Scott is the first black senator since Roland Burris departed the chamber in 2010. In addition, as Adolph Reed, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, “he will be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction; the first black Republican senator since 1979, when Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts retired; and, indeed, only the seventh African-American ever to serve in the chamber.”
For Reed, who specializes in the history of black America, this is cause for complaint rather than celebration. “Modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.”
This reminds us of the late Geraldine Ferraro‘s March 2008 comment on then-Sen. Barack Obama’s meteoric rise: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. . . . He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro, who supported Mrs. Clinton, didn’t use the T-word, but she was pilloried by the left and forced to apologize for suggesting that Obama’s political strength was a case of tokenism.
Yet the substance of Ferraro’s comment (apart from a dubious feminist complaint, which we elided above) is hard to dispute. It’s almost impossible to imagine that a white junior senator from Illinois would have wrested the Democratic presidential nomination from Hillary Clinton, much less been elected president. Obama’s race was a big part of his appeal to voters, stimulating black pride and assuaging white guilt. His supporters hailed both his election and re-election as a triumph of “diversity.”
JoAnn Watson, Detroit city council member, said, “Our people in an overwhelming way supported the re-election of this president, and there ought to be a quid pro quo.” In other words, President Obama should send the nearly bankrupted city of Detroit millions in taxpayer bailout money. But there’s a painful lesson to be learned from decades of political hustling and counsel by intellectuals and urban experts.
…Policies that ran whites and other more affluent people out of Detroit might have been Young’s and his successors’ strategy. After all, why not get rid of people who aren’t going to vote for you anyway? The problem is that getting rid of these people left Detroit with a lower tax base, fewer jobs and fewer consumers. Fewer whites might be good for the careers of black politicians, but it’s not in the best interests of ordinary blacks. Blacks have political control of Detroit, but the relevant question is whether some control of something is better than 100 percent control of nothing. By most measures, Detroit is one of the nation’s most tragic cities, and it’s mostly self-imposed.
…Detroit’s social pathology is seen in other cities with large black populations such as Philadelphia, Newark, Baltimore and Chicago. These are cities where blacks have for years dominated the political machinery in the forms of mayors, police chiefs, superintendents of schools and city councilmen, plus they’ve been Democrats. It’s safe to conclude that the focus on political power doesn’t do much for ordinary blacks.
At the GOP convention, MSNBC host Chris Matthews explained that “Chicago” was a racially loaded code word. Fellow host Lawrence O’Donnell said Republican convention speakers were reaching “for every single possible racial double entendre they can find.” His proof? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made a joke about Obama playing a lot of golf.
Now, the cynical motivations behind this relentless slander are too numerous to count. Such moral bullying makes white liberals feel better about themselves. It scares moderates and centrists away from the Republican Party, and it no doubt helps dissuade wavering blacks from even thinking about giving the GOP an honest look.
It also does wonders to stifle journalists terrified of having their racial bona fides questioned in any way. And it helps a feckless left-wing black political class explain away its own failures. Racial slander is like duct tape: There’s no limit to what you can do with it.
The newest revolutionary stance for the mentally infantile is radical Islam, which is being spread by the same tools of agitation and propaganda that launched Marxism a century ago.
During 70 years of Soviet genocide and tyranny, the KGB penetrated the West to an astonishing extent, helping to crank out generation after generation of mental androids, who all said the same thing, over and over again, feeling proud and heroic about themselves.
In Intellectuals, historian Paul Johnson describes how most of the celebrated public figures of the last century were Soviet sympathizers. Moscow could do no wrong. That includes my old hero Jean-Paul Sartre, who championed every mass-murdering gangster regime in the Marxist world, from Stalin and Mao to Pol Pot and Ceaușescu the Romanian child-molester.
Jean Paul Sartre isn’t my hero anymore.
A leftist website tells us that “[f]rom the late 1950s on, Sartre tried to marry his existentialist philosophy with … Marxism. In … 1960 … Sartre declared that existentialism was a subordinate branch of Marxism.”
That was around the time Nikita Khrushchev exposed Stalin’s decades of massacres of the innocents — but Professor Sartre didn’t feel the need to change one little bit. Instead, he found new death idols to worship in Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. Sartre and all the other Euro-Marxo-philiacs knew exactly what they were doing. They knew about the massacres, and they were free to protest, but they chose to be criminally complicit.
If you wonder why Europe is still in a socialist mess today, look no farther than the Europeans’ Marx-intoxicated educational system. The Soviet Union may have crumbled, but Euro-socialism has tried to take its place. Tony Blair (a socialist Labourite, after all) called it “Third Way Socialism.” Today’s European fiasco is not an accident.
After Greece and the others fall into bankruptcy next year, there will be a short interval of sanity, only to be followed by another big Euro imperialist fantasy. They’ve been doing it since Julius Caesar. They never stop, and today, they are already blaming America for fifty years of their own mass delusion.
At the start of the Marxist madness, in the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge saw the Ukrainian genocide up close, and he described its horrors to his socialist friends in England. Only to find out that they knew all about it already:
My wife’s aunt was Beatrice Webb (co-founder of the British Labour Party). And so one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the (Soviet) regime … but they liked it. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person … saying to me, ‘Yes, it’s true, people disappear in Russia.’
