemption. He also talks about creating new men and women—rejecting the false dichotomies between work and family, business and government, private and public. Above all, he insists that his new politics of meaning must saturate every nook and cranny of our lives by smashing the compartmentalism of American life. Morality, politics, economics, ethics: none of these things can be separated from anything else. We must have our metaphysics confirmed in every human interaction and encounter.
In this he unwittingly echoes ******’s beief that “economics is secondary” to the revolution of the spirit. Lerner writes, “If there were a different ethical and spiritual connection between people, there would be a different economic reality . . . And that is why meaning cannot be given lower priority than economics.” Needless to say, this is something of a departure from the Marxist materialism of his youth. Lerner’s preferred agenda would, of course, echo many of the guarantees from the Nazi Party platform of 1920, including equal rights, guaranteed health care, excessive taxes on the undeserving wealthy, and clampdowns on big corporations. A few relevant items from a 1993 article in Tikkun:
‘The Department of Labor should mandate that . . . every workplace should provide paid leave for a worker to attend 12 two-hour sessions on stress...
The Department of Labor should sponsor “Honor Labor” campaigns designed to highlight the honor due to people for their contributions to the common good . . .
The Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives, and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring, and dedication to work.’
This is precisely the sort of thing that Robert Ley’s German Labor Front pioneered. The comparison is more than superficial. The National Socialist state, like the Progressive and Fascist ones, was based on the Hegelian idea that freedom could only be realized by living in harmony with the state, and it was the state’s duty to ensure said harmony. There were no private individuals. (Ley famously said that the only private individual in the Nazi state is a person asleep.)
http://lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Li...2007_496pp.pdf
From Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy—and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them [2009] by Peter Schweizer; pages 46-8 (Ch. 3—THE CLINTON CRUSADE: How Democrats Made Credit a Civil Right):
“How in hell did we qualify?”—VICTOR RAMIREZ, A STUDENT WITH A SALARY OF $17,000 AND MORTGAGE RECIPIENT
For more than fifteen years, fair housing activists had been using the Community Reinvestment Act to compel banks to make increasingly risky loans. Using tactics of intimidation, delay, and public embarrassment, they had achieved stunning results. By 1990, some $5 billion had been shaken from banks through these tactics. But with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, what had been a nuisance and a low-level operation against banks would become a full-fledged effort to use the power of the state to shape the lending policies of banks, bringing them into line with the activist housing agenda.
From the beginning of his candidacy, Clinton had made home ownership for the poor and minorities a centerpiece of his urban policy. He mentioned the Community Reinvestment Act more than any other presidential candidate before or since. And with his election in 1992, activists discovered that they were no longer simply nipping at the heels of the financial establishment; they now had a friend in the White House who could dictate to that establishment. Clinton believed that millions of Americans were being held back by banks with too-stringent lending practices. This was manifestly (to him) not being done simply in the name of business soundness but was prima facie evidence of bigotry.
First Lady and political partner Hillary Clinton was also a strong ally. Not only did she embrace the agenda of spreading minority home ownership, she supported the Alinsky method of achieving it. During her time in the White House, she would raise money, attend events organized by an Alinsky affiliate, and lend her name to projects endorsed by Alinsky organizers in the White House several times. [Peter Slevin, “For Clinton and Obama, a Common Ideological Touchstone,” Washington Post, March 25, 2007.] This is hardly surprising, given her long-standing interest in community activism.
The Clintons would not simply pay lip service to these efforts. With the trademark hubris and impatience of his generation of liberal baby boomers, President Clinton would embark on a massive social engineering program that would, in the hallowed name of civil rights, dramatically undermine the lending standards of banks all over the country. He thereby set into motion a series of events that would shake the financial foundations of the country—and the world—sixteen years later.
Clinton and his team were part of a new wave of liberal activists turned political careerists who would rise to power with him. Highly educated technocrats—products of the “moderate” wing of the 1960s revolution who chose to work to change the system from within rather than seeking to destroy it—they also displayed a unique ability to square their raging personal ambition with high-minded social ideals, all the while excusing or overlooking their own hypocrisies and occasional venal sins.
