The Left's Failure to Admit the Truth: Interview with Jack Cashill

From Frontpage.com (8-3-05):

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Jack Cashill, an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue. He is the author of the new book Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture.

FP: Mr Cashill, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Cashill: Glad to be here.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Cashill: I was living in Ireland in 1993. One afternoon I was listening to their national radio, a huge and influential station, and they were interviewing Philip Nobile. Nobile had just written a devastating expose of Alex Haley's Roots for the Village Voice. As Nobile explained, Haley had plagiarized huge chunks of this non-fiction Pulitzer-prize winning work from a white novelist. Worse, when genealogists tried to walk in the footsteps of Kunta Kinte, they discovered that they did not lead anywhere. In short, Kunta Kinte was a fiction. This story was the talk of the British Isles. The BBC did a follow-up documentary. When I returned to the US, I mentioned to some friends, "How about this Alex Haley thing?" They stared at me blankly. "What Alex Haley thing?" Only then did I realize the depth of the problem.

FP: And so crystallize it for us, why wasn’t the Alex Haley “thing” an issue in American culture?

Cashill: Haley's fabrication of the Roots story was not an issue in American culture only because the great majority of Americans never learned it was a fabrication. The cultural gatekeepers did not think the American people should have this information. In its gratuitous anti-American and anti-Christian bias, Roots proved much too useful to the multicultural agenda. As a point of contrast, the gatekeepers were much more outraged by the utterly inconsequential Milli Vanilli lip-synching fraud.

FP: Give us a few words about what you discovered about Ward Churchill, Rigoberta Menchu, Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsley.

Cashill: I discovered that serious intellectual fraud is a collaborative process. In Sanger's case, the cultural establishment has conspired to suppress her full-throated support for a brand of eugenics that makes the Nazis look weak at the knees. Her writings are kept alive only by her opponents. In Kinsey's case, just as his child torture experiments were becoming well-known, Hollywood circled the wagon with the hagiography, "Kinsey." The Nobel Prize committee refuses to take back Menchu's Prize even after it learns that her autobiography was falsified from beginning to end, and it served no purpose but to prolong a useless civil war. Churchill's case shows just how intellectually bankrupt is the American university. He was promoted to department chair after his "Little Eichmanns" screed. And even after many of his writings have proved as false as his Indian identity, his colleagues continue to rally around him.

FP: Can you tell us a bit about Kinsey’s child torture experiments?

Cashill: There is no evidence that Kinsey himself was a pedophile as his defenders are at pains to point out. There is no denying, however, that he encouraged pedophiles to perform sexual experiments on children as young as two months and instructed them in the kind of data he wanted. His breakthrough book, The Sexual History of the Human Male, openly charts the experiments on at least 600 boys. Kinsey also knowingly skewed the statistics he gathered to make his own homosexuality and masochism seem more normative.

FP: And this guy is venerated by the Left? Are there any leftists that have come out and condemned Kinsey for this sexual abuse of young boys? Can you tell us a bit about his masochism? I remember reading that this guy put metal wires up his urethra. What was wrong with him do you think?

Kinsey: Oddly enough, Kinsey was an anti-communist Republican, the one Republican in the last century that the Left has embraced and, not coincidentally, the only one I know who routinely stuck hairbrushes (yikes!) up his penis. He was a sick pup. He likely had some father issues. There is no criticism of Kinsey from the Left. None. The Left has, however, savaged Kinsey's critics like Judith Reisman. Since she is of Jewish descent, the Left has had to denounce her as "a tool of the Christian right."

FP: Out of everyone you studied, who would you say was/is the most wretched human being? Why?

Cashill: The winner here is Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter who knowingly concealed the Stalin terror-famine that left some seven million of his fellow citizens dead. Duranty did not even have the excuse of sincerity. He had gotten mixed up in the "Paris Workings," a fashionable series of black masses on the eve of World War I, and lost whatever faith he had. From that point on, he did as he pleased. Appropriately, his book about this era is titled, "I write as I please." He still has his Pulitzer for his Moscow reporting and is still honored in the Times' Hall of Heroes, a reality that appalled even Jayson Blair.

FP: Tell us about the black masses Duranty was involved in. And why do you think the Times is so shameless in keeping Duranty on its Pulitzer list? Somehow I suspect that if a reporter intentionally covered up what happened at Abu Ghraib under American supervision the Times' disposition toward the reporter would be quite different. (And I am by no means equating the mass murder of 30 million people with a thong being put on someone's head).