She said it with … great satisfaction[.]
Scratch a Marxist, and you find a bloody-minded professor.
That’s still true. There are no innocent Nazi professors on the campuses, and there are no innocent Marxist professors, either. If I had the money, I would send every single professor a copy of The Black Book of Communism, by a French team of Marxist historians, published by Harvard University Press. Come to think of it, some conservative outfit should do a mass mailing to all the Democrats and leftists in the country. And all the college kids. Or maybe we should imitate the left and turn the Black Book into a Sunday cartoon series like “Doonesbury.” You can’t start too early.
Just thinking about it makes me shiver, because our crypto-fascist media pundits never change. They never ‘fess up, simply ignoring one bloody massacre after another and shifting their utopian dreams to the future — to some newer hope and change, as our current messiah told the world just four years ago. Nothing has changed.
Marxism is not a rational belief, but a virus that hides in the body politic for a decade or two, only to bust out again when a new generation of comes of age, without rabies shots.
Today’s Marxist liberals still harbor a nasty case of anti-American rage for the failure of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. They hate capitalism for bringing more prosperity to more people on earth than anything they dreamed of in a century of terror. Soviet imperialism is always excused, and America is held to moral perfection.
Marxists are no different from Hitler’s admirers in the 1930s, who also loved the Nazi state for its revolutionary commitment to wiping out the bastard peoples of the earth. Britain’s King Edward VIII was one of them — a secret that was buried after Winston Churchill exiled him to the Bahamas for holding secret surrender talks with Hitler. Fascist brutality has a magnetic attraction for such people. They are not innocent.
Which brings me to my Muslim agent of influence — or at least a gent I met last year who looks, acts, and succeeds in that role to an amazing extent. But I can’t prove it. Still, I wonder about Islamist influence-peddling, because Islamic fascists are not fools — unlike our journalists and academics. They are as determined and ruthless as the Soviets ever were. Like Marxists, Islamists follow a creed of conquest. Only one generation after Mohammed, Muslims armies conquered half the known world. That was not an accident. It was a mix of absolutist ideology and a fanatical war doctrine, like Ahmadinejad reveals every day.
Are Muslim influence-peddlers active today?
They may not be wearing secret agent badges, but consider the facts.
1. A decade after 9/11/01, the murderous reality of Islamist terror is constantly denied by our media, academics, and politicians of the left. In sober reality, Islamists brutally abuse and commonly kill women, gays, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, African tribal peoples, and Marxist atheists. And each other, of course.
Denying that simple reality involves such breathtaking ignorance that it cannot be an accident.
Our militant feminists hate America’s “patriarchy,” but they never pipe up about the Taliban patriarchy of Afghanistan and the patriarchal genociders of the Sudan. Radical feminists like Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans even agitated to bring the Muslim Brothers to power in Egypt. That makes them either perverse or evil. Or both.
Here’s another odd fact.
2. The heir apparent to the Saudi throne has been reliably identified as a financier of al-Qaeda before 9/11. And yet he is still rising to the top in Saudi Arabia, with the full knowledge of every intelligence agency in the world.
It’s not as if AQ is out of business, either. They are surging back in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sinai Desert. Obama’s heroic assassination of bin Laden didn’t kill their ideology. Money is somehow flowing to the AQs. After the media-faked “Arab Spring,” they have spread more widely than ever before. Now al-Qaeda has its own glossy Life magazine-type terror-glorifier, like Soviet Life. The GWOT isn’t over. Obama covers it up, kicking the can down the road. Let the next Republican deal with it. And get the blame, like George Bush got the blame for dealing with all the problems Bill Clinton kicked down the road.
And right in front of our noses, there is another interesting fact.
3. Since 9/11/01, a sophisticated campaign against the imaginary danger of “Islamophobia” was added to the sacred cows of the left, making it sinful to say a critical word about Muslim terrorists, just as it is verboten to say anything critical of Al Sharpton, Ellen Degeneres, or the messiah in the White House.
For the first time in a thousand years the West has blinded itself to the true nature of radical Islam. This is cultural suicide by political elites who pretend to be ignorant. But they know. They know.
Are there Muslim influence-peddlers?
Take a fourth fact.
4. A blatantly twisted pop history of “Islam — The Religion of Nice” hit the best-seller list about a decade ago, authored by Karen Armstrong. The liberals I know fell for this scam with pathetic eagerness. Millions of them joined the lemming rush. That loving history of Islam was PR, just as Edgar Snow’s PR plant about Mao Zedong as an “agrarian reformer” was long ago.
This is routine political propaganda from the left. It works, and it’s incredibly cheap for the impact it has on the noodle-heads of the Republic. Pasta-brain propaganda pays for itself, and today, tens of millions of spaghetti-heads still believe it.
How about number 5?
5. Israel has been viciously lied about and scapegoated by the Euro-American left for decades now, ever since Saudi oil money began to flow during the Carter years. During the Bush years, Jacques Chirac was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as being on the billion-dollar take from Saddam Hussein, and that’s only the tiny tip of Euro-socialist corruption. America seems to be falling to the same disease. Oil equals money equals corruption in one-party regimes, like the European Union.
