Some of the language on the signs is offensive and not appropriate for children.
Face masks. Rainbow flags. Handmaid’s Tale costumes. Hysterical references to Nazis.
Yup—the “Hands Off” protest in Washington, D.C., Saturday had all the regular tropes of another left-wing protest. The protest in the nation’s capital was one of a reported 1,200 across the country Saturday. “Join thousands across the country on April 5 to march against the Trump-Musk Coup and billionaire takeover,” organizers urged
.
Here are the most interesting signs I saw at the march:
As CatholicVote noted
on X, over 400 Catholic churches have been attacked
in the past four years. Maybe it’s not the right time to put a burning church on your protest sign?
When it came to what leftists thought was going on, no one erred in the direction of understatement.
Plenty of protesters decided to go for a Nazi theme.
For Silvester Krcmery, each morning began with what he called an “inventory check.”
Krcmery, a doctor who described his prison cell
as so small he could not sit, recalls waking up in the bitterly cold atmosphere.
“Do I still have my nose? Because it was as cold as a frozen stone. So I check: all right, I still have my nose,” he recalls in a clip from the new docuseries, “Live Not by Lies.”
“Then the right ear—I have it. Then the left ear—I have it. Because I couldn’t feel them at all. Nor did I feel some of my fingers sometimes. And so on.”
Krcmery, a devout Catholic living in what was then Czechoslovakia, was arrested in 1951. “In 1954, the young Christian doctor told the Communist judges, who were about to sentence him for high treason: ‘You have power in your hands, but we have truth!’” writes Rod Dreher
, the author of “Live Not By Lies
,” the book that inspired the new series produced by Angel Studios.
He was not released until 1964.
Silvester Krcmery is not a name I—or most Americans, I’d wager—had ever heard of before watching “Live Not By Lies.”
But his wasn’t the only powerful story shared in the first episode of the four-part series. (Subsequent episodes will be released on a weekly basis in April.)
Krcmercy’s sister, Gabriella, shares how the family struggled to survive in Communist days, relying on soup from nuns and the one kilogram of bread a family member received for each day’s work in a military hospital
.
We hear from Patrik Benda, one of six children of Vaclav and Kamila Benda, Catholics involved
in resisting communism in Prague. Patrik Benda recalls he and his siblings being tasked by his parents to find a phone booth on the way to school and call Vaclav Havel about the Communists searching the home of an acquaintance.
Benda recalls being surprised that Havel, an ardent fighter against the Communists and later the president of the Czech Republic, merely said “yes” over and over as he heard about the search.
“Later we learned there was a policeman behind him and he was listening to everything he said,” Benda adds.
Nor was that the only unique element of the Benda kids’ lives: they also learned to swallow paper messages.
In remarks made before the documentary’s premiere April 1 at The Heritage Foundation
, Dreher, who also is executive producer, noted how little stories of heroic Communist dissenters had been covered by Hollywood.
“The Cold War, when it ended, we put it all down the memory hole. You can go on Netflix now, 100 films about Nazism—and that’s good, we need to remember that—almost nothing about communism,” Dreher said.
The lack of stories about these heroes affects our present. A 2020 poll
released by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that nearly one out of five Gen Zers
thought “communism is a fairer system than capitalism and deserves consideration in America.” Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Americans weren’t aware that the Chinese Communist Party had killed more people than the Nazis.
Interspersed in the docuseries between the personal stories are interviews with historian and Daily Signal contributor Victor Davis Hanson
; author Douglas Murray; and other experts. Their commentary, paired with the narration of filmmaker Isaiah Smallman, helps relate the experiences of the Communist dissenters to today’s political troubles in the West.
Vice President JD Vance
, who spoke ahead of the documentary’s premiere, said the most important lesson was “not to conform.”
“One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned from a dear friend of mine who helped me return to my own faith, was that despair is a sin,” said Vance
, who also spoke about his friendship with Dreher, which began when Dreher interviewed him about his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“And I think that the way to survive, the way to thrive when many of these ideas are attacked, when many of our most important values are criticized or even become justification for being thrown in prison—the way to respond to it is not to conform. And that’s the most important lesson of Rod’s book,” Vance added.
The vice president continued:
The way to deal with this, the way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth, is to live not by lies.