Cashill: The motto of the "Paris Workings" was "semen et sanguis" which should tell you just about everything you need to know about this homoerotic boys club. It is likely that Duranty made the connections there that got him his job at The Times. It would be interesting to see what other luminaries engaged in these black masses. Duranty appalled even the duplicitous cub reporter Jayson Blair. Blair first encountered Duranty when he toured the New York Times during an internship. He found Duranty's gold-framed photo in the Times' hallowed hall of Pulitzer winners on the eleventh floor. All that distinguished Duranty from his fellow honorees was an asterisk beneath his picture and a disclaimer: "Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage." (Discredited?) The disclaimer was in small type. The headlines would be reserved for Blair. The Times can not bear an admission of this magnitude. Then they would also have to acknowledge Herbert Matthews, who appalled Blair as well. Matthews was the one who convinced the world that Castro was a liberal Democrat bringing a "new deal" to Cuba.

FP: In terms of all of this denial practised by the Left, it is obviously a given that members of the Political Faith are not interested in the truth. You can tell them all about the dysfunctional, pathological and evil ingredients of the lives of individuals they consider icons, and they won't care. You can tell them all about the bloodshed caused because of the earthly incarnation of their ideas - Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, Hanoi's, Castro's killing fields etc. They aren't interested. What exactly are they interested in?

Cashill: Great question. What interests the champions of all the major progressive strains-the radical naturalists, the Marxists, the multiculturalists, and the sexual hedonists-is the destruction of traditional Judaeo-Christian culture. This is the tie that binds. Traditionalists are all that stand in the way of their creating their own heavens on earth. "In a world without God," said Sartre (paraphrasing Dostoevsky), "anything is permitted." That "anything" includes deceit and dishonesty, weapons that the traditionalists are inclined to deny themselves. There are, after all, no "Mumias" on the right, never have been.

FP: Explain the “Mumias” reference to those of our readers who might not get it.

Cashill: Mumia Abu Jamal shot and killed a Philadelphia police officer in front of four eyewitnesses and was apprehended two minutes later with the literal smoking gun at his feet. The Democrat prosecutor claimed often and publicly that "he never had a stronger murder case." To no one's surprise, a mixed-race jury convicted Mumia of murder and sentenced him to death. But Mumia's career was just about ready to shift into high gear. Mumia, you see, was not your average prisoner on death row. The one-time journalist was well spoken, well versed in Marxist claptrap, and, above all, cute. That last item was critical. He emerged as the human equivalent of a baby seal, big-eyed and vulnerable. The Left made him its mascot. Soon enough he was the author or subject of ten books, the star of a thousand protests, and the voice of his own commentary on NPR.

FP: Today leftists like Michael Moore and Tom Hayden represent the Left perfectly in cheering for the Islamist enemy in this terror war. The Left is supposed to be for gay rights, women rights and minority rights, and yet it has come out on the side of the most fascistic, gay-hating, women-hating and minority hating forces on the face of the earth. This is some kind of mass pathology, no?

Cashill: As they say in old Arabia, my enemy's enemy is my friend. As Theo Van Gogh learned the hard way, however, these people don't make friends very easily.

FP: I think that it is much more than just the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Left is intimately attracted to the nihilist death-cult that serves as the buffer to Islamist totalitarianism, and it is for that very reason that the Durantys and Jean Paul Sartres so adored the communist killing fields. The Left and Islamism both share the sacred common ground of the thirst for mass death and suicide. But this is a discussion for another time and place my friend.

So have you checked out David Horowitz's DiscovertheNetworks.org? What do you think of it? Expand on your views about where the Left stands in this terror war in general and on Iraq in particular.

Cashill: I think you describe the hard core Left accurately. The soft core, the great majority, just need to be lied to, and are they ever!

DiscovertheNetworks is a great source for those interested in the interlocking connections between groups. To understand Kerry's oddball anti-war campaign one has to understand its provenance on the hard Left. This conscious anti-Americanism dates back to Stalin's consolidation of power in 1925. A realist, Stalin knew that an American revolution was unlikely so he focused his energy on discrediting the idea of America in the world. He worked through the Comintern, the Communist International, a worldwide propaganda network. The Comintern's first major effort in this regard was the Sacco-Vanzetti case. This set the pattern for all the "innocents" to come down the pike on through Mumia. For the record, they were all guilty. The pattern of reflexive anti-Americanism became so ingrained in the Left that it outlasted the Soviet Union and led to the absurdly nihilistic "unholy alliance" that David Horowitz talks about....