The European Union has no popular legitimacy; it suffers from what it coyly calls a “democracy deficit,” meaning that the real power-class isn’t elected, while the elected class doesn’t have any power. It’s a Potemkin Village, a Hollywood front. Which is why the southern half of the continent is now going bankrupt: Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and pretty soon, France and Ireland. One-party government infallibly leads to a spoils system, just as the rule of “affirmative action” has created a spoils system in the United States. The big-city Democrat machines have been running one-party crony regimes forever, and with Obama they’ve gone national.
I’ve wondered about all that.
Then last year I met my Muslim influence-peddler.
Imagine a fun, charming, Westernized Muslim with no visible means of support, but with friends in wealthy and influential places. He looks and acts like the pied piper from the Brothers Grimm fairy stories. Just havin’ fun. He doesn’t peddle Islam, but he will talk about it if you ask him.
Exactly what Muslim Mystery Man does in real life is a mystery. He might be gay or heterosexual — who knows? — but I did read about a Muslim imam the other day proclaiming a public fatwa, blessing gay sex if it is done for the sake of jihad. My pied piper could be anything or everything. Jihad can use mass suicide attacks like 9/11/01, but agitation, propaganda, bribery, and gay sex all have a role to play. Islam is an ideology of conquest, and like Soviet imperialism, the end justifies the means.
My Muslim pied piper lives in a university town where useful idiots abound. He mostly goes around the world with a big smile, making friends. His wealthy contacts seem to show that money is talking somewhere. But he just smiles.
I got to talking with the gent last year, and the conversation drifted to his Muslim background, which, needless to say, is completely pacifist, though he belongs to one of the more radical sects. But all that is past. Today he is a modern Muslim and feels comfortable associating with infi…with non-Muslims all over. My acquaintance goes around spreading the word, as George Bush used to say, that “Islam means peace.” (It doesn’t. Islam means “surrender.” There is a major difference.)
The Western media and colleges are packed with his kind, because every good liberal has to prove he is not Islamophobic. Say, a thousand Muslim pied pipers spread around strategic places in the West: the media, the universities, the web, the big corporations. The phony “Arab Spring” was started by one Walid Ghoneim, a Google VP for Marketing for North Africa (which includes Egypt), as described by the New York Times. Mr. Ghoneim tweeted and Facebooked the Tahrir Square demonstrations from a loft in Manhattan, apparently with the generous permission of his bosses at Google, the New York Times, and inevitably, the CIA and the Obama administration. Because stirring revolution in other countries is against federal law. The Obamination was looking the other way while that “Spring” was a-stirring. By now, maybe 50,000 Arabs have killed each other in the “Spring,” from Tunisia to Yemen. In Syria the civil war is still raging.
All because of one little guy in a Manhattan loft, using Twitter and Google. And a whole PR machine hidden behind the scenes, including (maybe) David Axelrod.
The giveaway with my Muslim pied piper was the total absence of jihad in his talk about Islam. Jihad is one of the five chief obligations for believing Muslims. Even the obligation of charity, which sounds fine and liberal, includes a tax for jihad. Jihad is not a little thing that can be swept under the rug.
But Islamists keep trying to sweep jihad under that Persian rug. With political liars (like Obama), you can learn everything by listening for what they don’t say.
I wasn’t impolite enough to ask my acquaintance whether he had heard the 164 “War Verses” in the Koran. He was born and raised in a radical Muslim sect, after all. He knows, he knows.
[2.190] …fight in the way of Allah with those who fight with you…[2.191] And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.
[4.74] Therefore let those fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world’s life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, then be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward. [4.75] …fight in the way ofAllah… [4.76] Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Satan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Satan… [4.77] …when fighting is prescribed for them…Our Lord! why hast Thou ordained fighting for us?…
[8.01] …the spoils of war…The spoils of war belong to Allah and the messenger
…make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.K 47:035
[Set 71, Count 138] Be not fainthearted then; and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand: for God is with you, and will not defraud you of the recompense of your works…
As most things American eventually do, injudicious use of the R-word is spreading around the world. Per CNN:
A Palestinian leader blasted Mitt Romney’s statements at a high-dollar fund-raiser in Jerusalem as “racist” Monday after Romney made a comparison between the per capita GDPs of Israel and Palestinian-controlled areas.
Romney, speaking to a group that included Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, said higher personal wealth among citizens in Israel was an indication that the country was accomplishing something its neighbors were not.
Pray, what did Mitt Romney say to be thus tarred and feathered?
“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” Romney said.
Citing the book “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” Romney detailed his interpretation of author David Landes’ thesis.
“He says if you can learn anything from the economic history of the world, it’s this: culture makes all the difference. Culture makes all the difference. And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said.
