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The New Leviathan: Glenn interviews author David Horowitz UPDATED

June 25, 2012
Wilson

Writer

UPDATE: Glenn also took time to talk to David Horowitz on GBTV Monday night:

Original Story:

On radio this morning, Glenn interviewed former Communist David Horowitz, a man who has now dedicated himself to exposing progressives, radicals, and extremists. And while Horowitz's latest book, The New Leviathan, contains some chilling information about how organized and funded the left has become, he said that he now sees that American conservatives are starting to wake up to the realities in front of them.

Transcript below:

GLENN: I will tell you that there are few heroes and lots of villains. There are few heroes in today's society. There are a few people that have stood and stood and stood for a very long time and tried to warn the American people, tried to warn the ruling class, if you will, that there's trouble coming, and knows it inside and out. And one of those heroes, in fact, a guy who I think has given us more time than maybe anybody else besides the Navy SEALs has been David Horowitz. David Horowitz has been standing guard for a long time. He was a Communist. He was raised by communists, he was part of the 1960s radical movement. When he started to see the slaughter after the Vietnam War, he woke up and said, what ‑‑ guys, we were wrong. They didn't care. And he realized it wasn't about the principles, it wasn't really about doing good. It was really about power and control. And he started to talk about that. And he was rejected by the left and the right and then the right would listen to him, if I'm not mistaken, David ‑‑ stop me at any time ‑‑ the right would listen to him when it was advantageous to him but still they really didn't get it. David Horowitz is a guy who, when I first started looking into the Tides Foundation and everything else, I found Discover the Networks, which is one of the best tools out there if you really want to know who's connected, how it's connected. It's really complex, very difficult to understand, but he's made more sense of it than anybody else. David Horowitz has a new book out called The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. It is one of the most frightening books you will read because it's all true and all about how far behind anybody who loves freedom really is. David, welcome to the program. How are you, sir?

HOROWITZ: Thank you, Glenn. Actually I'm not as pessimistic as my book would lead people because ‑‑

GLENN: It's breathtaking.

HOROWITZ: I see a dramatic change in American political life and that is the awakening of the people. The awakening of conservatives. When I first, when I left the left 25 years ago, actually conservatives were quite kind to me, but they didn't really want to take in if the message. They were in a kind of denial because ‑‑ first of all because it was too horrible to contemplate that there were so many people that want to destroy this country. So many Americans, American citizens, Americans born, Americans privileged especially, privileged Americans who have a hatred in their heart for America.

And the second thing is that conservatives don't like politics. If you're a conservative, you're probably in the private sector, you're a creator. Politics is real ‑‑ is a lot about destruction. You're a creator. If you're running a business, you want every customer possible. So you don't want to get involved in divisive battles. And then kind of the attitudes change a little and I got support because they ‑‑ I mean, here was a guy who was willing to mix it up and get into the street fight and I ‑‑ you know, I don't take any credit for that. That's really all I know how to do. And that's the way I was brought up.

GLENN: But we haven't ‑‑ I mean, all of us, first of all, after communism fell, we all thought, oh, Communist, it's a joke, that's proven wrong, it's not working." So any hiding communists or anything like that, "Oh, please, it's ridiculous. Nobody really believes that." And we're all in that moment of, you know, after September 11th, all ‑‑ even the progressives standing there on the steps of the capitol holding hands and singing Kumbayah and everybody thought, we're all Americans. No, we're not.

HOROWITZ: No.

GLENN: No, we're not. And your book outlines the staggering, again, just the appendix just breathtaking. It is the number of groups and how much money they have on the left. Let me just start here. There are 14 liberal groups that have a billion dollars in assets.

HOROWITZ: More than.

GLENN: Yeah, more than a billion dollars in assets. 14. The conservatives have zero. There's nobody on the side of conservatives that have the juice and the power of these foundations.

