"These are sick people," President Trump thundered during his Tuesday night rally in Phoenix. "If you wanted to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and crooked media. It's time to expose the crooked media deceptions and to challenge the media for their role in fomenting divisions, and yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage."

The crowd applauded wildly. This is the type of fighter Trump voters wanted when they elected him president, according to award-winning journalist and WND managing editor David Kupelian.

"Everybody's been afraid all my life of the news media – all the politicians, because they want to get re-elected," Kupelian said in an interview this week on "Caravan to Midnight." "Trump comes out and says, 'You're dishonest, you're fake news. No, I won't take a question from you; you're fake news. You're not fake news; you're very fake news.'

"Everybody loves that because it's a guy who's not intimidated by the news media."

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However, Kupelian said it's not just the media that have intimidated everybody; it's the left in general. And no tactic is more effective than when leftists call America a racist nation. It's an accusation Kupelian finds utterly absurd.

"For God's sake, America is the least racist nation on the face of the Earth and the least racist nation in all of history," Kupelian said. "The great American middle class bought into Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind America. ... The vast engine of America, the great middle class, changed its mind, basically, on segregation in one generation, and we got rid of it legally but also in our culture. And the proof of that – we elected a black guy twice as president.

"So the idea that America is a racist nation is just the last refuge of the scoundrels on the left. It's all they have. They have no ideas. They have nothing. They're losing all the voters, the electorate, so they say, 'You're a racist.'"

In addition to the "racism" charge, the left throws around plenty of other labels for those who oppose its agenda. One label that has emerged within the past decade is "transphobic," used to describe people who don't accept transgenderism as normal.

In his book "The Snapping of the American Mind," Kupelian writes about a young anorexic woman who, although she was dangerously thin, looked in the mirror and saw herself as being fat.

"How do we deal with somebody like that?" Kupelian asked. "Certainly with compassion and caring. Hopefully with some expertise to help her realize that it's in her mind; she's not actually fat, she's dangerously skinny. And we don't go and validate her and say, 'You are fat.' And we don't go and demonize and put people in prison and threaten people and tell them they're racist or something worse if they don't agree that she's fat.

"That is what we're doing right now with this whole transgender thing."

Get David Kupelian's culture war blockbusters, "The Marketing of Evil," "How Evil Works" and his latest, "The Snapping of the American Mind" – signed and personalized – at the WND Superstore. E-book and audiobook versions also available.

The transgender phenomenon shows the extent of the left's political influence on the psychiatric profession, which de-pathologized gender identity disorder in 2013, says Kupelian. Now, anyone who refuses to go along with a transgender person's delusion is either cast as malevolent or hit with a pathologizing label like "transphobic."

But transgender people are truly the afflicted ones, Kupelian noted. Repeated studies show 41 percent of transgender people attempt suicide during their lifetimes.

"That's not normal," Kupelian said. "We're talking about people who want to amputate healthy body parts and put on makeup and pretend to be the opposite gender. I have no contempt or judgment; I'm not looking down on these people. They have a serious problem, just like the anorexic girl. But I'm not going to pretend she's fat, and I'm not going to pretend Caitlyn Jenner is a woman. You can cut off your male parts; it does not make you a woman."

Perhaps Americans have so much trouble accepting reality because they are not being taught to do so in school, Kupelian posited. With the college experience increasingly focusing on identity politics, today's students are not acquiring the knowledge and life skills they need to become well-rounded citizens of a free society.

"They don't know about the economy," said Kupelian. "They don't understand the rules of economics, what makes a society work, what makes an economy work. They don't understand the lessons of history, and God knows they're not being taught it. They're not being taught about the Constitution. They're not being taught, 'OK, Western Judeo-Christian civilization, why are what we call Judeo-Christian values, the Ten Commandments, why have they served for millennia as the moral foundation and legal foundation really, too, of Western civilization? Why? What is it about this?'

"They're not taught that. They're taught critical theory and lesbian poetry and God knows what. They're not taught reality."

Kupelian clarified he is talking about reality with a capital 'R.' He said the Ten Commandments, as well as the entire Judeo-Christian code of ethics, are part of that moral reality and every bit as real as the laws of physical reality, such as gravity.

"There are moral laws," Kupelian said. "We throw ourselves against them, we suffer, we hurt, we get diseases. You know how many Americans have a sexually transmitted diseases today? 110 million. That's, like, all the grownups. This is insane. Why? Because we're going against the laws."

But instead of learning about reality, according to Kupelian, college students become smitten with a politician like Bernie Sanders who promises to give them things for free. It's all part of being young and foolish, which Kupelian admits he once was, too.

"When you're 18, 19, 20 years old and so forth, you don't know cr-p," he said. "You don't know anything. You may be intelligent, you may be smart, and what you do know is mostly wrong because you've gone to school and the school is controlled by the left. The textbooks are written by the left. Teachers' colleges are run by the left. And your teachers, especially – God forbid, if you're in an Ivy League college – you've got a bunch of insane, leftist, Marxist professors."

Kupelian hopes college students can overcome their environments, but he maintains it will be hard because leftist indoctrination is the objective of so many schools.

"These college kids, God bless them and preserve them and bring them out of the delusional world that they're in, which is intentional," he said. "Look, let's face it, this is the training ground for the next generation of leftists. That's why it's there, from the professor's point of view.”

Get David Kupelian's culture war blockbusters, "The Marketing of Evil," "How Evil Works" and his latest, "The Snapping of the American Mind" – signed and personalized – at the WND Superstore. E-book and audiobook versions also available.

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