The incentives, the financial rewards, the social benefits of living by lies [are] too often very great, but Rod’s lesson is important: that you’re going to sacrifice your soul, you’re going to sacrifice your civilization, you’re going to sacrifice your family, you’re going to sacrifice your country if you give into the easy pathway.
The first episode begins with the story of Isabel Vaughn-Spruce,
a British woman who was arrested in 2022 after acknowledging, while standing outside an abortion clinic, that she may have been silently praying. Vaughn-Spruce, represented by the legal powerhouse organization Alliance Defending Freedom, ultimately won a not guilty verdict—although she was arrested again later (that time, the charges were dropped).
But the fact that she could be arrested for essentially a thought crime in a Western country is chilling and a stark reminder that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mean such tyranny would be absent forever from the West.
As Dreher said, “If we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it.” This new docuseries is a chance to ensure that we don’t forget—and in remembering, do not repeat.
President Donald Trump’s
decision to clean house at the Smithsonian Institution is a necessary next step in his ongoing crusade to claw back cultural ground that the Left has spent decades capturing. This new action should be far-reaching and profound and sweep away such dangerous ideas as the Latino Museum.
The executive order
the president issued late last week, on March 27, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” couldn’t have been clearer regarding Trump’s intent.
“The Vice President
and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall work with the Congress to ensure that future appropriations to the Smithsonian Institution prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy,” it said.
That is a sadly accurate description of the mission of the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Latino, colloquially called the Latino Museum. Approved by Congress
in the monstrosity that was the $1.4 trillion 2020 omnibus bill, and still without an assigned building, the Latino Museum has already proved to be what many warned it would become: a hothouse for incubating grievances against the United States among a large group.
Of course, the entire Smithsonian Institution needs an overhaul. Under present leadership, starting with Secretary Lonnie Bunch, it aims to, as the woke Left
likes to say, “decolonize” American society.
Bunch knows how to turn on the charm, and has successfully ingratiated himself to Democrats and far too many Republicans. But he has, at times, been very candid with his intentions.
From the get-go, Bunch made sure that the Smithsonian was closely associated with The New York Times’ mendacious portrayal of American history, the 1619 Project.
“We call ourselves the Great Convener,” Bunch told Smithsonian Magazine in 2019, just as the project was getting underway, “but really, we’re a Great Legitimizer. And I want the Smithsonian to legitimize important issues, whether it’s 1619 or climate change. We help people think about what’s important, what they should debate, what they should embrace. Everybody that thought about the 1619 Project, whether they liked it or disagreed with it, saw that the Smithsonian had fingerprints on it. And that, to me, was a great victory.”
The 1619 Project was riddled with inaccuracies about our nation’s history and was a naked attempt to make Americans hate their past by restating the country’s beginning not as 1776 with the declaration but the arrival in Jamestown of a group of slaves from Angola in 1619. The New York Times explicitly stated
that it sought to change the way America saw itself, to, in its own words, “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.”
And Bunch did not just embrace 1619 but also the mayhem visited on the country by Black Lives Matter. He was an early supporter of BLM, starting with
the Ferguson riots in 2014.
After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the ensuing nationwide riots, Bunch urged BLM to organize
and seek to have a political impact so “we could really see change that endures.” He then created the platform Talking About Race, a teaching tool for grades 3-12, which appears to have changed its name to Teaching and Learning
. At its height, it included among its foundational subjects
such lines as, “Whiteness: an ideology that reinforces power at the expense of others.”
And needless to say, Bunch hugged diversity, equity, and inclusion as tightly as he could. “I want the Smithsonian to make diversity and inclusion so central that it’s no longer talked about,” he said at one point.
In other words, the ideas that Bunch set out to legitimize through his misappropriation of the Smithsonian perfectly fit Trump’s description of what has taken place with our cultural institutions: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order said.
I have personally been sounding the alarm against what the Smithsonian wants to do now with the Latino Museum since at least 2016, when I published an op-ed in The Washington Post
warning Congress not to vote to create it.
When the museum opened its first exhibit at the National Museum of American History in 2022, my worst fears were confirmed. I joined Joshua Trevino of the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Alfonso Aguilar of the American Principles Project to write in The Hill
that the exhibit “offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion, and economics. … It elevates only leftist ideologues, celebrates transexual activists, denigrates Christianity, denounces capitalism, condemns the West, portrays the United States as iniquitous and oppressive and badly distorts history. It advances the classic oppressor-oppressed agenda of textbook Marxism.”
