Racial Issues

Creating a Racist America

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Marjorie Taylor Greene has ruffled feathers again. She’s getting pretty good at it. This time, she’s forming an America First caucus (which is no real surprise) but she decided to twist the knife a bit by saying it would uphold “Ango-Saxon Values”. Not being Anglo (I’m a mix of Jewish, Irish, Scottish and Finnish), don’t mean much to me – but the usual suspects were up in arms over it.

Did I mention that “usual suspects” means House Minority Leader McCarthy? Yep – in fact, that’s how I heard about it: his Tweet calling it a nativist dog whistle. Which is absurd – it wasn’t a dog whistle: Greene used a bullhorn.

Anyways, this is the trend of things. I’d prefer we didn’t go this way, but in a nation increasingly atomized and with a host of non-white political pressure groups, this is inevitable. For instance, the other day the governor of Utah (you know, a Republican) said that the Utah Jazz’ exclusion of white kids from sports scholarships wasn’t racist…and that he was proud of the Jazz. I mean, my goodness: that Jazz program is the absolute definition of racist: it excludes kids based upon skin color. Naturally, old line GOPers will simply refuse to acknowledge this. They are so used to surrender that it is their default position. But Greene and the new generation of GOPers – inspired by Trump – are not going to surrender.

The bottom line is that if we’re going to start making race-based this, that and the other thing, white people will start to insist on race-based things, as well. They won’t allow their children to be excluded from opportunities based on skin color. If A is to be reserved for black people, then they will insist that B be reserved for white people – and so on and on like that with each ethnic group trying to rake off as much as it can for itself, to be divvied up by the leadership who rise to power promising to fight for the tribe.

We can still stop this, but time is short – essentially, it requires the very swift and rather overwhelming victory of the Trumpist element in American politics. That done, we’ll actually be able to undo some of the most recent racial damage created by the Left and get back on the path to a color-blind society. If we can’t get that, then this is just going to get worse and in place of the non-racist America so long striven for, racism will be the order of the day in a dying nation where tribal leaders tear society apart.

Some Thoughts About it All

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Which came first, the African or the Racism?

It is useful to go back to the beginning on all this. It is what the 1619 Project alleged to do, but they didn’t even get the date right: the first slaves being brought from Africa to the Americas some time in the 1520’s. Of course, the 1619 Project isn’t history – it is Propaganda. An attempt to make out that the United States was uniquely responsible for slavery and that slavery and racism were central to our being as a people. But it isn’t like that, at all.

The only reason there was an African slave trade to the Americas is because labor was wanted; lots and lots of labor. And not skilled labor, either; what was wanted was a huge number of strong backs and arms to do the intensely physically demanding labor of plantation agriculture and mining. The reason Africa became the source of the labor is because it was the closest, non-Christian population to where the labor was needed. If the people of Africa had been white, they still would have been taken as slaves. It was just happenstance that they were black.

And that is very important to realize, because it shoots down entirely the concept that white people are inherently racist or motivated by animus towards other races. That all whites are racist is an article of dogma on the Left these days: you are not allowed to question it and you must accept it and proclaim, if you are white, that you believe it and will thus “check your privilege” for all time to come. But the historical reality just doesn’t support such an interpretation. We didn’t come here to be racist: we came here to build a new civilization. Labor was needed to do that. And when there is a market for something, that market will be filled.

Now, you can still say that it was wrong to enslave anyone – and you’re right by the standards of today. Not of the standards of 1520 or 1619 or even 1776. It was only about the time our nation was founded that people started to question the heretofore never questioned concept of slavery. And I mean really heretofore: prior to the rise of the Abolition movement in the Christian West no one on Earth had ever proposed the notion that no human being may be owned by another under any circumstances.

It was a very new and radical idea: that we all, being the sons and daughters of the same God, have an inherent right to our liberty. It was a very good idea and it is splendid that it was thought up and adopted as a guiding principle. But to blame people for not adhering to it before it was even thought up is absurd. To be really at liberty to do as you please, live where you want, think as you desire is still very new in human history. It really only dates as a concept to the middle of the 18th century and even to this day is only partially applied, but most broadly in the United States.

If you were a commoner in, say, 17th century England, you could be forced to work if the authorities thought you were a vagabond. Every country on Earth in one manner or another pressed down on ideas it didn’t like. There were many restrictions on where you could live and what you could do for a trade. Until the early 19th centuries, you could be impressed into Naval service (especially by the British) entirely without your consent and if you bucked against it you would be mercilessly whipped until you accepted your fate.

