Liars (30 page)

The state of Virginia cut Buck's Fallopian tubes. She was one of sixty thousand Americans forcibly sterilized under eugenics laws.

Decades later, when the world was sifting through the rubble of the World War II and the monstrosities of state-sponsored eugenics had been laid bare, Hitler's surviving eugenicists were put on trial at Nuremberg. From the dock, these men—whose leader had been inspired by Wilson's and Virginia's model sterilization laws—tried to argue their case. The presiding Allied judges were treated to a grim defense:
the Nazis quoted Justice Holmes's opinion in
Buck v. Bell
.

State-sponsored eugenics has, by the grace of God, since been exposed for the horror show that it is. But one vestige of the progressive eugenicist heyday of the early 1900s remains: Planned Parenthood, Sanger's organization, whose explicit mission is to help women exterminate hundreds of thousands of human beings every year, with a disproportionate effect on children of color.

In 2009, Planned Parenthood conferred the Margaret Sanger Award on Hillary Clinton. Did Clinton refuse this award? Did she decline to associate herself with a vicious racist and eugenicist, a woman who explicitly wrote in a letter that “we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population”?

On the contrary. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision,” Clinton said, later adding that “there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so bravely.”

How could she admire a woman like this? Because at the very heart of the progressive movement is the belief that some people are better than others, that some people are more worthy, that some deserve to live, and others—so-called drains on society—deserve to die. They belittle conservatives for their “fetish” for life. What are they afflicted with, then, but a “fetish” for death?

Planned Parenthood carries out
more than three hundred thousand abortions every year. And it continues to target minorities by disproportionately locating Planned Parenthood clinics in black and Hispanic neighborhoods (nearly eighty percent of its facilities are located in or near these areas). Black women, while making up only about 6.6 percent of the population,
accounted for 35.7 percent of all abortions in 2010.

Could Sanger, a woman who once stood before an audience dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes in 1926, ever have imagined how her grand scheme would turn out?

If fear drives the progressives' quest for more power and more control,
why do they fear those they seek to weed out through eugenics? What threat could possibly be posed by the “morons” and “mental defectives” Sanger railed against? It's simple: these people stood in the way of the progressive utopia. These “undesirables” could not overthrow a progressive state, but they could erode it from within with their imperfections. In order to create the perfect progressive society, mankind had to “progress” beyond mental illness and other impurities—by any means necessary.

Is it any wonder that progressive eugenicists made common cause with the Ku Klux Klan? Is it any wonder that American progressives' pioneering work in eugenics inspired Hitler? So many progressives threw themselves into the “scientific” work of figuring out whose genes deserved to live on and whose should be made to die out. But what drove them? What drove the zeal behind the eugenics movement and the creation of Planned Parenthood, which continues its work today?

Fear, of course. The same fear we've met on nearly every other page of this book. Yes, some eugenicists may have pitied the “undesirables” they sought to remove from the human gene pool, some certainly hated them, and some may have thought they were simply building a better society through science. But the common thread was fear, whether they knew it or not. They feared their world would be undermined by every “unfit” person allowed to continue to live in it. They looked at the population with mental, behavioral, or other issues, and they did not see their fellow men and women in need of help, they saw a menace to be feared. That, of course, was the ultimate irony: progressive eugenicists dismissed their targets as merely the “feeble-minded,” yet they were apparently strong enough to constitute a threat to the whole progressive agenda.

This may all seem hard to take considering modern progressives' vow to fight for equality for all Americans. But the truth is, their ideological forebears fought for the exact opposite. And, like Clinton's
continued veneration of eugenicist Sanger, modern progressives remain ignorant—most likely willfully ignorant—of the sordid history of their movement. Until they fully repudiate their past, however, their supposed commitment to “equality” for less fortunate Americans will continue to ring hollow.

LIE 7

The Nazis had destroyed the Left, but the Right remained. . . . For [Hitler], the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda, means of
winning over the masses on his way to power.

—WILLIAM SHIRER, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

You recognize one of the Left's favorite parlor tricks, yes? They like to label any conservative they don't like (which is pretty much all of them) as the “next Hitler” and terrify the rest of us about a new Reich determined to strip away basic human rights.

Case in point: George W. Bush. (Although Bush was, as we've seen, hardly true to foundational conservative principles, he was nonetheless a favorite target of the leftist entertainment industry.)

Comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo was a constant critic of the former president, once referring to the Bush administration as the “forty-third Reich.”

Following the 2004 elections, singer Linda Ronstadt attacked not only Bush but all newly elected Republicans, saying,
“Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers.”

