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November 2017

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Trump, ISIS and the Crisis of Meaning When politics limits itself to the material, people seek spiritual purpose elsewhere.

By on November 7th, 2017

Three years and many beheadings after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate, Americans are rejoicing in its demise. “With the liberation of ISIS’s capital and the vast majority of its territory,” President Trump said in a statement, “the end of the ISIS caliphate is in sight.”

But does the fall of Raqqa really mean the fall of Islamic State? One needs merely a sharp object—or as we saw last week, a rented truck—and a nearby group of “infidels” to be an ISIS soldier.

After the Oct. 31 New York attack, Mr. Trump tweeted: “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” But ISIS’ most important battlefield is not in the Levant; it is online, in hearts and minds. ISIS’ power comes from ideas, not territory.

The threat is from within as well as without. Sayfullo Saipov, the Uber driver who allegedly murdered eight in ISIS’ name, had been living an unremarkable life in the U.S. for seven years. Thousands of young Muslims have left Europe and the U.S. for Syria and Iraq to answer Mr. Baghdadi’s call. Seduced via social media, young men and women, some of them converts, are also taking up arms in the West, or leaving their homes in Chicago, London and Paris, to live, and perhaps die, for a cause.

The Obama administration argued that young people join ISIS because of poor economic prospects. “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in 2015. “We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.” That’s myopic. Physicians, computer scientists and star high-school students have been radicalized, too. People are motivated by meaning more than money.

While Western states do (or used to) provide good social services, economic opportunity and consumer goods, they are increasingly indifferent to questions of meaning—to principles worth living, and perhaps dying, for. In the U.S. we are proud of our freedom—but freedom to do and care for what? For a small but not negligible number of young people, answering a call to build a caliphate, allegedly based on the dictums of a holy book, will seem a more genuine choice than ambition or consumerism.

Mr. Trump should know this. His campaign was a kind of call for meaning. Whatever the merits of Mr. Trump’s positions, he framed his views on trade, immigration and foreign policy in terms of America’s national identity: “Make America Great Again.” Hillary Clinton emphasized technical solutions. Can anyone remember her slogans, her rallying cries? There was “breaking down barriers” and “fighting for us” and “I’m with her.” None stuck. She ended on “stronger together.” Together with what or whom?

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Race and America’s Soul A fearless, eye-opening new book probes the wound. Myron Magnet

By on November 7th, 2017

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

The most surprising part of the book is Dattel’s documentation of the racism of northern abolitionists. As early as the 1790s, about a decade after Massachusetts had abolished slavery and while Connecticut was in the midst of its gradual abolition, the white townspeople of Salem and New Haven fretted that the movement of blacks into their neighborhoods would crash property values by up to 50 percent. Nor did Yankees make any distinction between freeborn blacks and freed slaves, as an 1800 survey by the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences found. Yale president Timothy Dwight, who sponsored the survey with lexicographer Noah Webster, summed up its consensus on the state’s blacks: “Uneducated to principals of morality, or to habits of industry . . . they labor only to gratify gross and vulgar appetites. Accordingly, many of them are thieves, liars, profane drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, quarrelsome, idle.” New Haven’s freedmen, Dwight expanded a decade later, “are, generally, neither able, nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing to themselves” and end up as “nuisances to society.” Little wonder, given such attitudes, that as white immigrants crowded into the new nation, employers preferred them to native blacks, left with mostly menial jobs as domestic servants, chimney sweeps, washerwomen, and outhouse cleaners.

Half a century after Connecticut’s survey, New York senator and governor William Seward made a famous abolitionist speech, perhaps a template for Abraham Lincoln’s immortal 1854 Peoria speech. Lincoln’s future secretary of state argued that “a higher law than the Constitution,” decreed by “the Creator of the Universe,” forbade slavery. Nevertheless, that same abolitionist, a decade later, pronounced that “the African race here is a foreign and feeble element . . . incapable of assimilation . . . a pitiful exotic unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of our native vineyard.” Just after the Civil War, Seward added that “I have no more concern for [Negroes] than for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor, they always have been and always will be so everywhere.”

Abolitionists, said ex-slave author and clergyman Samuel R. Ward in the 1840s, “best love the colored man at a distance.” Such even was the case with abolitionist heroine Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the epochal Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At the end of her novel, she sends her ex-slave character and his family, who could easily pass for white, she notes, as missionaries to Liberia. “I have no wish to pass for an American,” says George. “I want a country, a nation, of my own.” Wrote Frederick Douglass, starchily, to Stowe: “The truth is, dear Madam, we are here, & we are likely to remain.”