And that’s another thing to remember: extraordinarily brutal punishments were not reserved merely for African slaves: anyone who wasn’t high up in the socials strata was at risk of suffering the most astonishing punishments for crime. Whipping, of course: but also being branded with a red-hot iron; having your nose slit; your ears cut off; being placed in stocks to suffer abuse from the crowd; a host of offenses were capital and if you really did something the authorities didn’t like you would be hung, drawn and quartered (that is; you would be hung by your neck until you nearly suffocated and then you would be cut down; your living guts would then be ripped out of your body and while you were still alive, you’d then be tied hand and foot to horses who would be induced to rip your limbs off: a jeering and cheering crowd would watch all this). It was only after such punishments started to be eliminated from the criminal codes of the west in the late 18th century that people started to get offended that slaves were still being whipped. Prior to that, nothing would be thought of it…lots of people were whipped for all sorts of offenses.

If you were of the lower orders of society you were expected to serve and be obsequious. No talking out of turn and no back chat. Employers could use sanction in the law against you if you were insubordinate or substandard in your performance. It is true that you couldn’t be sold – but you could lose your position and wind up shipped to a colony or sent to a workhouse. Most people grovelled. They had to: it was that or starve or be subjected to horrible things. It was only with the birth of freedom in the late 18th century in the United States and France that people started to get off their knees, look the upper classes in the eyes and start talking back.

And that is another key thing to remember: things started to change after the United States became a nation (and, later, France had her Revolution). That’s the dividing line: that is when the worth of people as individuals really came to the fore. Prior to that time, even the Church was only really concerned with your soul, not your social condition. The Church would insist that all people be treated humanely but the Church wasn’t about you being free like a modern American is free. The point here is that it was only after common people learned that they didn’t have to grovel to upper class people that they started to see slaves, who were still required to grovel, were being treated unjustly. And that is where racism stepped in.

As humanity advanced in its concept of freedom and human dignity in the last 18th and early 19th centuries, it became ever more untenable to hold slaves. It was viewed a hidebound and corrupt: and it was also being shown that free labor was simply better than slave labor. But those who held slaves and who felt their livelihood and social position were dependent upon holding slaves didn’t want to change. And that’s when you started seeing people cook up the idea that Africans were inferior to whites and only suitable to be slaves.

To be sure, strands of what we call today racism started to appear earlier – but mostly in relation to the sexes. European women didn’t want to compete with African women for the most-prized males and so made it socially unacceptable for a white man to marry a black woman. It still happened, of course; but over time it ceased entirely to happen in the upper classes. Sexual relations went on, but marriage didn’t (a similar pattern happened in British India – in the 18th century British men would often marry Indian women…but as British women started to arrive in India in the 19th century, that practice became socially unacceptable; once again, competition for mates was the guiding force here). The real racism – the blacks are inherently inferior sort of vicious racism – that only started to appear in response to the growing clamor against slavery, as such. It was a rationalization made by people who simply didn’t want to lose what they had. After a time, a whole bizarre mythology of racism was created to buttress the argument of retaining slaves and it started to seep into the general population with even many of those opposed to slavery conceding that black people were inferior.

So, we aren’t dealing with a 400 year old legacy of racism nor are white Americans inherently racist and racistly racisting their way through life trying to keep the black man down. What we’re really dealing with is about 200 years old and the crucial aspect of it – the main American failure on the subject – happened post-Civil War when we failed to craft a just settlement for the freed slaves. We weren’t stained from the beginning with it: when we were founded in 1776, hardly anyone was yet on board with the idea that slavery was inherently wrong and no one was writing books trying to claim that black people are inherently inferior.

It was that post-Civil War failure which is really at the root of the problem: because we failed to secure the basic civil rights of black Americans, we laid up the legacy of woe that we are actually dealing with. Had we done it right back then, then by now most problems would be ameliorated. Because Jim Crow endured in law until the 1960’s, we’re still rather fresh into this problem. Immense strides have been made – we did, after all, elect a black man President, something that would have been inconceivable 80 years ago; and that is very fast change for a social organism. But, the bottom line is that there’s still a long way to go until a time comes when it doesn’t matter. That is, when what a person’s skin color isn’t even thought of when dealing with a person. We’re much further towards that then anyone had a right to expect 50 years ago, but still a long way away.

And that brings us to one of our crucial problems of today – just as, once upon a time, the slave owners twisted themselves into knots trying to justify holding slaves, so we today have people twisting themselves into knots trying to justify retaining a level of anger about, and contempt for, the United States of America, as such. For a lot of people, there is no upside to black and white people living peacefully together. In fact, there’s a lot of downside: hosts of people make their living off of continued racial animosity. What on Earth would Al Sharpton do for a living without it? How would Democrats keep 90% of the African-American vote? How would scores of critical race theory professors and hangers-on justify their fat salaries?