In order for this to be a racist statement, Romney would have to have attributed the successes of Israel to its racial makeup and to have argued that the reason the Palestinians were on the losing end of a “dramatically stark difference in economic vitality” was because they were genetically predisposed to lose. He didn’t do anything of the sort. In fact, he went out of his way to forward a thesis that relied upon cultural and institutional differences and tied them to varying levels of accomplishment. He cited (not entirely favorably) Jared Diamond’s geographically based Guns, Germs, and Steeltheory, and also (more favorably) David S. Landes’s book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, both of which explicitly reject race as a cause of success or failure, and focus instead on culture, climate, geography, historical circumstance, or a combination of all four. As Romney argued,
“You look at Israel and you say you have a hard time suggesting that all of the natural resources on the land could account for all the accomplishment of the people here.”
Quite. Contra the fashionable conceits of our post-modern zeitgeist, some cultures are in fact better than others. (The Left selectively knows this, too: Just ask a progressive about how women and homosexuals are treated in Saudi Arabia and their cultural equivalence falls apart in a matter of seconds.) Cultural superiority has to do with more than just the scale of the GDP that it engenders, but GDP is often an indicator of a society’s virtues. This critique is not new, especially in this setting — its basic message formed the basis of the 1947 U.N. reports from Mandatory Palestine — but why read the argument when you can just throw around the race card and play the victim?
“This man, before he came here, he should have got some education about Israelis, Palestinians, and the region,” Erekat said. “The Romney statements on Jerusalem and the racist statements about the Israeli culture being superior to the Palestinian culture reflect someone who needs to be educated, who needs knowledge. His statements are serving those extremist in the region now, and will serve extremists unfortunately.”
This is a bizarre statement. At no point did Romney so much as hint that the Israeli “race” was superior to the Palestinian “race.” Instead he very clearly made a cultural case for their differing outcomes; outcomes that are actually far more stark than Romney suggested, according to the Associated Press:
The economic disparity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is actually much greater than Romney stated. Israel had a per capita gross domestic product of about $31,000 in 2011, while the West Bank and Gaza had a per capita GDP of just over $1,500, according to the World Bank.
Still, this hasn’t stopped Think Progress from impressing some poor intern onto the faux-outrage bandwagon. Its complaint? That ”Romney incensed Palestinians.” Well, one might ask: So what? Ronald Reagan incensed many in the Soviet Union when he described their system as an “evil empire” and invited them to tear down the Berlin Wall. It doesn’t mean that he was wrong. Likewise, many Indians were incensed by British general Charles Napier who took a stand against the Hindu practice of “sati,” an ancient practice by which widows were routinely burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands. When banning the practice, Napier told the incensed locals:
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well! We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre. Beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
India doesn’t have sati any more and the Berlin Wall is no longer there — and those who were afflicted by the two things are better off for it.
Some cultures are demonstrably better than others and it is often a positive thing for those who are faltering to have this pointed out to them. Mitt Romney knows a thing or two about success. Why should he not share this with those whose culture is failing them? American virtues would certainly be a better addition to Palestinian life than would fatuous employment of the R-word.
Dan’s post on Jonathan Chait’s entry into the “if it’s bad for Obama, it’s racist” games is a keeper. What I love about this stuff is that liberals tend to insist how racism is not only repugnant to them, but alien to them. And yet, they continually demonstrate a sensitivity and acuity for spotting it that even real racists seem to lack. They’re like people who claim to be nose deaf (if you prefer, anosmic) who nonetheless insist they can pick up an exotic scent from miles away (“A lactose intolerant armadillo has grown flatulent over by the old Miller farm . . .”).
I don’t think liberals appreciate how much conservatives laugh at this stuff. We’re constantly being told we’re racists and that conservatism is full of racist codes and dog whistles aimed at conservatives. And yet the only people who consistently decipher these codes or hear these dog whistles are liberals themselves. Most of the time it’s a form of projection of course. Liberals see themselves as sinless and heroic on matters racial, so their opposite numbers in politics must be sinful and villainous on matters of race. It’s a form of lazy categorical thinking that completely fails to take account of reality in order to sustain a self-serving narrative.
I still laugh at this earnest handwringing from Tim Noah about how journalists must not call attention to the fact that Barack Obama is skinny because doing so may — just may — tip off racist voters that Obama is black. “Hey this Obama guys looks like he’s got a 32 inch waist . . . Wait. A. Second. He’s black! I can’t vote for him!”
Americans may think they know what President Obama would do if he wins four more years. But, in reality, they have no idea just how radical and far-reaching his agenda would be.
Obama himself has been clear about using another term to “reform” our financial sector and ensure the implementation of ObamaCare. The president also has said he would attempt progressive-style immigration reform, with the presumption of amnesty for illegal aliens.
Many figure Obama would continue his relentless expansion of federal government power; increasing even further his crushing, multitrillion-dollar intergenerational debt; and pursue a weak foreign policy coupled with the evisceration of America’s military.
These generalized ambitions, however, do not scratch the surface of the specific, transformative assault that is planned upon our country.
Months of painstaking research into thousands of documents have enabled Brenda J. Elliott and me to expose the detailed template for Obama’s next four years — the one actually created by Obama’s own top advisers, strategists and associated progressive groups.
This second-term blueprint is laid bare in our upcoming book, “Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed.”