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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: CROSSING THE TRUMP RUBICON

By on November 7th, 2017

We are in a veritable war of competing visions. The strife inside the two parties is irrelevant—when compared to the larger existential war for the soul of America.

Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. But in most unlikely fashion he leads the fight against it.

Those who found him too crude, who saw his tweets as too adolescent, and who vowed never to vote for such an antithesis of conservative and family values have all weighed in.

So have those who are embarrassed that Trump—as did Obama during the Henry Louis Gates fiasco, the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, and the Ferguson shooting and subsequent riots—quite inappropriately weighs in on current criminal investigations and trials.

And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

The Age of Intolerance

We are no longer in the late 1950s era of liberal reform. It is now a postmodern world of intolerance and lockstep orthodoxy.

There are few Berkeley-like free speech areas on college campuses any more. Students charged with particular crimes enjoy little due process. There is no Joan Baez-style acknowledgement of the tragedy of good Southern poor men fighting for an awful cause. No one acknowledges tragedy anywhere at all; it has all become melodrama. We may yet see Joan Baez’s version of The Band’s ballad or Shelby Foote’s commentaries in Ken Burn’s epic Civil War documentary Trotskyized.

The media is not disinterested. Networks such as CNN see their role actively on the barricades, devoted to the higher cause of destroying the Trump presidency, not as reporting its successes or failures. The danger to free expression and a free media is not even Trumpian bombast. It is the far more deliberate and insidious transformation (begun in full under Obama) of journalism into a progressive ministry of truth. Even if he wished, Trump could not take away what the professional press already surrendered voluntarily.

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The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism By Edward White

By on November 7th, 2017

One December day in 1939, Frank Nugent, a film critic for the New York Times, took his seat at the premiere of Gone with the Wind and waited for the carnage to unfold. So long and overblown had the movie’s ad campaign been that Nugent was sure it was going to be a turkey. When that proved not to be the case, he was stunned. “We cannot get over the shock of not being disappointed,” he wrote in his review the next day.

In truth, Gone with the Wind had come perilously close to being just the kind of disaster Nugent had foreseen. Three weeks into shooting, the producers shut down production, fired the director, and hired Ben Hecht to rewrite the script. Hecht was known as the “Shakespeare of Hollywood,” for his ability to knock out clever, crowd-pleasing work in the time it takes most writers to sharpen their pencils. But this was a tall order even for him: he’d never read Margaret Mitchell’s novel and had just seven days to dismantle and rebuild an epic blockbuster. The fact that he did it—fueled, so he claimed, by nothing but bananas and salted peanuts—might seem evidence of his remarkable talent. Hecht himself cited it as proof of the rank absurdity of Hollywood. Despite authoring dozens of successful films and earning six Oscar nominations, he dismissed Hollywood as a “marzipan kingdom” populated by idiots, responsible for an “eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
Hecht gave that lacerating verdict in his autobiography, A Child of the Century (1953), listed by Time in 2011 as one of the hundred best works of nonfiction published since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Written in the rambunctiously opinionated style of Hecht’s hero, H. L. Mencken, the book deals with Hecht’s eclectic life as a literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He was intimidatingly prolific, and always provocative. His second novel, Fantazius Mal­lare (1922) landed him in court on an obscenity charge; a later novel, A Jew in Love (1931) had him labeled as a self-hating Jew. Hecht shrugged off the controversies; bigger strife lay ahead.

As his career in Manhattan and Hollywood climbed to new heights of critical and commercial success, he suddenly swerved onto an entirely unexpected path: revisionist Zionism. During World War II, Hecht sabotaged his Hollywood career by castigating the U.S. and its citizens for failing to stop the Holocaust.

It was 1939, the climax of the so-called golden age of Hollywood. In addition to Gone with the Wind, cinema audiences that year were treated to The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, and Wuthering Heights, the latter two of which Hecht also wrote. But as Hollywood cheered its successes, safe in its bubble of unreality, Hecht’s restless gaze switched to Europe and the increasingly frequent and horrific reports of Jewish persecution. The desperate situation stirred in him a sense of belonging and duty to his fellow Jews that he’d never felt before. So, Hecht did what he always did when something got under his skin: he sat himself down and picked up his pen.

*

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s Nuclear Ambitions by Debalina Ghoshal

By on November 6th, 2017

Russia’s ROSATOM already has nuclear cooperation deals with Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, among others. Turkey is just the latest to benefit — possibly along with Iran and North Korea, both of which have been openly threatening to destroy America — from Moscow’s play for power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

The West would also do well not to feel secure in the knowledge that Turkey is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Nuclear reactors in the hands of a repressive Islamist authoritarian such as Erdogan could be turned into weapons factories with little effort.

