Wolves, Sheeple, and Sheepdogs
“These celebrities that we worship who haven't done a doggone thing to protect our Constitution or our freedom, and then you have someone like Chris Kyle out there putting his life on the line, getting rid of the bad guys before the bad guys get us. And yet he's demonized by some of those celebrities....Hypocrites are the ones who are slamming Chris Kyle.” --Sarah Palin"The film portrays Kyle as a proud southern, rural, religious, patriotic jock and gun enthusiast who was much more anguished about the people he was unable to save in Iraq than about the 160 confirmed sniper kills that the Navy credits him with. All of these traits are anathema to the left....Leftists simply can’t digest the fact that their own safety is predicated on the willingness to fight of courageous men they openly disdain." --Mark Hemingway, The Weekly Standard"Hollywood progressives don’t look forward to having to write, direct and star in patriotic pictures and if they can’t destroy American Sniper at the box office, they can taint it enough that no major star or director will want to be associated with anything like it. Adding to their undercurrent of anger is the way that American Sniper upstaged Selma at the box office and at the Academy Award nominations. Selma is a mediocre movie, but it was meant to be a platform for the usual conversation that progressives want to have about how terrible Americans are. Instead audiences chose to see a movie about how great Americans can be even in difficult times. There’s nothing that threatens the left as much as that."--Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine
Everything I've read about the "wolf, sheep, and sheepdog" politics of American Sniper sounds so appalling--and most of what I've read about it was written by its defenders.But for all I know, it's a good movie. I haven't seen it and I'm a little surprised how incurious I am. When I was writing THE NEW HATE, I couldn't stop reading and quoting people like Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin, and even more-so, historical haters like Henry Ford, Francis Parker Yockey, Eustace Mullins, and Elizabeth Dilling. I probably ruined the book with all the extracts, but it seemed so important to me that people understand that these people really wrote and thought the way that they did--and that opportunistically or not, supposedly mainstream politicians were still channeling their wolf, sheep, sheepdog brand of supremacism.As a Jew, I was appalled by the persistence of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion--among the racist far right and in the Arab world and among NWO conspiracists, of course, but especially in the writings of extreme Zionist reactionaries, who use them as the template for their own brand of programmatic Islamophobia. A Pam Geller, a Frank Gaffney, or a Robert Spencer substitutes Taqiya for Talmudism and Sharia for Kehilla, but they retail the same totalizing garbage about Islam's innate dishonesty and its thirst for world domination as the Protocols does about the Jews.And finally as an American, I was embarrassed and repelled by a corollary assumption that goes along with American Exceptionalism--"that there are those of us who are really 'us,'" as I put it, "and those of us who are essentially 'other'--aliens, interlopers, pretenders, and culture distorters, parasites and freeloaders."All that stuff still upsets me, but I guess I convinced myself that it is an ineradicable part of who we are. I feel less and less inclination to rub my nose in it--and less of a need to share it with everyone else.