The left-wing hate group
MoveOn.org
celebrated a video submitted as part of a contest in which Bush was compared to Hitler and proclaimed “what were
war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.”

In 2008, Madonna used the song “Get Stupid” to display
images of Senator John McCain alongside Hitler.

In 2012, there were a number of comparisons made by those on the left between Mitt Romney and the architect of the Holocaust. Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias suggested that Hitler and Romney were somehow comparable
because they both used Swiss bank accounts, and Obama adviser David Axelrod referred to Romney's
campaign efforts in Illinois as a “Mittzkrieg,” an obvious reference to the Nazis' Blitzkrieg military strategy in World War II.

And in 2016, TV's
The View
's resident nutbar leftist, Joy Behar, called support for Ted Cruz
akin to “Jews for Hitler.”

There's a method to all of this madness. Progressives constantly terrify their followers by preaching that conservatives are would-be authoritarians who would return us to the years of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, a world of racists and political purges and economic punishment to those who don't rank among the privileged few. There's a reason the media loves to refer to
supporters of Stalin, for example, as “conservatives.” In 2014, the
Washington Post
published an article about neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin entitled “
Why U.S. Conservatives Love Russia's Vladimir Putin.” (Spoiler alert: They don't.)

This tactic was perhaps most infamously employed back in 1987, when progressives like Senator Edward Kennedy railed against Ronald Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. This fearmongering was the beginning of a consistent progressive attack against nearly all conservatives by likening them to authoritarians of yesteryear.

Kennedy ranted on the floor of the U.S. Senate:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be
shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

The reality is that it's progressives, not conservatives, who have been backers of authoritarians throughout history, from Hitler to Mussolini to Stalin. But they've realized that playing defense is not a fun place to be, so they go on offense, leveling these ridiculous charges against conservatives as though a love of individual liberty and constitutional principles were somehow related to the Third Reich.

Let's take Hitler for starters. Progressives didn't oppose Hitler in the 1930s; they mostly embraced him as a visionary.

Writer H. G. Wells, who was one of the most influential progressives of the twentieth century, said in 1932 that progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.” Regarding totalitarianism, he stated, “I have never been able
to escape altogether from its relentless logic.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, cofounder of the NAACP, called the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany “
absolutely necessary to get the state in order.”

Joseph P. Kennedy, father of Jack, Bobby, and Teddy, was a legendary apologist for the Nazis, a truth that the mainstream media glossed over for years. Kennedy had supported the disastrous Munich
appeasement treaty with Hitler
negotiated by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and he shared a Hitler-like animus toward the Jews that
led him to argue that they should be shipped to Africa. Kennedy also doubted the success of democracy as a long-term enterprise. “Democracy is finished in England,” the ambassador
told the
Boston Globe
. “It may be here.” His views, for a time, even affected his young son, the future president. “Fascism?” the youthful president-to-be once wrote. “
The right thing for Germany.”

Contrary to progressive revisionism and acclaimed Nazi chroniclers such as William Shirer, Hitler was not a man of the right who paid lip service to socialist causes. He was, in fact, as author Jonah Goldberg and others
have pointed out, a “man of the left.” This wasn't something Hitler tried to hide, given that the word
Nazi
is short for the National Socialist Party.

In 1998, historian George Watson wrote, “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that
others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.” Hitler privately acknowledged to acquaintances his “profound debt” to Marxism. “I have learned a great deal from Marxism,” he remarked, “
as I do not hesitate to admit.”

Hitler's Nazi platform sounded a lot like Obama's or Clinton's does today: a planned centralized economy with strict gun control, separation of church and state, a ban on private schools, universal health care, and a demand that “the state be charged
first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood.” That's not to mention sharing the eugenics vision of progressives such as Margaret Sanger, by attempting to exterminate an entire race of people in the most monstrous crime in history. Small wonder that today's progressives like to overlook their support for the Nazi dream.

The Left's love affair with Nazism was no random flight of fancy. Leftists had a similar ardor for another great visionary and noted humanitarian: Benito Mussolini. Historian Charles Beard was among
those who praised Il Duce, a venomous thug and Hitler ally: “Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made [in Italy], an
experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism.”

Muckraking journalists almost universally admired Mussolini. Lincoln Steffens—a progressive writer who also
hailed the Soviet Union as “the future”—said that Italian fascism made Western democracy, by comparison, look like a system
run by “petty persons with petty purposes.” Mussolini, Steffens proclaimed reverently, had been
“formed” by God “out of the rib of Italy.”