These were not at all the same type of people as the community housing activists. Gale Cincotta, the tough-as-nails working-class Chicago housewife, would have had little in common with the Ivy League-educated members of Clinton’s inner circle. While Cincotta lived in the midst of the struggles of Chicago, members of the Clinton inner circle revolved into and out of lofty positions in government, business, and academia. With their elegant town houses and chauffeur-driven lifestyles, they wanted for very little.
What they did desire was the moral clarity and urgency of the civil rights movement, which had been the defining issue of their generation. Liberal boomers such as the Clintons and their friends had an abiding nostalgia for the drama and passion of the civil rights movement, and many were racked with guilt because they had either missed out on it or failed to participate. But they were also unwilling to give up their comforts or abandon the path of financial success. So they created a hybrid form of activism that would allow them to pursue their own goals while claiming the civil rights movement as their own by embracing the fair housing agenda. To this end, Clinton officials at HUD and DOJ teamed up with local activists to put the squeeze on U.S. banks.
Typical of the new breed of boomer liberal was Robert Rubin, who would serve as Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Not only would he be a major architect of Clinton’s economic policies, he would serve as a mentor to many of those who are now key members of President Barack Obama’s economic team.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ks-2016-215774
Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC
By DONNA BRAZILE
November 02, 2017
Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.
I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.
So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.
Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.
By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.
…
The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.
“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”
That wasn’t true, he said.
Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.
If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.
On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.
“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”
“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.
Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.
“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”
“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”
The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.
When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.
Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”
Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.
I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.
When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.
I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.
The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.
…
I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.
“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.”
I discussed the fundraising agreement that each of the candidates had signed. Bernie was familiar with it, but he and his staff ignored it. They had their own way of raising money through small donations. I described how Hillary’s campaign had taken it another step.
I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.
Bernie took this stoically. He did not yell or express outrage. Instead he asked me what I thought Hillary’s chances were. The polls were unanimous in her winning but what, he wanted to know, was my own assessment?
I had to be frank with him. I did not trust the polls, I said. I told him I had visited states around the country and I found a lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere. I was concerned about the Obama coalition and about millennials.
http://www.torontosun.com/2017/08/27...appened-hilary
Reliving the U.S. election: We already know 'What Happened,' Hillary
BY ADRIENNE BATRA
SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 2017
A few weeks ago, the title of Hillary Clinton’s book reliving the 2016 Presidential election was revealed. The memoir — What Happened (oddly a statement and not a question) — is yet to be released, but some excerpts were strategically leaked last week.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” obtained an audio of the former Secretary of State reading the book herself. She recounts a specific moment during the second debate against her Republican rival — now President — Donald Trump.
Here is Clinton in her own words:
“‘This is not okay,’ I thought. It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage, and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling, and carry on as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye, and say loudly and clearly, ‘Back up you creep. Get away from me. I know you love to intimidate women, but you can’t intimidate me. So back up.’ I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard. I wonder, though, whether I should have chosen option B. It certainly would have been better TV. Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue, digging my fingernails into a clenched fist, smiling all the while, determined to present a composed face to the world.”
Clinton’s overall observation of that evening once again demonstrates she has still not accepted her shocking defeat to Trump.
As for the GOP nominee “intimidating” her, candidates spend countless hours in debate preparation, planning for every scenario. That she wasn’t prepared to interact with Trump on the stage is her failure and not his.
In 2000 during a presidential debate — in the same town hall style Clinton describes in her excerpt above — former President George W. Bush had his personal space invaded by Vice-President Al Gore.
Bush simply nodded his head to the sudden intrusion, the audience laughed and it became a defining moment in the election. Bush’s instinct was a natural one — it wasn’t calculated or pre-conceived.
Had Clinton chosen her “option B,” akin to Bush, it would have been contrived and inauthentic — exactly how a large swath of the electorate viewed her.
And how about the breathtaking irony of Clinton referring to the president as a “creep”?