And so the fires are stoked. A few genuine racists are also still at it, usefully providing a patina of justification for the Left to assert that racism in inherent. And there is no solution – mostly because no solution is wanted. If white people are inherently racist then no action and no amount of time will change that. There will always be things to be offended about. The killing of George Floyd probably had no race aspect to it. I really doubt the cop got up that morning and said to himself, “man, I’m gonna kill myself a black man today”. But because the cop was white and the victim black, it is cast as proof that America is inherently racist…and let’s go loot Target because Reasons…and when order is restored well, whitey, you’re still inherently racist and no amount of you saying “Black Lives Matter” actually changes that…but your guilt is useful because it means you won’t look into things too deeply and thus the race grifters will stay on the gravy train and everything will keep going until the next incident which can be cast in racial terms.

And more’s the pity on that – because we do need a lot of reforms and all that gets buried under the rubble of a looted shop. We do need to reform the police. And the prosecutors. And we do need to find ways to bring about increased minority ownership of productive property.

I don’t know quite how this comes out. I’m hopeful that especially under Trump’s second term, great strides can be made in minority prosperity, which always lessens tensions (people with plenty don’t cause a ruckus and money buys you entree into even the most exclusive clubs). But we’ll just have to see.

Who’s the Nazi?

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Lately there has been much back and forth about just who is a Nazi. To be sure, all of us on the right have, at one time or another, been accused of being Nazis of one sort or another. But this latest game of Expose the Nazi is different in that plenty of people on the right are joining the left in the hunt.

I suppose this has been coming for a while – remember how we were all supposed to be in a panic about the Alt-Right in 2015/16? They were Nazis out to set up the Fourth Reich…to be run, as it turns out, by the flamboyantly gay Milo Yiannopoulos. Which didn’t – and doesn’t – make any sense, but the real purpose of the exercise was to un-person Yiannopoulos as having a gay spokesman for the right who was also wickedly funny just wrecked too many Progressive Narratives while also displeasing the Tru-Cons; who have no problem with gay, but do have a great deal of problem with anyone on the right who may actually advance a conservative notion or two.

The latest explosion was caused by a guy named Nick Fuentes. I honestly don’t know much about him. I knew zero about him – had never heard of him – before the explosion and even after looking him up, I can only find that a lot of people really, really dislike the guy. There doesn’t seem to be a political party run by Fuentes and he hasn’t created a political program…seems to me that he’s just this guy and his thing is to make outrageous statements for attention. Among the outrageous statements are anti-Semitic and anti-Immigrant statements. From what I can gather, this makes him out to be an a**hole…but I can’t discern a plan on Fuentes’ part to unify the nation under a Leader, eliminate all non-Aryans (with special attention to the Jews) and conquer increased Living Space for the Aryans. This would, of course, be the plan, if you were a Nazi. Fuentes being a Spanish name, I’m wondering if the guy even has any Kraut blood?

Part of the controversy resulted in Michelle Malkin being fired by YAF for coming to the defense of Fuentes. This is another jarring note in the concept that Fuentes is a Nazi because Malkin is of Philippine blood. It seems these days that “Nazi” is becoming a catch-all for “people I don’t like” and “people I have to get out of the public square because they might win an argument with me”. Good to keep in mind that while all Nazis are anti-Semites, not all anti-Semites are Nazis…unless you want to assert that Ilhan Omar is a Nazi. I somehow doubt that the likes of Fuentes and Malkin are planning a Nazi takeover of the United States.

Does this excuse any statements from either of them which I may consider wrong? Of course not. Either of them may have in the past – or may in the future – say things which I find outrageously wrong. But until they set up a National Socialist party and start trying to take over (while providing a logical explanation for why they’d want a system which would imprison and kill them as Untermensch) I’m not going to call them Nazis, or even think that they might have that goal in mind.

Are there any actual Nazis out there? Yep. I’ve even come across a few of them on social media – briefly, before I blocked them. There are in the world today genuine, dyed-in-the-wool Nazis who want to set up a Nazi system…the only slight variation on Hitler’s Nazism is that most of today’s Nazis consider anyone white to be Übermensch. This isn’t strictly in keeping with Nazi ideology which held that only Germans were the master race and while other white people could be superior in this way or that, none could compare to Germans. But, hey, when you’re running a con about Nazism in modern America, you have to cast a wide net for clicks and donations. I wouldn’t think that more than a few tens of thousands of Americans adhere to Nazi ideology.