Turkey’s announcement over the summer that it had signed a deal with Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation (ROSATOM) — of Hillary Clinton’s Uranium One stardom — to begin building three nuclear power plants in the near future is cause for concern. The $20 billion deal, which has been in the works since 2010, involves the construction in Mersin of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant — Turkey’s first-ever such plant — will be operational in 2023.

ROSATOM already has nuclear cooperation deals with Iran, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, among others. Turkey is just the latest to benefit — possibly along with Iran and North Korea, both of which have been openly threatening to destroy America — from Moscow’s play for power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It is also a source of desperately-needed revenue for Russia, hurt by sanctions imposed on Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine.
Like Iran, Turkey claims that its budding nuclear program is for civilian purposes only. Ankara’s interest in nuclear energy dates back to the 1960s, when it conducted a study on the feasibility of building a 300-400 megawatt nuclear power plant, three decades before the rise of President (formerly Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party.

Although it is true is that Ankara is currently incapable of meeting the country’s electricity demands, and relies heavily on imported natural gas even to manage that, it would be wishful thinking to assume this is Turkey’s only goal. Even though its state-controlled conventional power plants are dilapidated, since 2001, no public companies in Turkey have been allowed to invest in them.

Before international sanctions were imposed on Iran — prior to the 2015 never-signed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — Tehran and Moscow were Turkey’s main suppliers of fossil fuels for the operation of the conventional plants. Ironically, it was the hindrance to commerce with Iran that led Turkey to consider nuclear energy a viable option to supplement the natural gas imports on which it relies heavily.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Migrant Crisis Upended Europe by Giulio Meotti

By on November 6th, 2017

“The migrant crisis is the 9/11 of the European Union… That day in 2001, everything changed in the US. In a minute, America discovered its vulnerability. Migrants had the same effect in Europe… The migration crisis profoundly undermines the ideas of democracy, tolerance and… the liberal principles that constitute our ideological landscape.” — Ivan Kratsev, Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a member of the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, Le Figaro.

The European public now looks at EU institutions with contempt. They perceive them — under multiculturalism and immigration — not only as indifferent to their own problems, but as adding to them.

“We are a cultural community, which doesn’t mean that we are better or worse — we are simply different from the outside world… our openness and tolerance cannot mean walking away from protecting our heritage”. — Donald Tusk, President of the European Council.

A few weeks after Germany opened its borders to over a million refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that the migration crisis would “destabilize democracies”. He was labelled a demagogue and a xenophobe. Two years later, Orbán has been vindicated. As Politico now explains, “[M]ost EU leaders echo the Hungarian prime minister” and the Hungarian PM can now claim that “our position is slowly becoming the majority position”.

Many in Europe seem to have understood what Ivan Krastev, the Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a member of the Institute of Humanities in Vienna, recently explained to Le Figaro:

“The migrant crisis is the 9/11 of the European Union… That day in 2001, everything changed in the US. In a minute, America discovered its vulnerability. Migrants had the same effect in Europe. It is not their number that destabilizes the continent… The migration crisis profoundly undermines the ideas of democracy, tolerance and progress as well as the liberal principles that constitute our ideological landscape. It is a turning point in the political dynamics of the European project”.

Thousands of migrants arrive on foot at a railway station in Tovarnik, Croatia, September 17, 2015. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Migration is having a significant impact, for instance, on Europe’s public finances. Take the two countries most affected by it. Germany’s federal government spent 21.7 billion euros in 2016 to deal with it. Also reported was that Germany’s budget for security this year will grow by at least a third, from 6.1 billion to 8.3 billion euros.

In Italy, the Minister of Economy and Finance recently announced that the country will spend 4.2 billion in 2017 on migrants (one-seventh of Italy’s entire budget for 2016). Spain recently announced that in North Africa, the fence around its enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which keeps migrants out of the Spanish territory, will be funded through a further infusion of 12 million euros. Everywhere in Europe, states are allocating extra resources to deal with the migrant crisis, which has also changed Europe’s political landscape.

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What do Sociopaths and Leftists Have in Common? by Linda Goudsmit

By on November 6th, 2017

Sociopaths and Leftists share a common behavior trait – projection – accusing someone else of doing exactly what you are doing yourself. The crucial difference between sociopaths and Leftists is that Leftist projection is conscious and sociopathic projection is unconscious. The sociopath has a personality disorder that manifests itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. Let’s compare and contrast the nature of psychological projection with political projection.