As author and political commentator Mark Steyn astutely observed of this excerpt “I thought she was describing her first date with her husband Bill.”
The same woman who said her “skin crawled” being around Trump is married to a man who was allegedly involved in at least three “unwanted sexual encounters” according to a 2015 article in the Washington Post.
The former Democratic nominee for president has been far too quick to blame everyone else for her election loss, rather than reflect on her own failings as a candidate. After she emerged from her post-election hiatus, Clinton said she lost because of: former FBI Director James Comey’s ill-timed letter, Russian hackers, the “bankrupt” Democratic Party, and of course, misogyny.
Her default of playing the victim card has become tiresome, and in part explains why she’s not in the Oval Office.
So please Mrs. Clinton, spare us your sanctimonious revisionist history.
We already know what happened.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/promin...oits-feminism/
BY: Sam Dorman
May 15, 2017
Camille Paglia is a woman of seeming contradictions. She’s a lesbian who thinks homosexuality is not normal, a Democrat who often criticizes the party’s 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, a self-described "transgender being" who calls sex changes for children "abuse," and a feminist who says abortion is "murder."
Decades after she burst onto the scene with her best-selling book Sexual Personae, Paglia is back with a timely commentary on sex and gender. Her recent book Free Women, Free Men argues, among other things, that feminism is "stunting the maturation of both girls and boys" and that "if women seek freedom, they must let men too be free."
Paglia talked to the Washington Free Beacon about a variety of topics including Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D., Mass.) alleged populism, Megyn Kelly's performance as a moderator during the first Republican presidential primary debate, and whether misogyny played a role in Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential bid.
You say in your new book that feminism’s "sex war" has stunted the maturation of both girls and boys. What do you think is the end result of that?
Second-wave feminism went off the track when it started to demonize men and blame them for all the evils in human history. It’s a neurotic world-view that was formulated in too many cases by women (including Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett) with troubled childhoods in unstable homes. First-wave feminism, in contrast, focused on systemic social problems that kept women in secondary or dependent status. My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.
What impact, if any, do you think Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 had on feminism? Former Texas state senator Wendy Davis said Clinton faced a "misogynistic climate" during the election. Do you agree with this?
Misogyny played no significant role whatever in Hillary Clinton’s two defeats as a presidential candidate. This claim is such a crock! What a gross exploitation of feminism—in the service of an unaccomplished woman whose entire career was spent attached to her husband’s coat tails. Hillary was handed job after job but produced no tangible results in any of them—except of course for her destabilization of North Africa during her rocky tenure as secretary of state. And for all her lip service to women and children, what program serving their needs did Hillary ever conceive and promote? She routinely signed on to other people’s programs or legislative bills but spent the bulk of her time in fundraising and networking for her own personal ambitions. Beyond that, I fail to see how authentic feminism can ever be ascribed to a woman who turned a blind eye to the victims of her husband’s serial abuse and workplace seductions. The hypocrisy of feminist leaders was on full display during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which incontrovertibly demonstrated Bill Clinton’s gross violation of basic sexual harassment policy. Although I had voted for him twice, I was the only feminist at the time who publicly condemned Clinton for his squalid and unethical behavior with an intern whose life (it is now clear) he ruined. Gloria Steinem’s slick casuistry during that shocking episode did severe damage to feminism, from which it has never fully recovered.
In 2016, you said Donald Trump had a "swaggering retro machismo" that would give "hives" to people like Gloria Steinem. How do you foresee a President Trump impacting gender relations and perceptions of men in America?
First of all, I must emphasize that I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries and Jill Stein in the general election. Having said that, I will don my political analyst hat and say that Donald Trump’s retro style of confident masculinity (which dates from the Frank Sinatra/Hugh Hefner period) was surely a major factor in his victory and represents what was probably an inevitable and necessary course correction in American gender relations. The delirious excesses of unscientific campus gender theory, translated into intrusive government regulations by elite school graduates saturating the Obama administration, finally hit a wall with the electorate. The mainstream big-city media too have become strident echo chambers of campus gender dogma, as demonstrated by last year’s New York Times fiasco, where two wet-behind-the-ears reporters fell on their faces in trying to prosecute the Trump of his casino days as a vile sexist. I mercilessly mocked that vacuous article in my Salon.com column and stand by every word I wrote.