There is, though, a larger group which, while not explicitly Nazi, do share a lot of Nazi notions. These people can more broadly be classified as “White Nationalists”. They generally support democratic self-governance. They are not advocating for wars of conquest. In economics, its a bit of a mish mash of welfare State and free market. Many of them don’t even argue that non-whites are inferior. But what they do argue is that whites should be separate from non-whites: that there should be places set aside where only white people live – and part of this desire is that the United States no longer allow immigration. What we have here, in my view, is an attempt to make out that since Malkin, Fuentes and many others on the right are anti-immigration, they are akin to White Nationalists who are, in turn, akin to Nazis…and so Malkin and Fuentes, and everyone who won’t condemn them, are Nazis.

That is an incredible level of nonsense – but it is in keeping with the times. What is really desired here is to make being anti-immigration socially unacceptable. That if you take a position that immigration should no longer happen – or even that it should be highly restricted – then you are acting entirely from base motives. That you are a racist Nazi. Crucial to such a program would be to un-person anyone non-white who is taking the position that immigration should be stopped…and so the non-white voices of Malkin and Fuentes have to go.

I’m not going to do that: I will not let my opponents define me. I still don’t really know who Fuentes is. If he’s making the anti-Semitic statements that he’s accused of, then he’s an idiot and wrong in those statements. But I refuse to go along with deplatforming and destroying him. I don’t care what he says. I have no connection with him and have no moral requirement to prove I’m not like him by adopting positions I think wrong. I’m especially not going to do it because it seems pretty clear to me that the heart attack being had over him is mere political garbage designed to destroy those the Establishment want destroyed. The Establishment wants not only continued immigration, but increased immigration. Their solution to illegal immigration is to make it so easy to immigrate that no one would bother with doing it illegally. I’m not going along with that.

Demonstrate to me that someone is an actual Nazi and I’ll condemn that person. So, too, if you can demonstrate that they are racist, anti-Semitic, in favor of tyranny…prove to me that someone wants wicked things, and I’ll condemn the wicked plans and work to ensure they aren’t carried out. But don’t dare try to call someone a Nazi because you simply want me to run away from a political position. I happen to think that it is time to call a halt to immigration, at least for a period of time. For refugees, I’d set up refugee camps which will have as their goal the return of the refugees to their homeland…a temporary, safe harbor where they can be safe from dying but which is no ways is a step towards becoming a resident of the United States. Rely on it: set that up and you’ll only get people who are in actual fear of their lives showing up…because “camp or death” means “camp” while “camp or just staying home which isn’t so bad” means “just staying home which isn’t so bad.”

I am Catholic. I am part Jewish in blood. I have non-white relatives by blood and marriage. I live and work among non-white people. I am not in any way, shape or form racist and I could never be Nazi – or Socialist or fascist or Communist or any other such evil twaddle fit only for criminals and idiots. I will advocate for what I think is right and I will not be scared off on it because someone out there might slander me. Nor will I take anyone’s uncorroborated word for it that someone is evil. It is time for us on our side to call an end to this game: this “insult to win” garbage the Left – and, truth be told, part of the Right – has engaged in because they can’t win an argument.

Where the Shooters Come From

Mark Noonan53 Comments

RSM delved into the El Paso shooter’s background. Its pretty much exactly what you would expect. Parents are divorced. They taught him love and tolerance, but apparently neglected such basics as “right and wrong” and “how to use a GPS” (he got lost on his way to his massacre). His mom is a nurse and dad is a therapist…so, likely not poor people, but their son was on food stamps (how in heck a single man with no kids gets food stamps we’ll leave for another time).

Not too long ago I was in conversation with a 20 year old. A very bright person attending college. The product of a broken home, but still fairly well adjusted. Over the course of the conversation (several people were there) this youngster asserted to racist views. I was very surprised at this, at first. After the encounter, it stuck in my mind and I pondered it. How does a person brought up long after slavery and Jim Crow and put through an education system which relentlessly preaches against racism become a racist? It was simple once I hit on it: because this youngster was born after Jim Crow and was relentlessly taught not just that racism is bad, but that white people are inherently racist, and thus bad.

People, you see, don’t like to be taught they are bad. I’m sure it infuriated black people back in the day to have whole swaths of the system essentially preach their inferiority to whites. On balance, the petty racism a black person would encounter was probably less of an affront than his very government and society telling him that he was second rate. For a couple decades now, white kids in public schools have been taught precisely that: they are inferior. They are born racists; they have unearned privilege; on and on like that. None of it being remotely true; and some white kid gets an earful of that and becomes resentful. Couple that with being a failure (as all these shooters are), being entirely ignorant of actual history (and thus having no way to be proud of anything outside their miserable selves) and from backgrounds likely to remove all real moral instruction, and that’s where you get the mass murderers.