We found that, just as in 2008, when Obama concealed his true presidential plans behind bland rhetoric of ending partisan differences and cutting the federal deficit, his 2012 re-election theme of creating jobs conceals far more than it reveals about his true agenda for a second term.
Here are some of the second-term plans we uncovered:
• The re-creation of a 21st-century version of FDR’s Works Progress Administration program within the Department of Labor that would oversee a massive new bureaucracy and millions of new federal jobs;
• An additional government-funded jobs program that provides “good jobs” capable of supporting a family with a “decent standard of living.”
• A new government mandate to force businesses to provide twelve weeks of paid benefits to employees who need time off to care for a new child, a sick family member, or their own illness. Plus, a higher, required minimum wage that would raise the floor for all employees.
• An expansive, de facto amnesty program for illegal aliens via both executive order and interagency directives linked with a reduction in the capabilities of the U.S. Border Patrol.
• Plans to bring in untold numbers of new immigrants with the removal of caps on H-1B visas and green cards.
• Government-funded, neighborhood-based programs to better integrate the newly amnestied immigrants into society, including education centers and health care centers. A “federal solution” to ensure that the amnestied immigrants are treated “equitably” across the United States.
• A National Infrastructure Bank that would evaluate and finance infrastructure projects of substantial regional and national importance” and would finance “transportation infrastructure, housing, energy, telecommunications, drinking water, wastewater, and other infrastructures.”
• The wresting of control of the military budget from Congress by placing an ”independent panel” in charge of military spending while slashing the defense budget in shocking ways.
• Spreading the vastly reduced resources of the U.S. Armed Forces even thinner by using them to combat “global warming,” fight global poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations and step up use of “peacekeeping” deployments;
• A new “green” stimulus program and the founding of a federal “green” bank or “Energy Independence Trust,” which would borrow from the federal treasury to provide low-cost financing to private-sector investments in “clean energy. “
• A “green Manufacturing” revolving loan fund to create 680,000 manufacturing jobs and 1,972,000 additional jobs over five years
• Detailed plans to enact single-payer health care legislation controlled by the federal government.
How did we obtain this expansive blueprint? By investigating the policy papers and legislative proposals of the same progressive shadow groups that crafted Obama’s first term.
Obama’s first-term strategy did not materialize out of thin air. The president’s signature policies, including the “stimulus,” defense initiatives and even ObamaCare, were crafted over years by key progressive think tanks and activists, usually first promoted in extensive research and policy papers. Some first-term plans were even recycled and modified from older legislative attempts that had previously been pushed by progressive Democrats.
Many of these same progressive groups and activists have been hard at work planning Obama’s second-term strategy: jobs, wages, health care, immigration, defense, even electoral reform.
One joke going around the capital after the rare Washington earthquake of August 2011 was that Obama had proclaimed it: “Bush’s fault.” Yet it was Bush who must be credited with dusting off an old American saw that well applies to his White House successor: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Will we, the American people, allow ourselves to be fooled again?
It shouldn’t matter that I, an author with the audacity to select such a title, am black. The arguments presented should stand or fall on their objective merit. Nevertheless, I declare my racial identity at the outset to defuse any prejudice readers may bring regarding the motivation behind this piece. Indeed, it is in part because I am black that the following must be said.
All things considered, blacks and the civil rights culture surrounding them are the most open and prolific purveyors of racism in America. This is an ironic travesty which spits upon the graves of history’s abolitionists and offends all who are committed to a dream of equality under the law and goodwill among men.
Surely, such a claim is provocative. Unfortunately, it is also demonstrable.
In a recent interview with National Public Radio host Michel Martin, the Oscar-winning black actor Morgan Freeman made the odd declaration that President Barack Obama is not America’s first black president. NPRreports:
“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him … they just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America,” Freeman said. “There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”
This is a new take on Obama’s racial identity from Freeman, who has previously cited Obama’s blackness as the chief motivation behind political opposition from both Republicans in Congress and the Tea Party movement. From an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan:
… Morgan asked the actor, “Has Obama helped the process of eradicating racism or has it, in a strange way, made it worse?”
“Made it worse. Made it worse,” Freeman replied. “The tea partiers who are controlling the Republican party … their stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man out of here.”
Apparently, Obama is black enough to trigger baseless charges of racism, but not black enough to qualify as the first black president. If that makes your brain hurt, you might be rational.
Freeman’s comments are not anomalies. He channels long-held, broadly accepted ideas regarding what it means to be black, the relevance of race, and the claim of blacks upon the rest of society. These ideas are horrifically racist, yet uniquely tolerated.
The tolerance of racist ideas openly expressed by blacks and the larger civil rights establishment is informed by sloppy thinking regarding both race and the role of government in society. True reconciliation requires confronting these ideas with reason. Here are eight ways in which blacks are perpetuating racism, and the one true way to effectively thwart it.
Obama’s not black enough for this guy.
8 ) Seeking Racial “Purity”
Individuals or groups who seek racial “purity” are properly condemned as bigots — if they are white. Non-whites are routinely given a pass, and in some cases encouraged to “preserve their culture” through sexual segregation.
Morgan Freeman laments President Obama’s “white mama” and cites her as evidence that Obama is not truly black. This raises a few questions, the first of which is: what is “black”?