After our piece appeared, a second exhibit, which was curated by two left-wing professors, was scrapped by the Latino Museum’s leadership. It was going to argue, among other things, that capitalism was bad for Hispanic Americans.
Vice President JD Vance, who is now in charge of the Smithsonian cleanup, has a pretty straightforward start to his task. He must deal with Bunch—and defund the Latino Museum.
The U.S. Department of Education is calling on colleges to account for racist
and antisemitic incidents on campus—and its move to withhold taxpayer dollars from violators has gotten university officials’ attention.
The University of Michigan just disbanded its multiyear, multimillion-dollar boondoggle in diversity, equity, and inclusion
, and Columbia University agreed to align the school with federal guidelines protecting free expression and addressing the harassment of Jewish students.
Next up: Harvard.
Earlier this week, the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration announced a review of the approximately $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard and local Harvard affiliates like Boston-area hospitals. Federal taxpayers
supply more than $255 million in contracts with the university and another $8.7 billion in multiyear grants.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon
said, “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from antisemitic discrimination—all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry—has put its reputation in serious jeopardy.”
The Education Department’s review is the latest in a line of consequences it has enacted on schools that have violated civil rights laws, allowed for Jewish students to be verbally and physically abused, and declined to punish students who have damaged property as part of riots.
Previously, McMahon canceled some $400 million in federal money for Columbia due to Columbia students’ actions to wreck campus buildings and threaten or physically harm other students over the last year. To regain federal support, former interim President Katrina Armstrong recently outlined a set of changes to school policy, including the creation of advisory committees on free speech and student discipline.
McMahon’s team, though, has seen enough to not take schools at their word. She says the school must carry out these commitments before funding will be restored.
The message is resonating.
Two weeks ago, the Education Department included the University of Michigan on the agency’s watch list of schools that may be violating civil rights law. Following that notice, university officials closed the school’s DEI office on March 27—likely to avoid the embarrassment of losing federal money first and then realigning school policies with the law to regain it.
The school says its “approach” to DEI is “evolving,” but there is little left to evolve. School officials had spent more than $250 million on DEI over the last decade, and The New York Times called
the program a “vanguard” of the DEI movement. Now its DEI office is gone, along with the Office for Health, Equity, and Inclusion.
Recent appeals’ court decisions have upheld
President Donald Trump’s executive orders supporting civil rights law and opposing DEI. School officials have little room
to argue that DEI is anything but discriminatory.
Like Columbia and Michigan, Harvard has allowed discrimination and harassment to continue for years. Just recently, a Harvard employee was caught on video tearing down posters of Kfir Bibas, a child kidnapped
by Hamas terrorists at just 9 months of age and held prisoner before being brutally murdered along with his mother and 4-year-old brother.
Pro-Hamas students
later held a “die-in” on campus library steps, which would hardly be worth mentioning if not for the disgusting actions they were supporting. In an echo of tactics used to harass students last year, the protesters were instructed by organizers to wear masks to conceal their identities.
In January, Harvard settled a lawsuit with the Brandeis Center, a legal advocacy group, who had sued Harvard for “ignoring
and tolerating” such actions. The center reported that “since 10/7 [the date of Hamas’ 2023 terrorist attack on Israel], Harvard students and professors have daily explicitly supported anti-Jewish and anti-Israel terrorism.”
As part of the settlement
, Harvard administrators agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism for use when evaluating campus incidents to decide whether actions constitute harassment.
It remains to be seen whether Harvard’s preemptive actions and those from the University of Michigan suffice to make school policies compliant with the law. But federal education officials have made one thing clear: Taxpayers will not be funding schools that allow harassment and violate civil rights.
If there were any lingering doubts about the unabashedly pro-transgender bias
of the liberal media, they were demolished Thursday by the marked contrast between a feature story and a news article, both in The Washington Post, on two separate cases of trans athletes competing in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
At 6 a.m. Thursday morning, The Post published online a 2,238-word magnum opus
, headlined “A trans girl was banned from her track team. Now she’s competing with the boys.” (It comes nearly a year after The Post published an equally obsequious 2,600-word profile of a drag queen
.)