The Guardian asked in 2010 whether Nancy Pelosi was the most powerful woman in U.S. history. More than ten years after she became the first female Speaker of the House, how do you think Pelosi has furthered perceptions of women in positions of power and leadership?
Unlike Hillary Clinton, both Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein owe their national prominence to their own skills, tenacity, and achievement in the political world. I have repeatedly said that Feinstein, with her even temper, natural gravitas, and long experience with military affairs, should have been the first woman president. Pelosi, who emerged from a prominent political family in Maryland (her father was a U.S. Congressman and mayor of Baltimore, and her brother was also Baltimore mayor), has an amazing aptitude for deft insider maneuvering and bare-knuckles power plays, without ever losing that cool, unflappable persona, always so primly ladylike and stylish. She smiles and smiles—even as she shoves the stiletto in! Even when I’ve found her too predictably partisan, I have been continually impressed by her poise and aplomb. However, Pelosi herself, to some reports, has been frustrated by her difficulties in giving formal speeches, and perhaps this has held her back from running for president. The main point here is that we should have had our first woman president way back in the 1990s, but neither Pelosi nor Feinstein, the leading female candidates, chose to run, as even Elizabeth Dole bravely did. There is absolutely no mythical "misogyny" holding back American women from the presidency: for heaven’s sake, the U.S. has had women mayors, senators, and governors for decades now. But our money-grubbing presidential campaigns, which must cover an immense geography (far vaster than any European nation), are both too prolonged and too arduous for most women to want to tackle. Perhaps both Pelosi and Feinstein (unlike Hillary) are too happy and content in their personal relationships to want that kind of crazed derangement of their private lives.
Could you envision Elizabeth Warren running successfully as a populist candidate in 2020 against Donald Trump?
Elizabeth Warren, a smug Harvard professor, is no populist. She doesn’t have an iota of Bernie Sanders’ authentic empathic populism—but Sanders will be too old to run next time around. I tried to take Warren seriously during the run-up to the primaries, but her outrageous silence about Sanders’ candidacy when he was battling the corrupt Hillary machine made me see Warren as the facile opportunist that she is. She craftily hid from sight throughout the primaries—until Hillary won the nomination. Then all of a sudden, there was bouncy, grinning Warren, popping in and out of Hillary’s Washington mansion as vice-presidential possibilities were being vetted. What an arrant hypocrite! Warren stands for nothing but Warren. My eye is on the new senator from California, Kamala Harris, who seems to have far more character and substance than Warren. I hope to vote for Harris in the next presidential primary.
What do you think of Megyn Kelly and her decision to leave Fox News?
I long ago stopped watching TV news and chat shows because of the tedium of their hackneyed polarized politics and smarmy personnel. Hence the first time I ever laid eyes on Megyn Kelly was when she was narcissistically snorting and snickering on air in the ten-minute prelude to the first GOP presidential debate in August 2015. The nation’s selection of presidential candidates should be treated as serious business—not as a platform for adolescent exhibitionism by the TV hosts. Hence when the very first question to Donald Trump, as posed by Kelly, was "You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals," I thought it was grounds for Kelly’s instant termination from her job. The tenor of the entire national campaign, from that moment forward, was lowered by Kelly’s sloppy ad hominem crudity. Ironically, it was because of her unprofessional behavior at that first debate that I discovered the unsparing podcast commentary of Diamond and Silk, two pro-Trump African-American sisters in North Carolina who satirically lambasted Kelly the next day for her rudeness.