At the very least, by Freeman’s standard, having a white mother disqualifies one from being black. (That counts me out, too.) But not all blacks are equally so. Freeman himself is relatively light-skinned, certainly on a global spectrum. Many native Africans are far darker than Freeman, closer to ebony than brown. Indeed, the American black is invariably of mixed race, distinct from African cousins by breeding with whites over hundreds of years. Of course, the same can be said of any race over a long enough period of time. American whites are commonly a melting pot of Norwegian, Swede, German, Irish, Latin, Russian, and any of a dozen others.
That speaks to a critical truth. Race is a social construct of little objective value beyond efficiently communicating an amalgam of physical descriptors. President Obama is black, not because both parents were so, but because his physical characteristics are categorized as such in our thought and language. Beyond that, race means nothing. The notion of racial “purity” is inherently irrational, because race itself is subjective.
Why then should we distinguish Obama as the first black president, or argue over whether he is black enough to qualify as such? What rational value does such a distinction have? What is Freeman getting at?
Given the political context, it seems likely that Freeman desires a president whose blackness more dramatically informs public policy. Of course, a president so oriented would necessarily disenfranchise everyone else. And that’s the idea.
… unless we’re the ones doing it.
7 ) Cultural Segregation
Perhaps the most objective metric supporting the claim that blacks prolifically purvey racism is the astounding number of organizations which openly segregate. There are names we have all come to know, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to Black Entertainment Television. And there are many others which are lesser known. Consider this list from one of many similar ones available on the web:
American Association of Blacks in Energy
The Association of Black Psychologists
The Executive Leadership Council
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
National Association of Black Accountants
National Association of Black Hotel Owners, Operators, and Developers
National Association of Black Journalists
National Black Business Council
National Black Chamber of Commerce
National Black MBA Association
National Black Nurses Association
National Council of Negro Women
National Coalition of 100 Black Women
National Medical Association
National Newspaper Publishers Association
National Urban League
National Society of Black Engineers
Organization of Black Designers
United Negro College Fund
100 Black Men of America
Surely, blacks are not the only demographic group which chooses to associate together, and there is certainly nothing wrong with free association. The problem is the double standard. Substitute white for black in any of the above and you would have theatrical public outcry and claims of civil rights violations.
Segregation of blacks by whites is widely regarded as one of the banes of the civil rights movement. Yet segregation is widely tolerated when blacks choose to engage in it. Such an obvious double standard fuels racial animosity rather than soothing it. If the goal of the civil rights movement was and remains equality and inclusion, how does such prolific segregation advance that?
Little do they know one of them is responsible for the systematic oppression of the other.
6 ) Collective Responsibility
Comedian Chris Rock took this past Fourth of July as an opportunity to pimp antiquated racial hatreds. He tweeted:
Happy white peoples independence day the slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks (sic)
Rock, of course, leads a life of distinguished privilege among the entertainment industry’s brightest stars. He has never lived in chains as the property of another human being. Nor has anyone he knows. Nor has any American in several generations. That the philosophical bias of emancipation was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 is as elusive to Chris Rock as the fact that the men who signed it were not made free by the stroke of a pen. Ideas proceed actions, and the process of crafting government which regards all men as equal under the law continues even today.
Nevertheless, Rock feels justified feigning indigence at a crime to which neither he nor any person alive was a party. How is that possible? He subscribes to and relies upon an irrational sense of collective responsibility.
He is black. The slaves were black. So he is as a slave.
There exist whites. Slave masters were white. So whites are as slave masters.
It’s an elementary logical fallacy which is nonetheless amplified by academics and entertainers alike. It has become a kind of racial gospel, quite literally in the case of black liberation theology. Popular culture is replete with black commentators, preachers, authors, and celebrities testifying to the injustice of slavery as if it happened to them personally and continues to this day.
This offends on two fronts. First, a son is not responsible for the sins of his father. Second, though overt slavery has been long abolished in America, there remain rampant intrusions upon fundamental liberties to varying degrees throughout the world. It is stunningly disingenuous to wring hands over distant history while at best saying nothing about and at worst advocating the many encroachments upon individual rights commonplace today.
In a piece examining black author Touré and the objects of prescribed “spiritual liberation,” PJM associate editor David Swindle asks:
What are his primary liberation concerns in the chapter he titles “Keep It Real is a Prison”? Liberating the black children trapped in inner city schools mismanaged by Democrats and teacher union bureaucrats? Liberating the law-abiding, black families struggling to keep out of the crossfire amidst the the astronomical rate of black-on-black violence? What about liberating the untold numbers of African blacks oppressed by dictators and Islamists? How about all the black women around the world today living as victims of female genital mutilation? What about the black women victimized by gang rape in the Congo?
No tweets on any of that from Chris Rock.
O.J. Simpson was all smiles after his acquittal. Many black onlookers saw it as a victory against racism.
5 ) Masquerading Vengeance as Justice
You can’t have justice without equal treatment under the law. Yet many policy prescriptions and attitudes relating to race explicitly call for the preferential treatment of minorities.