HOROWITZ: Let's dramatize it. I mean, the Koch Brothers have a foundation. It's worth $239 million. Sounds like a lot of money. The Ford Foundation has $10 billion. It's 30, whatever that is, five times, 35 times the size of the Koch Brothers. And, of course, the Gates Foundation is three times the size of Ford. The leftwing foundations ‑‑ and they are the ones that they fund Occupy Wall Street, they fund the radical organizations that gave Obama his start, that trained him, that brought him up through the ranks. They have $104 billion in assets whereas the conservative foundations have only $10 billion total, 75 conservative foundations. But that's just the, I don't know, it's just the base of the iceberg because they then fund other tax‑exempt foundations, 501(c)(3)s.

For example, the Ford Foundation created the Environmental Resources Defense Council many years ago. And actually it created them to fight DDT just to do this very briefly. DDT, the Rockefeller foundation in the old days when it was the conservative foundation funded a global malaria eradication program using DDT. Along came the Ford Foundation and the Environmental Resources Defense Council which now, by the way, has $139 million in assets. It's grown to gigantic size. It started with this malaria campaign. They conducted a campaign against DDT using Rachel Carson's famous, or should be infamous book The Silent Spring which claimed that DDT would kill all the birds. Completely false, no scientific basis, but it's a classic of the environmental movement.

They persuaded even the Nixon administration to ban DDT and so malaria returned. And malaria kills three million people a year. It's killed since the ban on DDT100 million people probably. 95% of them are black children under the age of 5 in Africa. All this blood is on the heads and the hands of the ‑‑ without the Ford Foundation, this never would have happened.

GLENN: Ford Foundation, I was talking to a friend who actually knew Henry Ford and he said ‑‑ they were having lunch together one time and he said, "The worst thing I ever did was let go control of the foundation"

HOROWITZ: Yeah.

GLENN: Because it went off the rails. They always do that.

HOROWITZ: We print, in our book The New Leviathan, we print Henry Ford's resignation letter from the board which says in so many words that you are attacking the very system, the Ford Foundation is dedicated now the very system that created this wealth. And, you know, in his behalf, he had to save the Ford Motor Company which was in the hands of a gangster after his grandfather died in 1947 and that's why he let the president of Studebaker, who turned out to be a progressive, be president. And that's true of a lot of, well, most of the venerable American foundations.

GLENN: So how we ‑‑

HOROWITZ: Rockefeller is now a leftwing foundation. Carnegie, Hewlett, Packard, Kellogg, Casey, Joyce, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are funding the left. These are government‑backed institutions.

GLENN: When you have Soros join this ‑‑

HOROWITZ: And Soros.

GLENN: I mean, how do you possibly win, David?

HOROWITZ: Well ‑‑

GLENN: Because you ‑‑ wait. We haven't even talked about the universities. The universities are the think tanks now.

HOROWITZ: Of the left, right. Look. I had this experience. I was on a panel in Paris in 1986 organized by the committee for the free world and we had the Vietnamese there. It was an anniversary of the America's defeat in Vietnam. The French. And I was on a panel. And the topic of the panel was, is communism reversible. This is 1986. And nobody thought it was. I certainly didn't. And three years later it was gone. The fact of the matter is that America is ‑‑ first of all, it's not like European countries. We are an individualist country. We were founded by individualists. We had a frontier. So ‑‑ which created an incredible spirit of independence. If you didn't like the way things were here, you went west a little ways and you founded your own, and you did it on these principles. And these, the founders, it's not just the original founders but all along the way the founders of America were incredible people. You know I'm thinking ‑‑ you know the Mormons who went across the country and then came to Salt Lake and they said, "Hey, you know, let's ‑‑ let's build it here in the middle of nowhere."

GLENN: That's crazy, yeah. Yeah.

GLENN: You know. Or as I was saying to Glenn earlier, Dallas is a little, a little shack in the middle, log cabin actually in the middle of Dallas where some guy walked across the plains and you have to be to Texas to see how vast it is and said, "I'm going to stop here and this is where I'm going to raise ‑‑ you know, do whatever I did," and he was the founder of Dallas. That spirit is so antithetic to everything these collectivists want to do that I still think we have a fighting chance.