Sigmund Freud described psychological projection as the defensive mechanism of denying in oneself the existence of unpleasant behavior while attributing that exact behavior to others. (“Case Histories II, PFL 9, p.32) Accusing someone else of lying when in fact you are the liar is a prime example of projection. Projection is a characteristic blame-shifting defense mechanism for sociopaths – it keeps them from acknowledging and taking responsibility for their own behavior. The work of the sociopath’s therapist is to help the sociopath get in touch with the objective reality of his behavior so that he can change it.

Interacting with a sociopath is very confusing and creates cognitive dissonance in those unfamiliar with psychological projection. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological stress of holding two or more contradictory beliefs at the same time. Consider sociopath Bill who accuses his honest business partner Joe of embezzling money from their company. At first Joe is confused – he cannot reconcile being accused of stealing when he knows for a fact he did not steal anything. Joe is immediately put on the defensive by the accusation. Joe examines the accounts and sees that money is indeed missing – he is determined to discover who the thief is so he can be reimbursed and clear his name. It never occurs to Joe that it is Bill who is stealing because Bill is the accuser!

In a political context psychological projection is a deceitful conscious strategy to put your political opponent on the defensive. There are fair fights and there are dirty fights in politics. Fair fights are honest debates about the merits of opposing policies and ideas – dirty fights are deliberate, personal, and deceitful tricks designed to discredit your opponent and put him on the defensive. Political projection is a very dirty fight.

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating article written on the subject by Bill Federer. It exposes the staggering dishonesty of political projection and its source:

Karl Marx is attributed with saying, “Accuse the victim of what you do.” In the political context, be the first to accuse your opponent of what you are guilty of:

– If you are lying, accuse your opponent of it

– If you are racist, accuse your opponent of it

– If you are intolerant, accuse your opponent of it

– If you have something to hide, accuse your opponent of it

– If you or your spouse have been sexually immoral, accuse your opponent of it

– If you are receiving millions from globalist and Hollywood elites, accuse your opponent of it

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President Trump Targets Voter Fraud—Dems Go Insane! Joan Swirsky

By on November 6th, 2017

They never ever counted on the one entity for which neither media hacks nor pollsters have any respect: the American public!

On Tuesday, American voters will once again go to the polls hoping that the candidate(s) they vote for will fulfill what should be their one and only mission, i.e., to serve the needs of We the People.

Republican, ahem, leaders are appropriately nervous that the phony so-called conservatives they’ve been foisting on us for decades will be replaced by authentic conservatives who will help President Trump fulfill his mission to Make America Great Again!

And––oxymoron here––Democrat leaders are even more agitated because looming over the entire election will be the initiative President Trump announced last May to investigate voter fraud, an issue they are all-too-seedily familiar with.

They are also in high anxiety about the inconvenient truth that, according to journalist Susan Jones, “There have been five special congressional elections so far this year, and in the four races where Republicans ran against Democrats, Republicans have won all four. (In CA, two Democrats vied for a House seat, so a Dem win was the only possible outcome).

VP Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach are leading the commission’s efforts to reassure voters about the integrity of federal elections. The president also appointed Hans von Spakovsky, a GW Bush appointee, to head the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

The far-left Washington Post called his appointment “divisive,” which to most Americans meant that the president picked the perfect guy. In 2005, von Spakovsky led the Justice Department’s approval of a Georgia law requiring voters to produce photo ID, which was rejected!

Think about that rejection. You need a photo identification card to get a driver’s license, donate your blood, buy alcohol or cigarettes, open a bank account, apply for welfare benefits or food stamps or Medicaid or Social Security or unemployment or a mortgage or a hunting and fishing license, get on an airplane, rent a car, get a prescription, buy a cell phone, visit a casino and get married––and that is the short list!

But the initiative was rejected because Democrats object to any requirement that would prevent illegals and dead people and cartoon characters from voting and potentially swinging an election in their favor.

What do you think Sanctuary cities are all about? They are certainly not about the deep love and empathy leftists have for humanity, or the preference people who work 12 or 16 or 20 hours a day have for giving total strangers free housing, education, healthcare, and ongoing stipends into perpetuity. No no no….sanctuary citizens are all about Democrat votes!

Sure enough, the reliably cringe-producing Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called on the president to reject the embrace of “white supremacy” and the desire to “disenfranchise” voters that motivated such a commission.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, MEDIA Comments turned off

Another Terrorist Attack, Another Whitewash of Islamic Jihad Willful blindness sixteen years after 9/11. Bruce Thornton

By on November 6th, 2017

After a Muslim immigrant from Uzbekistan murdered eight people on a bike path in New York, the usual “expert” pundits and commentators began recycling the same clichés they always use to avoid a hard, uncomfortable fact: these killings are perpetrated by Muslims who are faithfully following fourteen centuries of Islamic precept and practice.