That one video by Diamond and Silk woke me up hard about Trump, whom I had already dismissed as a "carnival barker" in my Salon column. I suddenly saw Trump’s populist appeal—and from that moment forward, month after month, I felt the slow movement in the country toward him. As for Megyn Kelly, I have no idea what her appeal is. She seems shallow and self-absorbed—one of those glib types (not unlike Rachel Maddow) who has somehow been led to think she’s much smarter than she really is. As a college teacher with red pen in hand, I’m not impressed.
You say in the abortion chapter in your new book that pro-lifers have the "moral high ground" in trying to protect the innocent. Yet you've also argued that overcoming nature is a moral imperative and that we should "thwart nature’s procreative compulsions" through activities like abortion. How do you reconcile those two views?
In ethics, one of the many branches of philosophy invented by the ancient Greeks, we are usually faced not with a simple, reassuring scheme of right versus wrong but rather an often painfully conflicted choice between morally mixed options. I stated in Vamps & Tramps (1994): "Women’s modern liberation is inextricably linked to their ability to control reproduction, which has enslaved them from the origin of the species." However, as an atheist who nevertheless respects religion, I see and respect the contrary position. As I went on to say: "We career women are arguing from expedience: it is personally and professionally inconvenient or onerous to bear an unwanted child. The pro-life movement, in contrast, is arguing that every conception is sacred and that society has a responsibility to protect the defenseless."
Contemporary American feminism has distorted and desensitized itself by its inability or refusal to recognize the ethical weight of the pro-life position, which it routinely mischaracterizes as "anti-woman." In contrast, I wrote (again in Vamps & Tramps): "Modern woman has become an agent of Darwinian triage. It is or should be ethically troubling: abortion pits the stronger against the weaker, and only one survives." The inflammatory abortion issue has consumed far too much of feminism, to the point of monomania. I used to be a contributing member of Planned Parenthood, until I realized that it had become a covert arm of the Democratic party. If Planned Parenthood is as vital to American women’s health as feminist leaders claim, then why can’t it be removed from the violent political arena altogether and fully funded by wealthy liberal donors? Let the glitterati from Hollywood to Manhattan step up to the plate and put their money where their mouths are.
What do you think of 50 Shades of Grey and highlighting sadomasochism in a popular film?
Neither the original novel nor the two bland films of 50 Shades of Grey interest me in the least, because I was fortunately exposed during my college and graduate school years to far more sophisticated and substantive literature about sadomasochism, such as The Story of O and the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, then widely available in Grove Press paperbacks. It is intriguing, however, that at a time when feminist rhetoric blankets the culture, the tremendous worldwide success of 50 Shades of Grey seems to suggest that many women of all ages still secretly long for the old-fashioned sizzle of traditional polarized sex roles. In my first book, Sexual Personae (1990), based on extensive research into history, anthropology, and psychology, I correctly predicted the return of sadomasochism, a prophecy that seemed baffling at the time: "My theory is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind." My long review-essay, "Scholars in Bondage," commissioned by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2013 and reprinted in my new book, dissects the current chic trend for academic studies of sadomasochism, which I find both faulty in scholarship and lacking in basic common sense.
You say you were never encouraged by "misguided adults" to believe that you were actually a boy or "that medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life." Do we have an obligation to not participate in or encourage someone’s gender dysphoria in adulthood, or just childhood?
My lifelong gender dysphoria has certainly been a primary inspiration for my entire career as a researcher and writer. I have never for a moment felt female—but neither have I ever felt male either. I regard my ambiguous position between the sexes as a privilege that has given me special access to and insight into a broad range of human thought and response. If a third gender option ("Other") were ever added to government documents, I would be happy to check it. However, I have never believed, and do not now, that society has any obligation to bend over backwards to accommodate my particular singularity of identity. I am very concerned about current gender theory rhetoric that convinces young people that if they feel uneasy about or alienated from their assignment to one sex, then they must take concrete steps, from hormone therapy to alarmingly irreversible surgery, to become the other sex. I find this an oddly simplistic and indeed reactionary response to what should be regarded as a golden opportunity for flexibility and fluidity. Furthermore, it is scientifically impossible to change sex. Except for very rare cases of intersex, which are developmental anomalies, every cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth sex for life.