GLENN: Okay. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to talk to you a little bit about ‑‑ because the book lays out the path to presidency for Obama and how everything was just a network of these radical progressives. We'll get into that here in a second. The name of the book is The New Leviathan by David Horowitz and it's all ‑‑ it's the dirt on what ‑‑ on how this, how this machine that they've built really works. We'll come back to David here in just a second.

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(OUT 11:19)

GLENN: Chapter 12 in my new book cowards is young socialists, why kids think they hate capitalism. David has helped us with several of our ‑‑ several of our books and he is ‑‑ being a reformed Communist, he knows about radicals and revolutionaries and how they work. He has a new book out called the New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. And if you really want to know what you're up against, if you really want to see how all of this works, you want to see how screwed we are on the EPA, how much ‑‑ how much money the leftwing organizations have.

VOICE: The leftwing 501(c)(3) ‑‑ by the way, this book is really about the Shadow Party on steroids. George Soros is an important player here but when you see how many of them there are, you'll appreciate what we're up against. The environmental leftists, we divided environmental groups into pro free market and anti‑free market. The anti‑free market wants huge government controls. They think that corporations are the cause of everything from the mythic global warming to every other environmental problem we have. So they have built into them this anti‑capitalist, anti‑freedom agenda. The progressive environmental organizations have $9 1/2 billion in assets. That's bigger than the EPA budget which is 8.7 billion. And also dwarves the pro ‑‑ there are pro free market environmental organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. There are 32 of those and they have $38 million. So that's the left ‑‑

GLENN: To give you some idea of how ‑‑

HOROWITZ: 249 times, times as big.

GLENN: We're not coming to ‑‑

HOROWITZ: But that's ‑‑ that's not the end of it because the left through the Democratic Party and through brainless Republicans gets itself funded by the government. What's the disparity there? They get annually $570 million to fund these anticapitalist, anticorporation environmental organizations, and the pro free market environmental organizations get 728,000. 570 million versus 728,000. You can do the math on that.

GLENN: We're bringing a ‑‑ we're not bringing a knife to a gunfight. We're bringing a toothpick.

HOROWITZ: A toothpick, exactly right.

GLENN: To a ‑‑ to a gunfight.

HOROWITZ: But I'm going to have to say this over and over. Look at Wisconsin. They had all their forces out in Wisconsin and they lost. And why did they lose? Because the people are waking up.

GLENN: They ‑‑

HOROWITZ: Glenn, I mean, you're the Clarion voice here in waking them up.

GLENN: I think people are just, I think people have sensed for a long time that something's not right. I think they started waking up in George W. Bush. I mean, Pat, you and I both have an awakening about the same time, don't you think?

PAT: Mmm‑hmmm. Mmm‑hmmm.

GLENN: It was just a couple of years after September 11th and we're like, something's not right. By 2004 we were pretty awake and I think we're ‑‑ I think we're still somewhat asleep, but we're waking up. And people are just, people are waking up all over the country.

HOROWITZ: I think you can date it from 9/11. 9/11 started the turn and then Obama has really, you know, it's like that when they go to hyperspeed. That Obama really said, people suddenly realized we could lose this country.

GLENN: How much is Obama really in charge of things? How much of this is Obama and how much is he the face?

HOROWITZ: I think if it were only Obama, it wouldn't be such a big problem. I think that Obama is pretty incompetent. I think that's pretty evident. He let Pelosi and Harry Reid run his ‑‑ and the unions. I think the ‑‑ one of the values in this book The New Leviathan is to give you a picture of how it works and how big it really is. And again with the unions. Look, all that Scott Walker had to do was to take away the, you know, the government collecting dues for the unions and give people the freedom to leave and half their members left. So this couldn't ‑‑ you know, this can turn pretty quickly if we have people who have the stomach and the spine to do the right thing.

GLENN: Did you see how Obama is now asking for donations?

HOROWITZ: From weddings? They're shameless.

GLENN: All of the money that they have.

HOROWITZ: Not enough.