CNN: ALL White People are Supremacists

Leo Pusateri18 Comments

OK, CNN–so we’re all ‘white supremacists’ now, are we?  Yep– according to CNN, all ‘ordinary’ white people share the original sin not just of slavery, but we are just born white supremacists.  We just can’t help it.

Well, then, let’s take a closer look at the concept of ‘white supremacy,’ shall we?
Contrary to the conservative mindset, which is set in the belief that all people are inherently good and capable of self-determination, regardless of race, it has long been the white liberal/progressive mindset that minorities are hapless and incompetent, and would barely have the pleasure of existence save for the oversight of their progressive intellectual betters.

In the mind of the progressive, minorities cannot independently rise above their station in life without progressive policies and the government programs that stem from them. Hell, in the mind of the progressive, minorities can’t even be counted on to be resourceful enough to do something simple, such as to obtain a driver’s license or an identification card to vote (unless a progressive government program were in place to assist them).

In other words, progressive policies have at their very core the premise that minorities are unable to fend for themselves, save for the good graces and ‘caring’ of those on the White Limousine Liberal plantation.

In summary, CNN, let me respond to your assertions by saying that IF there are any ‘natural’ supremacist sentiments and tendencies, it resides not in so-called ‘ordinary people.’ Rather, from Woodrow Wilson, to Margaret Sanger, to William Fulbright, history has demonstrated time and again that white supremacist tendencies lie squarely in the heart of the white limousine liberal progressive.

This latest accusation is nothing more than another stellar example of white liberal projection.

(h/t PJ Media)

Wanting To Take A Swing At Someone Is Racist?

Retired Spook14 Comments

RICORUN DISCLAIMER — I, RETIRED SPOOK, DID NOT WRITE THIS.  THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY AMAZONA WHO ASKED ME TO PUBLISH IT FOR HER.

Picking up on the theme of the Lawrence O’Donnell video posted by Cluster in the previous thread, The Huffington Post accurately reported a comment made by Tagg Romney after Tuesday’s debate:

Mitt Romney’s eldest son weighed in on the second presidential debate on Wednesday, joking that the debate’s contentious nature made him want to “take a swing” at President Obama.

During an interview with North Carolina radio host Bill LuMave, Tagg Romney said that hearing the president call his father a liar made him want to “jump out of [his] seat and … rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him.”

He continued: “But you know you can’t do that because, well first because there’s a lot of Secret Service between you and him, but also because this is the nature of the process, they’re going to do everything they can do to try to make my dad into someone he’s not. We signed up for it. We’ve gotta kinda sit there and take our punches and then send them right back the other way.”

A young man felt defensive of his father after seeing his father called a liar on national television, and joked that his emotional response was to “take a swing at him”. This is not a story.

Yet David Sirota, a Denver Liberal, claims it is, and has done his best to make it a story. Worse, to make it story not about a man joking about an impulse, but about an entire landscape of alleged racism.

Racism? But of course.

Sirota has a radio show in Denver, Rundown, in which he and conservative Michael Brown offer points of view from both sides of the political aisle. As the spokesman for the Left, Sirota explains that this comment could not have any foundation OTHER than racism, and on the radio show Thursday (during a segment when Brown was not there to insert a touch of sanity into the proceedings) he expounded on this at great length.

I listen to the show sometimes, and have so far found Sirota to be rational and inoffensive as he has explained his Liberal perspective on many topics. But this week he not only veered wildly from this approach to political news, he devoted about half an hour to his insistence that Tagg Romney was coming from a position of what he repeatedly called “white privilege”. He lied, and he invented wild-eyed theories about what would have happened if a black man had said this about a white candidate.

The lies: That Tagg Romney had “fantasized” about doing harm to the president, and that he had said he wanted to “punch him in the face”.

He repeated the claim that the young Romney had been “fantasizing” about this horrible act of violence, implying that Romney had engaged in an ongoing fantasy and had not just spontaneously described his frustration at watching his father attacked by using a very mild metaphor of “taking a swing at” the attacker. Sirota not only repeatedly, insistently, characterized this as a desire to engage in real violence, as a desire to inflict harm on the President, but as a “fantasy” of Romney’s.

In fleeting moments of what I can only consider inadvertent honesty, he did use the word “impulse” a couple of times, but always returned to the theme of “fantasizing” about doing harm to the President.

He also claimed that Tagg Romney had elaborated that he “wanted to punch the President in the face”.

He repeatedly identified Tagg Romney as being a major spokesman for the entire Romney campaign, trying desperately to link Mitt Romney to this overwrought portrayal of seething rage and elaborate fantasies of violence against the President. It was quite shameful.