Beyond that, I believe that my art-based theory of "sexual personae" is far more expansive and truthful about human psychology than is current campus ideology: who we are or want to be exceeds mere gender, because every experimental persona that we devise contains elements of gesture, dress, and attitude rich with historical and cultural associations. (For Halloween in childhood, for example, I defiantly dressed as Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, and Hamlet.) Because of my own personal odyssey, I am horrified by the escalating prescription of puberty-blockers to children with gender dysphoria like my own: I consider this practice to be a criminal violation of human rights. Have the adults gone mad? Children are now being callously used for fashionable medical experiments with unknown long-term results.
In regard to the vexed issue of toilets and locker rooms, if private unisex facilities can be conveniently provided through simple relabeling, it would be humane to do so, but I fail to see why any school district, restaurant, or business should be legally obligated to go to excess expense (which ultimately penalizes the public) to serve such a minuscule proportion of the population, however loud their voices. And speaking of voices: as a libertarian, I oppose all intrusion by government into the realm of language, which belongs to the people and which evolves organically over time. Thus the term "Ms." eventually became standard English, but another 1970s feminist hybrid, "womyn", did not: the populace as a whole made that decision, as it always does with argot or slang filtering up from ethnic or avant-garde subgroups. The same principle applies to preferred transgender pronouns: they are a courtesy that we may choose to defer to, but in a modern democracy, no authority has the right to compel their usage.
What do you think of Kate Upton?
Believe it or not, I had no idea who you were referring to! After consulting the Web, I realize that the lady in question is a lively but rather gawky, chipmunk-toothed Taylor Swift clone who gained fame as a Sports Illustrated cover model. In her gum-baring goofiness, she is somewhat reminiscent of model Margaux Hemingway, one of the "It" girls of the 1970s. But alas, Upton has never risen above the tide of banality to register on my radar screen.
There once was a time (during the resurgence of pro-sex feminism in the 1990s) when I never missed the luscious Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and enjoyed twitting feminist prudes by publicly celebrating it. But the great age of dynamic, distinctive super-models is long gone. My all-time favorite swimsuit model was Stacey Williams, an alluring brunette whom Sports Illustrated featured for a record eight years. Today, traces of Stacey’s sensual mystique can perhaps be seen in Chanel Iman Robinson, the half Korean, half African-American Victoria’s Secret model who has vivaciously adorned three annual swimsuit issues thus far.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/03/what-...trump-era.html
…Paglia’s displeasure over the election was largely reserved for the liberal Establishment, and for Hillary Clinton, whom she’s criticized lavishly for the last 20 years. “I like Hillary because she’s kind of a bitch,” Paglia said in a 1993 interview, but her assessment has since evolved. She now calls Clinton “a walking neurosis.” During the primaries, Paglia preferred Bernie Sanders — “an authentic leftist,” who brought her back to the 1960s. “That is what real leftists were like,” she told me. “They’re not post-structuralists with their snide, cool, elitist jargon.” In the general election, as a resident of Pennsylvania, she voted for Jill Stein.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/be...ton-residence/
Chinese Reportedly Hacked Hillary Server. During Same Time, 12 CIA Sources Reportedly Killed by China. Coincidence?
BY JOE SAUNDERS
AUGUST 29, 2018
Russian computer hacking might have been the least of Hillary Clinton’s security breaches.
The former secretary of state’s email scandal is back in the headlines, and its impact on American national security might have been even worse than Americans knew.
And deadly for American intelligence sources in China.
According to an exclusive Daily Caller News Foundation report, the unauthorized, unsecured computer server Clinton used while serving as the United States top diplomat — privy to some of the deepest secrets in the national security community — was penetrated by a Chinese firm “involved in collecting intelligence for China.”
As the exclusive DCNF report stated:
“The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
“The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant ‘courtesy copy’ for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.”
In other words, an American secretary of state who felt entitled to work on her own amateurish computer system had exposed all of her correspondence to one of the country’s most powerful and dangerous rivals in world affairs.