GLENN: What are they doing? I guess it is, it's not enough.

HOROWITZ: Never enough.

GLENN: It's never enough. The name it book is The New Leviathan: How the Leftwing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America's Future. You want to see what it really looks like, you want to see why I've had so many sleepless nights in the last couple of years. David lines it out unlike anything I've ever seen before. New Leviathan available in bookstores everywhere. Back in just a second.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A break in trust: A NEW Watergate is brewing in plain sight

Gary Hershorn / Contributor | Getty Images

When institutions betray the public’s trust, the country splits, and the spiral is hard to stop.

Something drastic is happening in American life. Headlines that should leave us stunned barely register anymore. Stories that once would have united the country instead dissolve into silence or shrugs.

It is not apathy exactly. It is something deeper — a growing belief that the people in charge either cannot or will not fix what is broken.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf.

I call this response the Bubba effect. It describes what happens when institutions lose so much public trust that “Bubba,” the average American minding his own business, finally throws his hands up and says, “Fine. I will handle it myself.” Not because he wants to, but because the system that was supposed to protect him now feels indifferent, corrupt, or openly hostile.

The Bubba effect is not a political movement. It is a survival instinct.

What triggers the Bubba effect

We are watching the triggers unfold in real time. When members of Congress publicly encourage active duty troops to disregard orders from the commander in chief, that is not a political squabble. When a federal judge quietly rewrites the rules so one branch of government can secretly surveil another, that is not normal. That is how republics fall. Yet these stories glided across the news cycle without urgency, without consequence, without explanation.

When the American people see the leadership class shrug, they conclude — correctly — that no one is steering the ship.

This is how the Bubba effect spreads. It is not just individuals resisting authority. It is sheriffs refusing to enforce new policies, school boards ignoring state mandates, entire communities saying, “We do not believe you anymore.” It becomes institutional, cultural, national.

A country cracking from the inside

This effect can be seen in Dearborn, Michigan. In the rise of fringe voices like Nick Fuentes. In the Epstein scandal, where powerful people could not seem to locate a single accountable adult. These stories are different in content but identical in message: The system protects itself, not you.

When people feel ignored or betrayed, they will align with anyone who appears willing to fight on their behalf. That does not mean they suddenly agree with everything that person says. It means they feel abandoned by the institutions that were supposed to be trustworthy.

The Bubba effect is what fills that vacuum.

The dangers of a faithless system

A republic cannot survive without credibility. Congress cannot oversee intelligence agencies if it refuses to discipline its own members. The military cannot remain apolitical if its chain of command becomes optional. The judiciary cannot defend the Constitution while inventing loopholes that erase the separation of powers.

History shows that once a nation militarizes politics, normalizes constitutional shortcuts, or allows government agencies to operate without scrutiny, it does not return to equilibrium peacefully. Something will give.

The question is what — and when.

The responsibility now belongs to us

In a healthy country, this is where the media steps in. This is where universities, pastors, journalists, and cultural leaders pause the outrage machine and explain what is at stake. But today, too many see themselves not as guardians of the republic, but of ideology. Their first loyalty is to narrative, not truth.

The founders never trusted the press more than the public. They trusted citizens who understood their rights, lived their responsibilities, and demanded accountability. That is the antidote to the Bubba effect — not rage, but citizenship.

How to respond without breaking ourselves

Do not riot. Do not withdraw. Do not cheer on destruction just because you dislike the target. That is how nations lose themselves. Instead, demand transparency. Call your representatives. Insist on consequences. Refuse to normalize constitutional violations simply because “everyone does it.” If you expect nothing, you will get nothing.

Do not hand your voice to the loudest warrior simply because he is swinging a bat at the establishment. You do not beat corruption by joining a different version of it. You beat it by modeling the country you want to preserve: principled, accountable, rooted in truth.

Adam Gray / Stringer | Getty Images

Every republic reaches a moment when historians will later say, “That was the warning.” We are living in ours. But warnings are gifts if they are recognized. Institutions bend. People fail. The Constitution can recover — if enough Americans still know and cherish it.