Not content to lie about what Romney said or a wholly imagined “fantasy”, Sirota spun even more wildly into typical Leftist rhetoric, expanding this comment into an elaborate explanation and condemnation of what he called “white privilege”, going on at length about his claim that this stemmed from a callous assumption that privileged whites can say anything they want to or about black people. The convoluted effort to make this a racial matter would have been funny, if it had not been such an illustration of the toxicity of the far Left and its irrational obsession with branding everything said by a conservative as coming from a well of racial hatred.

And then Sirota elaborated even more, repeatedly claiming that if Obama had a son who made this kind of comment about a white opponent, it would result in a “race war”. He was apparently quite impressed with this phrasing, as he repeated it several times.

I originally thought to just write this rant off as a Left-leaning commentary that got out of control, but Sirota mentioned that emails were already coming in, and was quite smug about generating such opposition to this outrageous statements. And then he put them in writing, in an article in Salon.  So this was not just a Bidenesque blurting of poorly considered emotion. It is a true and accurate representation of the beliefs of a spokesman for the Left, one who identifies himself as such in his radio show bio, whose very presence on this show is as one giving the point of view of the Left.

I mention it because it is a sign that these bizarre distortions of fact into a stew of lies, accusations, and outright insanity are not limited to the fringes of Leftist lunacy, but are mainstream Left. Sirota has been a voice of moderate, rational, Leftist philosophy, and to see him fly so far off the rails, into such a detailed and emphatic racist temper tantrum, with such nasty accusations that spiraled from attacking Tagg Romney to trying to implicate his father and the whole campaign in the invented race-based issue to substituting an invented “fantasy” for a spontaneous comment to wild-eyed assertions of out-and-out “race wars” if the racial identities were reversed, made me realize how pervasive and deep-seated this vicious projection of so many vile characteristics is, and what a major component of Leftist philosophy it is.

Sirota never questioned his assumptions. He never once took a breath and examined what he had been saying and tried to sort out what was real from what had bubbled up from his own belief system and world view. He just freely intertwined his own bigotries with the simple comment by Tagg Romney, and created a whole scenario, in which the actual comment played such a minor role it was lost in the hate-based hysteria of claims of violent fantasies and race wars and white privilege.

I think the most toxic heritage of the last four years will be the creation of sanctioned hatred and racism. I believe that prior to the callous decision of the Left to create, nurture, encourage and incorporate claims of racial hatred and to apply this to every perception of every word and action of the political opposition, this kind of seething rage was limited to the lunatic fringes of the movement. But it is now so mainstream in the Left that it has become the default response to anything any conservative says, about pretty much anything. We, as a nation, can recover from economic disaster, and with the right leadership we can deal with threats from our enemies. But I think it may take generations to heal the wounds created by using race as a weapon to turn people against each other, to brand people as morally inferior, to spawn hatred and distrust and even violence.

I understand that the Left’s use of race in the despicable ways they do has the added advantage, in addition to that of Divide and Conquer, of providing to those who use it a short cut to the Higher Moral Ground—-by applying these vile characteristics to others, they can assume moral superiority, without actually DOING anything to justify it. But the harm done to the nation is frightening.

Will The REAL ‘post racial’ Barack Obama, Please Stand Up?

Leo Pusateri59 Comments

As the Daily Caller reports, a video of a 2007 speech from Barack Obama has surfaced.  An astonishing video, to be sure.

Gone is Obama’s measured midwestern, pedantic dialect.  Gone is Obama’s ‘post racial’ tone.  Gone is Obama’s supposed distance from Pastor Jeremiah Wright (you remember “G-d DAMN AMERICA!” Reverend Wright-you know, the guy that Obama sat in front of for over 20 years, that he supposedly never listened to).   In fact, in the video, Obama embraces Jeremiah Wright, naming him as his mentor and counselor.

Class warfare rhetoric is rampant in this video, as is his allusion to the principles inherent in liberation theology.

It is said that the true character of a person can be seen by how that individual acts when he or she feels that they’re not being watched.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you Barack Obama,

unplugged and unhinged.

A Liberal Whine: Obama Not Playing Race Card, Enough

Mark Noonan49 Comments

From Ta-Nehisi Coats in The Atlantic:

…From the “inadequate black male” diatribe of the Hillary Clinton supporter Harriet Christian in 2008, to Rick Santelli’s 2009 rant on CNBC against subsidizing “losers’ mortgages,” to Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during Obama’s September 2009 address to Congress, to John Boehner’s screaming “Hell no!” on the House floor about Obamacare in 2010, politicized rage has marked the opposition to Obama. But the rules of our racial politics require that Obama never respond in like fashion. So frightening is the prospect of black rage given voice and power that when Obama was a freshman senator, he was asked, on national television, to denounce the rage of Harry Belafonte. This fear continued with demands that he keep his distance from Louis Farrakhan and culminated with Reverend Wright and a presidency that must never betray any sign of rage toward its white opposition.

