text: Parts II and III of this volume focus on sexual and gender politics. These are reflections of the left’s totalitarian ambitions — its desire to transform not only the political order but the entire social order and the individuals who compose it. Generally described as “identity politics,” these efforts were expressions of the left’s signature project of “social construction”— its determination to use social institutions and the power of the state to create “new men and new women.” In other words, to reshape human nature to fit the utopian program.
  Under Communist regimes, such efforts led to human disasters on an epic scale: tens of millions of deaths through politically induced famines and the systematic slaughters of individuals who refused to go along with the socialist scheme. In America, the left is still unable to marshal the full power of the state against its political opponents, but even in this democratic environment its utopian incitements and the intimidations of political correctness led in the 1980s to the greatest human catastrophe outside of war in the nation’s history. As the articles in this section show, the epidemic of AIDS was fueled in the first place by the left’s crusade for “sexual liberation,” defined as promiscuous sex with strangers, and then facilitated by its politically inspired destruction of elements of the public health system designed to combat such contagions.
  The leaders of the gay rights movement were all veterans of the radical Sixties who had gravitated to the Democratic Party, the dominant presence in the governments and public health agencies of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, the three urban centers from which the epidemic originally spread. Once the epidemic took root, the left then directed its political influence to disabling the safeguards of the nation’s public health systems in order to protect the sexually “liberated” zones it had created, which happened to be the spawning grounds of the disease. Thanks to the left’s practice of charging its opponents with “homophobia” and bigotry, resistance to its policy agendas was easily overcome. The subsequent crippling of the public health systems led to a massive expansion of the epidemic and the eventual deaths of more than 650,000 Americans, most of them homosexual and young, most of whom could have been saved if traditional public health policies had been employed.
  In 1983, just before the virus was isolated, at a time when authorities were first becoming publicly concerned, Peter Collier and I wrote an article about the political forces shaping official responses in the city of San Francisco. Retitled here as “Origins of a Political Epidemic,” the article was written with the help of some prominent gay leaders who had become alarmed by what they saw taking place but, because of the intimidation, were unable to oppose publicly. It was the first journalistic report to expose the destructive impact of the gay liberation activists and also the criminal negligence of local authorities, who acquiesced to their self-destructive, politically correct demands. The remaining articles in this section track the relentless path of the epidemic and the inability of the rest of the nation to wake up from its ideology-induced slumber and revive the public health policies that had been abandoned.
  In my autobiography Radical Son I wrote about my involvement in reporting the story Collier and I had written, and also about the hostile reaction it received. At the time there had been only 300 deaths from an epidemic that was doubling every 6 months. I recalled how I had calculated that, at this rate, in 20 years there would be 200,000 people dead if nothing were done; how I realized that the cultural tide supporting the destructive agendas of the left was so strong that there was nothing anyone would do to stop it; and how utterly helpless I felt. The final section of this volume, “Gender Politics,” deals with another destructive aspect of the cultural attitudes promoted by the left. This was an ideological feminism, which created its own party line and was used to corrupt institutional standards, demanding gender quotas in hiring and evaluations. In 1995 this feminist juggernaut precipitated the greatest witch-hunt in American history over a series of incidents at the “Tailhook” convention of naval aviators in Las Vegas. As a result of the feminist attacks and the purges that followed, what had been an annual event was terminated. The reputations recklessly destroyed and careers summarily ended were a national tragedy, a travesty worse than anything that had resulted from the infamous McCarthy investigations. But they received no critical coverage by media in full self-censorship mode as a result of similar feminist campaigns that had put them on notice that they themselves were not immune from similar attacks.
  Part IV of this volume is also about the media culture, and focuses on one of my early concerns in creating the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988. This was the government’s creation of what became a billion-dollar media platform for left-wing propaganda in the public broadcasting networks PBS and NPR.