And it’s possible that at least 12 operatives serving United States intelligence agencies paid for Clinton’s security breach with their lives.
According to a New York Times report from May 2017, a successful Chinese counterintelligence operation that started in 2010 “systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.”
“From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources,” The Times reported. “According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.”
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but 2010 was Clinton’s first full year as secretary of state.
Naturally, she would not have been in on every detail of covert CIA operations, but it’s entirely possible that Chinese intelligence services reading her correspondence in real time would be able to glean enough information to identify where the United States might have intelligence assets within China.
After a year of getting such information, it’s not hard to imagine the Chinese intelligence services having enough to take drastic, deadly action against sources helping their American rivals.
At any rate, a report that Clinton’s server had been thoroughly and professionally hacked by Chinese intelligence is circulating now, more than a year after The Times reported a disastrous breach in American intelligence operations taking place in China at the same time that the Clinton breach occurred.
It’s not a big stretch to put those two items together.
There are, of course, other possible explanations. Writing for Foreign Policy earlier in August, Zach Dorfman claimed that a faulty communications system was to blame — although the exact nature of that system was understandably left undescribed.
“The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it,” he wrote.
Dorfman also cited “former intelligence officials” who put the number of executions by the Chinese much higher than 12 — closer, in fact, to 30.
“When things started going bad, they went bad fast,” one of the former officials told Dorfman.
Nonetheless, the timing — and Clinton’s notorious history of playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to intelligence, security, classified information and foreign policy — give reason for pause.
Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state is infamous for many reasons, but her bungling of American diplomatic security that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, then lying shamelessly to the American people about what happened, is one of the worst.
Having her government email being hacked by Chinese intelligence, if there is even a tenuous connection with an operation that ended with a roll-up of American intelligence operations in China — and the deaths of 30-odd operatives working for American interests — is a disaster to rival that.
Russia, the United States’ other big rival on the world stage, has long been known to have been engaged in intelligence operations targeting the Democratic National Committee, and by extension, Hillary’s campaign.
But Russian hacking might have been the least of Clinton’s leaks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37826098
US election 2016: What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?
By Jude Sheerin
• 2 November 2016
Haiti protesters blame the Clintons for a litany of ills in their mother country
Donald Trump has said the work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Haiti was a "disgrace". What really happened?
"The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars," says Haitian activist Dahoud Andre.
He has been leading protests outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign base in Brooklyn for the last two years.
He said protesters from his small activist group, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, will continue to level their allegations - so far all unproven - if the Democratic candidate wins the White House.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump raised the matter in the third and final presidential debate when he told Mrs Clinton: "I was at a Little Haiti the other day in Florida.
"And I want to tell you, they hate the Clintons, because what's happened in Haiti with the Clinton Foundation is a disgrace."
Mrs Clinton retorted that she was proud of the foundation's work, and pointed out her rival's namesake charity had spent money on a lifesize portrait of himself.
The Clintons' history with the world's first black republic dates back to their 1975 honeymoon, when they met a voodoo priest and visited a hotel where Ernest Hemingway once stayed.
Few could have guessed the two young Americans touring the attractions that December would one day wield such influence over the impoverished Caribbean island nation.
Mr Andre is not alone among his compatriots in blaming the once-and-perhaps-future first couple for a litany of ills in Haiti.
Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC: "A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that's for sure."
"The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them," he added.
Replicated mistakes
Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State and Mr Clinton was UN Special Envoy to Haiti when the January 2010 earthquake struck, killing an estimated 220,000 people.
Some $13.3bn (£10.9bn) was pledged by international donors for Haiti's recovery.
Mr Clinton was appointed co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.
________________________________________
But the IHRC found itself under fire as frustrations mounted at the slow pace of recovery.
Its mandate was not renewed by the Haitian parliament in 2011.
A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC's decisions were "not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities".
Mr Clinton's own office at the UN found 9% of the foreign aid cash went to the Haitian government and 0.6% to local organisations.