Thus the myth of “twice as good” that makes Barack Obama possible also smothers him. It holds that African Americans—­enslaved, tortured, raped, discriminated against, and subjected to the most lethal homegrown terrorist movement in American history—feel no anger toward their tormentors. Of course, very little in our history argues that those who seek to tell bold truths about race will be rewarded. But it was Obama himself, as a presidential candidate in 2008, who called for such truths to be spoken. “Race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now,” he said in his “More Perfect Union” speech, which he delivered after a furor erupted over Reverend Wright’s “God Damn America” remarks. And yet, since taking office, Obama has virtually ignored race…

The article is quite long and it just goes on and on like that – America is and has been a hopeless, racist hell and Obama hasn’t been doing enough to pay whitey back for his transgressions.  Obama is just playing the white man’s game, as it were, for fear that an enraged black man will awaken the racist within us all and thus defeat him on November 6th.  The underlying premise of it all is that all white people are guilty and until they confront their terrible crimes, we can’t get past the race issue in the United States.

The reality is a bit different, of course.  The true issue of race in America is that it is dead as a doornail except for those who need it for fun and profit.  The fact that Obama has been treated just like anyone else doesn’t enter in to liberal minds – it was my (very white) wife who first clued me in to the Obama phenomena.  She was quite taken with this well spoken, good looking man who was clearly ambitious for higher office.  I, too, could not escape immediately the charm of Obama.  While I wouldn’t have voted for him under any circumstances this was entirely due to his standard-liberal positions on the issues.  That he is a black man was, is and always will be entirely irrelevant.  It wasn’t until the Jeremiah Wright issue came up that I became aware of the dishonesty underneath the surface of Obama – and while an author like Coats clearly admirers people like Wright, anyone who is not committed to the con-job which is race in America these days would immediately be offended by someone who lives well off America and yet condemns it in such hateful terms.  And as Obama and team started going “Jeremiah who?” it really just told us that Obama is dishonest – he sat in the man’s church for 20 years and could not reasonably argue that he was unaware of Wright’s raving lunacy.

Obama’s 2008 persona, though, carried him through to victory – just as anyone else with that sort of persona and given that set of political circumstances would likely have been carried in to the White House.  In other words; treated just like anyone else.  The problem for Obama is that his management style (probably the worst decision-maker we’ve ever had in the White House) coupled with the disastrous policies normal to liberalism have ensured complete failure of his Administration.  And just like any other person who is failing in the job of President, he’s getting hammered in popular approval and will likely lose on November 6th.  He wasn’t elected due to race in 2008, won’t be defeated in 2012 because of race – he was elected because of his personality and circumstances and will be defeated because of his policies.  But if this narrative is accepted as true then all the racial con-artists out there (people like Wright and Farrakhan and Jackson and Sharpton) would shortly be out of work.  A certain segment of the population (which does include a very large number of white people, of course) needs to have race to be a painful, divisive issue now and forever more.

It will be funny – not to me, as I’ll be dead right around that time – in 30 or 40 years when America is no longer a white-majority nation to see the successors of these people.  How will they keep the race hustle up?  Don’t doubt that they will try – Mugabe in Zimbabwe is still blaming the white people of Zimbabwe for his problems even though there are hardly any white people left in that country.  It’ll just be entertaining to watch the mental back flips these people will have to do to convince people that whitey is still keeping the black man down.   Think of it like this – the race-hustlers of 2052 will be trying to convince a panel of 1 (aged) white guy, two Latinos, two Asians and three mixed-race people that we still need racial set-asides to clear up the racial disparities of the Jim Crow era.

The sad part of it is really the way these people feel the need to keep hate alive.  We all know the truth of our past – the glory and the sins; slavery will always be a stain upon the Great Republic, as will segregation.  But it is also very much long past, now.  There are no slaves left.  No children of slaves, either.  I doubt we even have a great-grand-child of a slave alive in the United States.  The Jim Crow laws have been a dead letter since the mid-60’s.  Black people serve at all levels of American society and no one would ever dream of barring anyone from any position simply based upon their skin color.  More and more of us, also, have mixed race families – while I’m sure there are still some hill-apes out there who don’t want their daughters to marry a black man, they are few and far between (and getting ever fewer by the day); people just don’t care about it any longer.  All we want is decent people who obey the law and do the right thing – skin color is irrelevant.  But here are our liberals – so fearful that the race-baiting gravy train may come to an end that they will do whatever is necessary to keep old hatreds inflamed.