It does not take a majority. Twenty percent of the country — awake, educated, and courageous — can reset the system. It has happened before. It can happen again.

Wake up. Stand up. Demand integrity — from leaders, from institutions, and from yourself. Because the Bubba effect will not end until Americans reclaim the duty that has always belonged to them: preserving the republic for the next generation.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Warning: Stop letting TikTok activists think for you

Spencer Platt / Staff | Getty Images

Bad-faith attacks on Israel and AIPAC warp every debate. Real answers emerge only when people set aside scripts and ask what serves America’s long-term interests.

The search for truth has always required something very much in short supply these days: honesty. Not performative questions, not scripted outrage, not whatever happens to be trending on TikTok, but real curiosity.

Some issues, often focused on foreign aid, AIPAC, or Israel, have become hotbeds of debate and disagreement. Before we jump into those debates, however, we must return to a simpler, more important issue: honest questioning. Without it, nothing in these debates matters.

Ask questions because you want the truth, not because you want a target.

The phrase “just asking questions” has re-entered the zeitgeist, and that’s fine. We should always question power. But too many of those questions feel preloaded with someone else’s answer. If the goal is truth, then the questions should come from a sincere desire to understand, not from a hunt for a villain.

Honest desire for truth is the only foundation that can support a real conversation about these issues.

Truth-seeking is real work

Right now, plenty of people are not seeking the truth at all. They are repeating something they heard from a politician on cable news or from a stranger on TikTok who has never opened a history book. That is not a search for answers. That is simply outsourcing your own thought.

If you want the truth, you need to work for it. You cannot treat the world like a Marvel movie where the good guy appears in a cape and the villain hisses on command. Real life does not give you a neat script with the moral wrapped up in two hours.

But that is how people are approaching politics now. They want the oppressed and the oppressor, the heroic underdog and the cartoon villain. They embrace this fantastical framing because it is easier than wrestling with reality.

This framing took root in the 1960s when the left rebuilt its worldview around colonizers and the colonized. Overnight, Zionism was recast as imperialism. Suddenly, every conflict had to fit the same script. Today’s young activists are just recycling the same narrative with updated graphics. Everything becomes a morality play. No nuance, no context, just the comforting clarity of heroes and villains.

Bad-faith questions

This same mindset is fueling the sudden obsession with Israel, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in particular. You hear it from members of Congress and activists alike: AIPAC pulls the strings, AIPAC controls the government, AIPAC should register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The questions are dramatic, but are they being asked in good faith?

FARA is clear. The standard is whether an individual or group acts under the direction or control of a foreign government. AIPAC simply does not qualify.

Here is a detail conveniently left out of these arguments: Dozens of domestic organizations — Armenian, Cuban, Irish, Turkish — lobby Congress on behalf of other countries. None of them registers under FARA because — like AIPAC — they are independent, domestic organizations.

If someone has a sincere problem with the structure of foreign lobbying, fair enough. Let us have that conversation. But singling out AIPAC alone is not a search for truth. It is bias dressed up as bravery.

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

If someone wants to question foreign aid to Israel, fine. Let’s have that debate. But let’s ask the right questions. The issue is not the size of the package but whether the aid advances our interests. What does the United States gain? Does the investment strengthen our position in the region? How does it compare to what we give other nations? And do we examine those countries with the same intensity?

The real target

These questions reflect good-faith scrutiny. But narrowing the entire argument to one country or one dollar amount misses the larger problem. If someone objects to the way America handles foreign aid, the target is not Israel. The target is the system itself — an entrenched bureaucracy, poor transparency, and decades-old commitments that have never been re-examined. Those problems run through programs around the world.

If you want answers, you need to broaden the lens. You have to be willing to put aside the movie script and confront reality. You have to hold yourself to a simple rule: Ask questions because you want the truth, not because you want a target.

That is the only way this country ever gets clarity on foreign aid, influence, alliances, and our place in the world. Questioning is not just allowed. It is essential. But only if it is honest.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.