Sixteen years after 9/11 we still don’t get the reality of Islamic jihad.

Indeed, we can’t even get simple facts straight. The NYC terrorist’s cry of Allahu Akbar, the traditional Muslim battle-cry, is consistently mistranslated. As Robert Spencer has repeatedly pointed out, the phrase does not mean “God is great,” an equivalent, as Senator John McCain has claimed, of “Thank God.” Rather, it means “Allah is greater.” Using the mistranslation obscures the triumphalist intolerance at the heart of Islam. Since the 7th century, Muslims have gone to war for the same reason Mohammed did: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” Allah is “greater” because all other gods are “idols” or, as with Christians and Jews, distortions of Allah and his revelation to Mohammed. Hence jihad, the effort to “slay the infidels wherever you find them” until Islam and sharia law––practiced by the “best of nations,” as the Koran says, “raised for [the benefit of] men” –– comprise the sole legitimate political-social order for all of humanity.

Having misinterpreted the jihadist war-cry, these same commentators then try to separate the jihadist from the vanguards of modern jihadism such as ISIS. Despite his frank boasts of allegiance to ISIS, or the thousands of videos and photos on his cell phone including beheadings, or his request for an ISIS flag in his hospital room, we continue to hear that he is a “lone wolf,” a “self-radicalized” anomaly much like the Las Vegas mass murderer. Hence the progressive apologists retreat into the psychological analyses that have replaced philosophy and religion in the secular West. Rather than sacred scripture and doctrine, rather than glorious Muslim history and Koranic injunctions, now social conditions and mental derangement must account for this act.

So according to The New York Times, the Uzbek jihadist is the product of a “rootless life,” a neurotic with a “monster inside.” How could he be a Puritanical fundamentalist? He cursed, liked fancy clothes, and showed up late to mosque services. The Wall Street Journal reports that he was a homesick momma’s boy. As The New Republic put it, he is just a “desperate soul” vulnerable to the propaganda of ISIS, the latest in a string of mass murderers who suffer from a mental disorder, one weaponized by mass gun ownership, violent jingoism, and the “politics of fear.”

Hence after the attacks the widespread false analogy with the Las Vegas shooter. Mostly this trope was an excuse to bash Trump for his different responses to the attacks. But beyond that is the same assumption that only psychological dysfunction could explain why someone would brutally run-down bikers and pedestrians. Yet the falseness of the analogy is obvious: The Las Vegas shooter did not have a worldwide virtual community of like-minded believers inspiring and counseling Muslims to inflict murder and mayhem on unbelievers. He did not have a historical precedent in the long record of Islamic violence and aggression. He did not have several models for his crimes like the Muslims using vehicles for murder in London, Nice, Barcelona, Stockholm, Berlin, and Israel. He did not have a belief system in which such violence is enjoined as a command of God and a mark of righteousness. He did not shout “Thank God” as he mowed down his victims. He did not believe that his acts would turn him into a martyr destined for a life of eternal pleasure. He had no global organization eager to take credit for his deeds.

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Antifa Fail Near-empty protest sites across America means the anti-Trump Resistance’s so-called revolution will have to wait for another day. Matthew Vadum

By on November 6th, 2017

The millions of rabid Trump-haters that the George Soros-linked group Refuse Fascism hoped would show up Saturday in cities across America to drive the duly elected president and vice president of the United States from office must have had other plans.

The so-called Resistance’s coordinated multi-city action failed despite oceans of favorable media coverage from the mainstream media and a full-page ad in the New York Times.

The plan was to occupy city centers and parks in around two dozen U.S. cities and not depart until President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were forced to flee the White House. The protests, Refuse Fascism boasted, would rage “day after day and night after night ─ not stopping ─ until our DEMAND is met.”

So this means they left a little over three or seven years too early. And the turnout on the weekend for the launch of their revolution was so sparse, no one will care if a few stragglers have stayed behind to “occupy” various cities.

The broader goal of Refuse Fascism is to overthrow the U.S. government through occupations and crippling strikes. Perry Hoberman, an associate research professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC and a member of Refuse Fascism’s national steering committee, had previously said Nov. 4 would be modeled on the Women’s March that took place the day after President Trump’s inauguration.

But the “Antifa apocalypse,” as some had termed it, a series of disruptive protests planned in 20 cities, failed to materialize on Nov. 4.

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