Caruba proves to be far from Boring: as the founder of the National Anxiety Center and the Boring Institute, journalist Alan Caruba relishes his role as an exposer of liberal hoaxes and misinformation

Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 by Stephen Goode

The environment. Education. The United Nations. Militant Islam. Immigration. Longtime journalist Alan Caruba takes up these subjects and more in his new book Warning Signs: The Good News Is That the Bad News Is Wrong (Merril Press, Bellevue, Wash.).

Caruba relishes exposing what he sees as hoaxes perpetrated daily in the name of science. He laments the pervasive ignorance being created by an educational system that he regards as woefully inadequate and growing worse.

Others have talked about these problems. What Caruba brings to the table is his exceptional common sense, coupled with wit and thoroughness of research that make memorable his writing and his frequent appearances on talk radio.

He's the founder of two great media spoofs, the Boring Institute and the National Anxiety Center, where he airs his concerns about America's future by satirizing such embarrassments as our fascination with celebrities and the tendency of broadcast and print media to see everything that--happening in this country--whether it's global warming, smoking tobacco or eating fast food--as leading to imminent death and disaster.

The National Anxiety Center's Website (www.anxietycenter.com) gets more than a half-million hits per month, Caruba tells INSIGHT. His weekly column, "Warning Signs," is excerpted on more than 30 news and opinion Internet sites. Sales of Caruba's three pocket guides--on immigration, militant Islam and the United Nations, plus his poster, "The Earth Is Fine!" debunking environmental hoaxes--help underwrite the cost of the Anxiety Center.

Caruba is a great raconteur INSIGHT interviewed him at his home in Maplewood, N.J., where he has lived for 60 years. We sat entertained as he tom marvelous stories about his days as a young man in the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., a Yankee surrounded by guys from Louisiana and Tennessee.

On the wall of his study is a large poster with the main guidelines for good and accurate journalism printed in big letters: "WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW and WHY." Caruba explains: "It reminds me what a journalist's job really is."

INSIGHT: You're one of those folks who moved to conservatism from being a card-carrying liberal. How did that conversion take place?

Alan Caruba: Oh I was liberal! My parents lived through the Great Depression and, as far as they were concerned, FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] could walk on water. For them, the advent of the United Nations held the promise of an end to future wars. They were seriously liberal.

For easily half my life, I never questioned any liberal point of view. I looked upon conservatives in very much the way they were painted throughout the fifties and sixties--nutcases--until I began to reach some degree of personal maturity. Then much of what the conservatives were saying began to make a lot of sense.

My personal conversion began in the seventies when I was doing public-relations work for some leading chemical manufacturers, particularly manufacturers of pesticides. It became obvious to me that if you take away the pesticides you get ever more pests. And when you have that, you have ever more disease and destruction of property, which is what pests are about.

It struck me that the environmental attack on all forms of pesticides and herbicides was irrational. It just didn't make any sense. As I questioned the environmentalists and why they were attacking these beneficial chemicals my circle of alarm about what they were saying began to expand.

What are they talking about, for example, when they talk about global warming? There is no global warming. There are no meteorological statistics that indicate any warming for the last 50 years. It was the matrix of lies, lie upon lie upon lie, that forced me to abandon former liberal beliefs and move further into what I understood to be conservative thinking.

Also, I was a gun enthusiast and still am. I could not understand why there was this massive effort literally to take guns away from people to whom the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.

What's interesting is that my mother, who passed away last year at the age of 98, came around to my point of view. She registered as a Republican after spending her entire life as a Democrat.

Q: The Democratic Party does seem to leave former supporters behind when it moves leftward, doesn't it?

A: It bothered me for many years that the Democratic Party was so devoted to a strategy of "tax and spend." Then it became clear to me that the Democrats had been taken over by the environmentalists. And they're virtually owned by the National Education Association. There no longer is any moderation in the party. It's not the "big tent" any more, it's a party led by people like [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.]. You just cannot get more radically left than that. A big chunk of the members of Congress are members of the far-left Progressive Caucus. They call themselves "progressives," but it's quite frightening to see how many of those elected to Congress as moderates are really on the extreme left.