The bulk of it went to UN agencies, international aid groups, private contractors and donor countries' own civilian and military agencies.
For example, the Pentagon billed the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars for sending US troops to hand out bottled water and keep order on the streets of Haiti's ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince.
Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC "it's hard to say it's been anything other than a failure".
But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground.
"They relied too much on outside actors," Mr Johnston says, "and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers."
…Mrs Clinton's campaign has said she never did anything at the State Department as a result of donations to the Clinton Foundation.
But potential conflicts of interest have emerged.
After the earthquake, disaster capitalists flocked to the nation of 10 million people, which is about the size of the US state of Massachusetts.
Private contractors were eager to sell services, in what one US envoy described in a Wikileaks-disclosed diplomatic cable as a "gold rush".
In email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials, a senior aide to Mrs Clinton, who was then-secretary of state, kept an eye out for those identified by the abbreviations "FOB" (friends of Bill Clinton) or "WJC VIPs" (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).
"Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC," wrote Caitlin Klevorick, a senior State Department official who was vetting incoming offers of assistance coming through the Clinton Foundation.
"Most I can probably ID but not all."
Ms Klevorick told ABC News she made the comments about Mr Clinton to help pin down whether would-be contractors had a history in Haiti or with disaster relief.
The emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, have fuelled claims the Clintons were running a pay-to-play operation…
House Republicans are already laying the groundwork for a volley of congressional hearings into the Clinton Foundation in the event the Democratic candidate wins the White House in a week's time.
Possibly the most enduring criticism of the Clinton Foundation's work in Haiti stems from its signature project, a garment factory known as the Caracol Industrial Park.
The foundation, working with the Clinton State Department, helped arrange a US-subsidised deal with the Haitian government to build the $300m factory complex in 2012.
Several hundred farmers were evicted from their land to make way for the 600-acre manufacturing site, which produces clothes for retailers such as Old Navy, Walmart and Target.
South Korean textile giant Sae-A Trading Co, which is the main employer at the facility, subsequently donated between $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
Mr Clinton declared 100,000 jobs would be created "in short order".
But the Caracol Industrial Park has created only 8,000 jobs.
Sae-A spokeswoman Karen Seo told the BBC: "The rate of job growth depends both on the efficiency in building facilities, as well as customer demand - including the long tail of the recession. Momentum is growing and we are optimistic."
In its defence, the Clinton Foundation - which has raised more than $2bn from over 330,000 donors since its 2001 launch - points to its A rating from philanthropic monitors.
Charity Watch says 88% of the Clinton Foundation's budget was spent last year on programme expenses.
But the watchdog's president, Daniel Borochoff, told the BBC the high mark was not intended to reflect whether Mrs Clinton kept donors to her family's foundation at appropriate arm's length, or provided favoured access as secretary of state.
Questions 'fester'
…In the Little Haiti neighbourhood of Miami that was visited by Mr Trump this September, the head of a local women's advocacy group has questions for Mrs Clinton.
Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, believes that Clinton-backed projects have helped global investors more than they have benefited poverty-stricken Haitians.
She told the BBC: "The more Secretary Clinton refrains from responding to the concerns and questions from the people of Haiti, this perception that she's trying to evade responding will continue.
"Instead of allowing these questions to linger and fester, why not come clean? The questions will not go away, they will continue."
from Bullies by Ben Shapiro; page 249:
In April 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Isarel that if it didn’t make concessions to the Palestinians, the Arab world might not lend it support in its fight against Iran going nuclear. This was a tacit threat. That threat became explicit the next month when supposed pro-Israel thugmaster Rahm “Dead Fish” Emanuel visited the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he told major AIPAC donors that “thwarting Iran’s nuclear program is conditional on progress in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.” In other words, the United States would let Iran go nuclear unless Israel ponied up to the Palestinian terror regime. [Arnaud De Borchgrave, “King Abdullah: Create Palestinian State or Risk War,” May 12, 2009, http://www.newsmax.com/deBorchgrave/...5/12/id/330049 ]
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