Pray for them.  Don’t get mad about it.  Hopefully they will wake up from their befuddlement in the by and by.

 

Obama Losing African-American Support?

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Last week, in an update to an open thread, I linked to an article which shows that under Obama black Americans have suffered greatly, with black unemployment rising to ruinous levels.  I asked, rhetorically, if these conditions will really cause black Americans to once again award 95% of their votes to Obama.  My thinking was, yes, it would.  Though I expect black turnout to be lower in 2012 as a percentage of the total vote than 2008, I fully expected a repeat of the overwhelming support for Obama.

Perhaps I was wrong – this poll (PDF) by the Democrat-leaning PPP shows Romney gaining the support of 20% of North Carolina African-American voters.  To be sure, the polling sample of black voters is small; about 200 respondents.  But, still – my goodness!  If Romney can really win 20% of the black vote then not only is Obama doomed but about 2o or 30 House seats suddenly become “in play” for the November election (the Democrats have about that many House seats which are theirs by gift of a 90%+ black vote in favor of the Democrats…if that drops a bit, the Democrats lose the seat).  It is  poll results like this which must be costing Axelrod many a sleepless night.

Count on it that Obama will sweep the African-American vote by an overwhelming majority – but if there is really any movement to Romney then it is going to be a stunning political change.  Maybe, at the end of the day it will take a black liberal to destroy African-American loyalty to the Democrats?

As an aside, the overall poll shows Romney up 48-46 over Obama in North Carolina – in line with the “battleground” status of North Carolina for 2012.  On the other hand, the polling sample is 44% Democrat, 36% Republican.  Almost certainly on November 6th the turnout will be more in line with 40%+ GOPer and no better than 35% or so Democrat…meaning that you can add at least 5 points to Romney’s total in this poll.  I never believed stories that North Carolina was competitive for the Democrats in 2012 and I’m more certain than ever it won’t be – watch for the Democrats to pull the plug on the State right after the convention.

Are You a Racist?

Retired Spook115 Comments

Back when I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s, the term “racist” actually meant something. Today we throw the word around so casually that it’s virtually lost its meaning for most people. So just exactly what is a “racist”?

Webster defines racism as follows:

1
: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2
: racial prejudice or discrimination

I’ve NEVER thought of myself as a racist, and yet I’ve been accused of being one on this blog when I’ve written that I believed blacks in America have been duped and suckered into voting in virtual lockstep for Democrats in exchange for affirmative action programs and free “stuff”.  I don’t know how any casual observer could perceive it any other way.  If that makes me a racist, well then I wear that as a badge of honor.  It hasn’t changed the way I look at blacks as individuals.  I’ve been hoping for nearly half a century that MLK’s dream would come true, and we would get to a point where everyone would judge others by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.  I’m still waiting for that to happen, and, in fact, it appears we’re drifting farther away from that ideal rather than toward it.  Much of our current problems, IMO, can be laid at the feet of the current administration.  Never in my lifetime has there been a president who has been more divisive, particularly along racial lines, than this president.  What a poor record for one who was touted as being the first “post racial president.

As I said in a comment in a previous thread, my overall experience with other races, particular blacks, has been pretty good.  I graduated from high school in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed.  Democrats held substantial majorities in Congress back then, and it wouldn’t have passed had not a substantial majority of Republicans voted for it.  All that was eclipsed a year or two later with LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty, two of the most massive government wealth transfer mechanisms every seen at that time.  Those two programs were the lynch pins in the Left’s effort to destroy the black family.  OK, let me rephrase that and give Progressives the benefit of the doubt that their initial goal was not to destroy the black family.  The destruction of the black family was simply an unintended consequence of the Left’s effort to create a solid block of reliable votes.  Regardless of the initial motivation, the destruction of the black family is the root of many of our current societal problems.

Prior to high school graduation, I’ll have to admit, my exposure to interaction with blacks was pretty limited.  I didn’t dislike them or not get along with them; I just didn’t interact with them much.  Most of the blacks in Fort Wayne, Indiana where I grew up went to one inner-city high school – Central High (since converted into a vocational center for the Fort Wayne Community Schools) We played them in basketball — they beat us — we shook their hands, end of story.  As I got out into world, I began to interact more with other races, but still I don’t recall ever encountering any of the types of problems we see today.  It just never dawned on me to treat someone differently because of the color of his or her skin.

So just exactly what is racism in modern terms?  Is it something that can eventually be overcome.  Will our kids do a better job than we’ve done, or is it going to take a race war before we finally move on?  It’s pretty obvious, from discussions about the recent Trayvon Martin incident, that our resident Progressives see it through a completely different lens than do our Conservatives and Libertarians.  Let’s see if we can have a civilized discussion about it.