Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent - Fred Litwin

Fred Litwin, a good friend, is a highly intelligent, ambitious, capable and successful Ottawa businessman. He is, as well, a book worm, a news hound, a partisan political activist and a man of integrity with an open mind and an eye for the patently ridiculous. Having said all that, it's a bit of a curiosity that Litwin -- author of the 2015 Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent -- didn't find his way a lot sooner into the amazing turquoise gazebo of the conservative movement. After all, he was coming from the very middle of the absurdly irrational and tottery liberal red pergola.

But hey, everyone at their own pace, is my motto. If it took a terrorist event as large as 9/11 to thoroughly awaken Litwin, and others, out of their left wing delusions, then all I can say is, at least some lasting positives came out of that horrendous catastrophe. Fred, welcome to the fold.

       The founder of the local, ground-breaking -- though currently inoperative -- Free Thinking Film Society has written an interesting, informative and provocative book, which focuses almost entirely on his intellectual and emotional reactions to relatively recent events in politics. The well-written autobiographical narrative begins on the very morning of the commercial airplane attacks in September 2001. His prose cannot help but transport the reader back to those terrifying moments we all experienced, as he himself is reliving them. Is it an accident? Is this really happening? Who did this?

       Litwin moves on to trace his maturation from gregarious gay liberal to virtually full-blown conservative, albeit with a few lingering progressive overtones. Touching on the two overriding themes of the book, he says, profoundly, in the introduction: "I never lost a friend by coming out as a gay person, but I lost friends coming out as a Conservative." 

       Of course Litwin's awakening per se is not unique. Thousands of writers -- myself included -- have felt a visceral compulsion to write about our experiences of how we came to rational thinking from the far left. He mentions several, including the well-known David Joel Horowitz, a New York-born Berkeley graduate and founding president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Everyone's migration rightward is fascinating in its own way. What I found so interesting in Litwin's account is the incredibly wide circle of friends, pundits and even politicians who seemed to let him down. From Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to Jean Chretien and Hedy Fry. He ended up in fights on the internet and at dinner parties, arguing the side of George Bush. It must have disgusted his friends.

       His reaction to the attacks of 9/11 -- he was horror-struck -- matches the vast majority of humanity's. But his unmet expectation that committed leftists would somehow have appropriate and helpful responses and explanations is, well, frankly, naive. The hard left of the past 20 years can no more be expected to feel sorry for America under attack by radical Muslims than Allied soldiers would have sympathized with dead Nazis. Fred's naivety, however, is more than made up for by his fast-paced, well researched arguments.

       I especially appreciated his support for Bush's invading Iraq and his unimpeachable stand regarding weapons of mass destruction. As he proves, President Bush did not lie. Indeed, Litwin's arguments about WMD could have been written by right wing commentator and lawyer Ann Coulter, an influential conservative pundit whom Litwin says he dislikes intensely.

       Conservative Confidential's eight chapters each deal with recent political issues and how the author personally experiences them. This writing style can come across as sanctimonious -- as can be seen every day in the comments sections on the internet -- but that is not the case with Litwin: he is impressively knowledgeable about every topic he touches upon, including but not limited to: Israel; international Islamic extremism; political intrigue and left wing bias at the CBC; and, fascinatingly, how Canada's professional gay establishment has hoodwinked the international gay community.

       The last chapter, called "My Dinner with David," tackles an especially divisive subject, counter-jihadism -- or the "anti-Islam right" -- which Litwin discovers lives closer to home than he is comfortable with, and to which major leaguer Horowitz comfortably belongs. The David he refers to is writer, poet and retired English teacher David Solway, author of more than 10 books, including an intriguing parable on John Franklin's disastrous attempt to find the Northwest Passage. Litwin's and Sloway's falling out occurred, you guessed it, at a dinner party, and resulted from their furiously opposing opinions on counter-jihadism, or whether Muslims in general are trying to take over the world.

        Perhaps, just maybe, Litwin -- showing a touch of his latent naivety -- comes across as ever so slightly disingenuous when he is shocked that some of his new found "respectable" conservative friends do not think that Islam the world over is fundamentally a wonderful religion, full of great people who love democracy and want the best for everyone. Most rational conservatives agree Islamic extremism is only one side of the international Muslim experience. But even for them (myself included) it took a lot of reading and soul-searching after 9/11 -- and, for Ottawa locals, attending more than a few Free Thinking Film Society events dealing with the subject -- to discover and admit that violent, repressive Sharia law (including as it is found embedded in Saudi Arabia and other underdeveloped countries) does not represent the best Islam has to offer.

       In conclusion, from Litwin's reasoning and clarity of thought, it is obvious he was primed and ready to switch sides. He needed a definitive push. How unfortunate the push was so lethal.

As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.