Perhaps the most egregious example is affirmative action. Rather than apply the same standard to all candidates for a given opportunity, affirmative action lowers or eliminates standards for favored groups. This is insulting to all parties concerned, making experience and qualifications inferior to irrelevant political considerations. It is by definition an injustice. Yet is is tolerated and even mandated. Why?
Building on the notion of collective responsibility, affirmative action is sold as social justice. The sins of white fathers deprived black sons of opportunity, it is argued. So white sons must cede their place to blacks. This is not justice in any objective sense. It is an irrational vengeance exacted upon the innocent on behalf of the un-wronged. It is at best a punishment of the son for the sins of his father, and never connected to a demonstrable wrong. What are the odds that a given white person’s ancestor committed a crime against a given black person’s ancestor? To the black racist, it doesn’t matter, because white guilt is collective, as is black entitlement.
Another common way in which vengeance is masqueraded as justice is the rationalization of specific black crime as justified by generalized white crime. Blacks celebrated as O.J. Simpson was acquitted, not because they believed he was innocent, but because he put one over on the Man. Consider this 2007 admission from the blogger of The Black Factor:
For more than a decade, O.J. Simpson has been the Negro that got away. To put it into historical context, O.J. Simpson is the ni**er Whites couldn’t lynch at noon. O.J. was one of the few Black people, who could afford to play the legal system the way Whites have longed played the legal system (Claus Van Bulow, anyone?). And, right or wrong, he walked free. And, many Whites got all beside themselves. As a result, Blacks have been listening to Whites play the crying game every since (sic).
Note no concern for justice. O.J. was a black man getting back at whites for the collective injustices of the past. The object of such a sentiment isn’t to obtain equal treatment under the law, but to turn the tables of history and subject whites to injustice as revenge.
4 ) Loose Accusations of Racism
Race is one of several factors which inform an observer’s subjective judgment, and is not particularly special. What a person wears, how they talk, their posture and demeanor — all have an effect upon what an observer presumes about them. This is particularly true when the observer has to make a quick judgment in an impromptu encounter.
The ability to make snap judgments about another is an integral part of our survival instinct and ought not be blunted by political correctness or cited as evidence of racism. Prejudice, or pre-judgment, is something we rationally inculcate in our children at a very young age. We teach them to beware of strangers. How a person looks is one of the first and most effective means by which we determine them to be strange.
In this sense prejudice is both innate to all persons and appropriate in many contexts. If a woman taking a turn down an alley suppresses her prejudice regarding a gang of motley young men, she risks much unnecessarily.
Prejudice is not inherently racist, and loose accusations of racism based on isolated perceptions of prejudice are premature. Words have meaning, and we have different words to describe distinct concepts. Prejudice, bigotry, and racism are not interchangeable. While prejudice can be innocent and even reasonable in certain contexts, bigotry is the irrational maintenance of a prejudice in light of evidence to the contrary. Bigotry can be informed by a multitude of factors, of which race is only one. Racism is what we call bigotry informed by race.
These distinctions are important in any intellectually honest discussion of race relations. When prejudice, bigotry, and racism are used interchangeably, it is evidence that the discussion is not honest.
3 ) Fighting Irrationality with Irrationality
The consensus that racism is bad does not seem to be informed by a consensus as to why. For many, it seems that racism is simply out of fashion, rather than an objective wrong.
Bigotry offends reason. Sustaining a prejudice about an individual in light of evidence to the contrary does not make sense. It is a rejection of reality, and that is what makes it offensive. Attempts by hand-wringing “progressives” to combat racism with equally irrational assertions compound the offense.
A recent example is the so-called Unfair Campaign, an initiative out of Duluth which was until recently supported by the University of Minnesota. The mission of the Unfair Campaign is to “to raise awareness about white privilege in our community.”
The notion of “white privilege,” as articulated by the Unfair Campaign in the above video, is itself a racist sentiment. To assume that all whites have an inherent leg up on the rest of society is as irrational as assuming all blacks are somehow inferior. Indeed, the sentiments are one and the same, a point raised in this response featuring yours truly.
The University of Minnesota has since quietly removed its support of the Unfair Campaign.
Liberty fosters respect and cooperation.
2 ) Treating Whites as Hostiles Rather Than Traders
All of the above fosters racism because it perpetuates irrationalism in the culture. At worst, irrationalism becomes institutionalized through public policy, wielding government’s monopoly on force toward subjective and therefore unjust ends. As the populace perceives such injustice, animosity is created where it may not otherwise exist, and accelerated where it might otherwise be benign.
The underlying principle is applicable beyond race relations. Under a condition of liberty, where each individual is protected against the initiation of force by another, trust is engendered and people deal peaceably with one another in trade, offering value for value. When strangers meet in the market, they begin with a greeting.
Conversely, when strangers meet in the wild, they begin with a threat or warning. Why? Because they are not otherwise protected from the initiation of force. Suspicion and hostility is fostered whenever public policy treats people unjustly, such as when one race is granted preferential treatment over another. It doesn’t matter whether it’s whites being treated preferentially under Jim Crow, or blacks being treated preferentially under affirmative action, the injustice and resulting cultural degradation are the same.