Post staff writer Karina Elwood’s fawning profile of transgender “female” athlete Eliza Munshi, 18, of Falls Church, Virginia, lamented that “[a]fter President Donald Trump banned transgender
girls from competing in girls’ sports, a Virginia high-schooler joined the boys’ team.”
How fawning was it? Consider the cringeworthy anecdotal lead paragraph: “Eliza Munshi kneeled on her bedroom floor curling her lashes. She dabbed glitter into the corners of her eyes and debated whether to tie her hair into one French braid or two. She slipped on her green jersey and headed to her first track and field meet.”
The article was lavishly illustrated with no fewer than nine photos, including one of Munshi as a child, perhaps at age 3 or 4 and wearing a dress—the implication being that the now-18-year-old knew from an early age that, XY chromosomes notwithstanding, he was really a “she.”
Some 14 hours later, at 8:04 p.m. Thursday, The Post published a not nearly as sympathetic 304-word account of a female fencer who had forfeited a match last Sunday at the University of Maryland at College Park, rather than duel with a transgender swordsman
competing as a faux female.
“Fencer disqualified from tournament after refusing to face an opponent she says is transgender
” was the headline The Post put on the article, which wasn’t even written by one of its own reporters.
Instead, it was a reprint of an Associated Press report that led with: “USA Fencing disqualified a fencer from a women’s tournament in Maryland after she refused to face an opponent whom she says is transgender
.”
Stephanie Turner’s refusal to pretend that her would-be opponent was another woman at a fencing tourney held four days earlier on March 30 had gotten her disqualified from further participation in the tourney held by USA Fencing, the national governing body for the sport.
The ever-woke AP took pains to use plural pronouns in noting: “The Associated Press is not identifying Turner’s opponent because they have not publicly commented on the incident, nor disclosed their gender identity (emphasis mine).”
But the sex of her would-be opponent was obvious to Turner, even if it wasn’t to The AP, which included Turner’s quote to Fox News: “I told them that I was refusing to fence because this person is a man, and I’m a woman, and this is a women’s tournament, and I refuse to fence on principle.”
Unlike The AP or The Washington Post, The Washington Times’ account
of the incident identified Turner’s rival as Redmond Sullivan and noted that Sullivan had previously competed as a man.
In a symbolic gesture of refusal to square off against Sullivan, Turner took a knee—which not so long ago was a gesture gleefully embraced by the Left when done by athletes in support of left-wing causes. (In this case, not so much, despite Turner’s being a woman of color. As such, we now know that in the privilege hierarchy of the Left, transgender “women” rank higher than women of color.)
After taking a knee, Turner said Sullivan approached her and asked whether she was OK. When she told him she wouldn’t fence against a man, Sullivan cited USA Fencing’s transgender policy
.
“Redmond says to me, ‘Well, you know, there is a member on the board of directors here who supports me,and there is a policy that acknowledges me as a woman, so I am allowed to fence, and you will get [sanctioned],’ and I said, ‘I know,’” Turner told Fox News
.
That “member of the board of directors” of USA Fencing was likely Damien Lehfeldt. The New York Post reported Friday that Lehfeldt had written “a long-winded Aug. 30, 2023, blog post
, in which he defended the right of trans fencers to compete against women, despite conceding they may have ‘a physical advantage.’”
“There’s a possibility that transgender women have a physical advantage over their cisgender opponents after transitioning,” The New York Post quoted Lehfeldt’s blog as saying. “There is also a possibility they do not. In fencing, there is no data to support either viewpoint. Giving athletes a sense of belonging and a will to live is more powerful than medals and competitive glory.”
That, of course, is easy for Lehfeldt to say, because he isn’t a girl or a woman being forced to compete against a faux female or to risk losing “medals and competitive glory.”
Whether Turner would have won a medal at the March 30 non-NCAA tournament is unknowable now, but according to the website SheWon.org
, to date these athletic interlopers have robbed more than 1,400 other girls and women worldwide of the recognition they deserved:
# of Female Athletes: 1,407
# of Medals*: 2,011
# of Competitions: 887
# of Sports: 44
*Or records, scholarships or other opportunities.
Turner also won’t be lavished with an effusive 2,238-word paean by The Washington Post, but by the same token, Munshi isn’t being allowed to deprive real girls of trophies or scholarships.
