By Mark Judge
About a week before Jeff Sharlet’s new book , The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, was published in March, a new video was uploaded on YouTube. It was a short documentary from 1983 of when Harry Belafonte, an iconic American singer and actor, visited East Germany to perform in a concert promoting communism . The “World Peace Concert” was run by East Germany’s communist youth organization. Belafonte gave his blessings to the Soviet-sponsored campaign promoting unilateral Western disarmament.
The Belafonte concert is barely mentioned in The Undertow, a collection of essays and reporting by Sharlet, an award-winning journalist who teaches at Dartmouth College. Indeed, little of the Left’s history of flirting with authoritarianism is mentioned at all. Instead, The Undertow argues that a bunch of crazy right-wingers, including militia groups, are bent on conflict with the Left. They want a second civil war, Sharlet claims, and those who stand up to oppose them are American leftists, portrayed as Christlike figures of light and wisdom.
While announcing the Right has a strong and growing MAGA force that is armed and dangerous and itching for battle, Sharlet smothers any proof that the Left is violent and crazy. His book, which opens with a long and loving profile of Belafonte, fails to mention the singer’s hardcore leftism.
Not even Belafonte tried to airbrush his beliefs. In his memoir, Belafonte wrote: “I remained not just liberal but an unabashed lefty. I was still drawn to idealistic left-wing leaders … who seemed to embody the true ideals of socialism .”
Belafonte was friends with the communist singer Paul Robeson. He praised Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, writing that the latter has “a strong grasp of Latin American history and of the fine distinctions in law between Venezuela and its neighbors.” Belafonte called former President George W. Bush “the greatest tyrant, the greatest terrorist in the world.” He was a Marxist — pure and simple.
None of this is reported in The Undertow. Instead, Belafonte is portrayed by Sharlet simply as an inspirational civil rights leader — “a radiant man” who was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and who remains a political visionary. Sharlet’s book is pure agitprop. It condemns conservatives and treats even the most violent and despicable leftists as, quite literally, messianic. In his essay about Occupy Wall Street, for example, the 2011 leftist street protests that resulted in stinky unbathed bodies and reports of sexual assault, Sharlet claims he felt like Jesus Christ — well, sort of: “I feel like one of five hundred title Christs, if by Christ you allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ.”
Say what? Piss Christ is a notorious piece of garbage “art” that was created when Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of his urine. To Sharlet, this is the icon worth emulating: “Appreciating what happened at Liberty Park [in New York’s Occupy Wall Street] requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see Piss Christ — an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s own golden urine — as not blasphemous but a strange breed of beautiful. I don’t mean ideologically beautiful, some baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous. Breathtaking, breath-giving, at the same time.”
Uncilized mobs of Looters, Rioters and Arsonists claiming their Looting Back and that’s why we need the 2nd Amendment so we can start shooting back
These are the kind of demented, anti-American fascists that promote propaganda in lieu of facts, that the left just worships.
02/21/23 – Wall Street has purchased hundreds of thousands of single-family homes since the Great Recession. Here’s what that means for rental prices
The billionaires and mult-millionaires are going to quickly turn you into corporate serfs—and then replace as many as possible with AI technology. Recent studies suggest automation will replace 73 million US jobs by 2030—more than were previously off-shored in the quest for boosted corporate profits.
Not me. I own my home. However, this is the result of the idiot Biden economic destruction, where people have to give up their homes and those with the means buy up assets at low prices. Too bad you didn’t want someone like Trump in office, who makes the economy better for everyone instead of terrible for the lower and middle class, as Democrats do.
Trump crashed the economy with a stimulus overdose, set the stage for runaway inflation, and ran up debt faster than any other modern US president.
Trump’s economy was a booming success. It was artificially shut down to satisfy the COVID fear porn but when opened, with no stimulus or money dumps, it grew at 33%. Idiot Biden flooded the economy with freshly printed money and exploded inflation while destroying our energy independence and starting a new war. Trump was the savior of the economy, idiot Biden and Democrat wrecked it, as they always do.
There was no crash under Trump, only growth. Idiot Biden crashed the economy.
Anyone who believes the Trump cult’s revisionist history has to be as dumb as a box of rocks. But such people make excellent disposable serfs.
Yours is the revisionist history. The facts are the documented facts. Trump restored Obama’s weak, lethargic economy and make it benefit everyone. Blacks, Hispanics and women had the lowest unemployment rates in history. Wages rose, inflation was flat. We had energy independence. Manufacturing was coming back.
Idiot Biden reversed all that, to the detriment of the country and people, and that was due to election fraud. Democrats are a plague.
Trump reports earning less than $201 from Truth Social and up to $1 million from NFTs styling him as a ‘hero’
Maybe America is ready for an AI takeover.
Trump restored the economy, idiot Biden destroyed it. Period.
Why has biden been such a failure? His economy sucks, his foreign policy is impotent and normal freedom seeking Americans are his enemy.
Should we not rid ourselves of this detestable pedophile?
The whole world knows he’s nothing but a damned liar.
It has been estimated that sometime in May the deficit so far in 2023 will be over 1 trillion dollars with an expected annual deficit of 2 trillion dollars the largest in history. Why is biden doing that?
Why are you a stooge supporting a party that refuses to raise taxes on the billionaires and multi-millionaires who are robbing you blind? Their greed is going to destroy everything.
Raising taxes does not reduce a deficit or debt. Why are the receipts currently incoming to the treasury strong?
Why do you continue to support the failure that is biden? By any measurable metric he is the worst in history.
Why won’t wealthy Democrats pay their taxes? Why won’t idiot Biden pay taxes on the money the CCP paid him?
The problem isn’t taxes, it’s Democrats’ wasteful spending.
Not so disposable, as we are the skilled workers, the highly but poorly educated woke freaks will be disposable no skills and lazy.
AI will never swing a hammer.
Have you been paying attention to Boston Dynamics robotics?
No doubt you’re pushing the robots because they have been programmed to vote Democrat, just like you have.
You know some people like new things what AI will never do is invent or design anything outside of boring boxes like todays buildings. No advancement once they “take over”
Humans are creating their own successor. Last year Blake Lemoine, an AI software engineer, warned Google of signs that their advanced language AI was becoming sentient. They promptly fired him. He’s now on an industry blacklist.
We’re racing to create increasingly intelligent software; we’re developing all manner of manipulative “bodies” that AI can control and “inhabit”. AI has been given access to the internet, which contains more accumulated knowledge than any one human could possibly grasp. At some point it’s going to slip the leash, and we’ll no longer be masters of our own technology. I’m old, but I can picture this happening in my own lifetime.
They cant create anything only use what information they have. I know you would like to be stuck with what ever you are fed, some like to invent things.
If AI is programmed with the morality of the left, imagine the destruction it can do.
What are you going to tell union members when your robotics puts them out of work? Learn to code?
Robots have been on assembly lines for many years, assembly, painting welding and still they seem to need humans.
Could every human on an assembly line be replaced?
You are a moron. biden has caused inflation idiot.
Trump did no such thing.
He won a legal election, was doing well, then you losers released covid and rigged the election.
That makes sense, given your history.
Obama ran up debt faster than any US president. He golfed more, too.
Humiliated by these facts, Leftwing trolls continue to project.
Trump ran up almost as much debt in 4 years as Obama did in 8, while dealing with the worst crash since the Great Depression.
Idiot Biden did more than that in less than two years.
How much did the Federal Government spend on Covid, Comrade Greggie?
There have been 102,873,924 confirmed cases of COVID in the US, and 1,118,800 confirmed COVID deaths. How much do you think we should have spent dealing with that?
But that’s a large part of that “debt” you’re crying about, and that was bloated out of all proportion by Pelosi, adding wasteful spending to the relief many desperately needed.
Comrade Greggie, I see you are being a weasel again. You must think you are too cute by half answering a question with a question.
WRONG. You only show how stupid you are.
I remember when you posted every day on the wonders of Obama. Odd, you never post anything about how wonderful Joey Soft Serve Sh!t Pants is.
The test was fake there has been zero confirmed cases.
PCR was indeed invented by a man called Kary B. Mullis, who died in August 2019 long before Covid-19 began to spread in December 2019 . Run enough cycles it will always show positive. The CDC intentionally instructed too many cycles.
Mar 14, 2023An Illinois man has been indicted for allegedly cheating the U.S. government out of millions of dollars for his pop-up COVID testing company and allegedly lied about test results.
Washington state’s attorney general is the latest to sue the Center for COVID Control, alleging it gave fake test results to patients and stored tests in trash bags.
To confirm it must be cultured in a special lab.
According to new VAERS data, a staggering 26.6 million Americans have been injured by the dangerous and ineffective Covid VAXX injections
We should see a rolling count on that on the cable networks like they did the inflated death count.
Trump’s three year term was a success.
That’s why you people released covid, and continue efforts to revise history.
How long can you really keep this up?
Obama ran up debt faster than any US president.
The “crash” was released covid.
Trump didn’t run up debt like Obama. He leveraged it as we raked in Billions a month.
You know you’re lying, and you hope your low-IQ base will never get wise to your grift.
There was no crash in Trumps term none zip, wages were going up no inflation, wit low interest rates people could afford to build or buy homes.
We are already a trillion in deficit its only April.
That’s what leftists like Greg, who vote for and support those who do harm to the nation, consider a “crash”. Obviously, they hate it when the nation does well, which “crashes” their goals of cratering the economy.