These civil rights would enslave producers to consumers.
1 ) Lifting Civil Rights Above Inalienable Rights
The term “civil rights” has become sacrosanct in the political discourse. It has become interchangeable with “correct” and a rhetorical bludgeon with which to bloody opponents of “social justice.” To call something “a civil rights issue” is to end the argument. Health care. Marriage. Education. Jobs. All have been evoked as civil rights. In so doing, proponents of a new affirmative action hope to paint their opposition as bigots, because popular sentiment holds that only a bigot would oppose a civil right.
This is another corruption of the language, most egregious because of its effect upon public policy and the way in which force is applied in people’s lives. Not all civil rights are good. In fact, when they are crafted in opposition to the inalienable rights recognized in the Declaration and protected by the Constitution, they are downright evil.
Civil rights are legal grants from the state which can be wholly arbitrary. The inalienable rights of the individual are objectively derived and exist independent of the state. Good civil rights support inalienable rights. For instance, voting is a civil right which compliments the inalienable rights of the voter. Bad civil rights oppose inalienable rights. Granting a civil right to health care or any other provision places a burden upon producers to supply their wares without trade, something which used to be called robbery.
Because the civil rights movement of the 1960s was in opposition to institutionalized racism, civil rights have since been associated with decency and justice in the public discourse. That association has been abused to promote all manner of wrong. The potential exists to make a civil right out of anything. In fact, the claim of a slave owner over his “property” in a state with legal slavery would be a civil right. A hammer might be used to bash in someone’s head as readily as it may pound a nail. Likewise, civil rights may be crafted for ill as readily as for good.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a world where people were treated equally under the law, and judged by one another according to the content of their character. Such a world requires the condition of liberty, where people may only deal with each other in trade, not by force. Absent the fear and distrust which manifest in a system of political favoritism, people are incentivized to deal with each other respectfully. Free association can never deprive anyone of anything. Force can, however, and therefore ought to be removed from human relationships. That’s what proper government does. True concern for racial equality can only manifest in a vigorous defense of individual rights. Those who mindlessly seek civil rights in opposition to objectively derived individual rights seek tyranny, not equality, and deserve to be regarded as the agitators they are.
Over at Facebook, I noticed a picture of Kermit and Miss Piggy marrying, with a caption about Chick-fil-A*. I can’t seem to find it, now — perhaps the person who posted it deleted it.
I confess, haven’t been following this story at all. But after the Muppets picture, I saw someone ranting about Chick-fil-A being denied business licenses because they were “against gay marriage.”
At that point, I posted to Facebook,
“Whether these Chick-fil-A people support gay marriage or not, are people no longer entitled to their own opinions? I mean, denying them business licenses? Really? Is this what we’ve come to:”Either fall in line or you will pay; we will destroy you…” for having a different opinion?
Whatever happened to “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
If this is true, if this bullying is true, then this is not my father’s liberalism, that’s for sure. It’s something very, very different.
Well, a lively conversation ensued in which it was pretty much agreed upon that if a business willfully inserts itself into a political issue, that’s “one thing” but if a business is forced to declare its political beliefs — and if that declaration can mean the difference between getting a license or not, that’s “something else.”
It’s fascism, actually.
But this Chick-fil-A story is something beyond a demand to declare oneself and face consequences — it’s even worse than that. Apparently the mainstream media has taken it upon itself (perhaps because the owners are Christian?) to define Chick-fil-A’s positions for it.
So, did you hear about that wild quote that the president of Chick-fil-A didn’t say the other day?
Here’s a piece of a CNN report that is typical of the mainstream press coverage of this latest cyber-skirmish in America’s battles over homosexuality, commerce and free speech (sort of).
(CNN) — The fact that Chick-fil-A is a company that espouses Christian values is no secret. The fact that its 1,600 fast-food chicken restaurants across the country are closed on Sundays has long been testament to that. But the comments of company President Dan Cathy about gay marriage to Baptist Press on Monday have ignited a social media wildfire.
“Guilty as charged,”, Cathy said when asked about his company’s support of the traditional family unit as opposed to gay marriage.
Now, one would assume — after reading a reference to the “comments of company President Dan Cathy about gay marriage” — that this interview . . . actually included direct quotes from Cathy in which he talks about, well, gay marriage.
In this case, one cannot assume that.
While the story contains tons of material defending traditional Christian teachings on sexuality, the controversial entrepreneur never talks about gay rights or gay marriage. Why? Because he wasn’t asked about those issues in the interview.
Read Mattingly’s whole piece, wherein he addresses the whole “well, they may not have said it but it’s what they meant, so what’s the big deal?” angle.
The big deal is simply this: the press put aside context and decided to paint this company as some radically-religious-gay-hating-entity and then let the forces of anger, hate and spite have their way with it. The truth is, one can be a Christian and still be sympathetic to some parts of the so-called “gay agenda” without signing on in toto. One can disagree on the issue of gay marriage — based on scripture, or thousands of years of tradition, or on natural law — without actually hating anyone. But the right to principled opposition is being erased, quickly, and the press is doing all it can to help erase it. We are losing the right to say, “I don’t think the same way you do; my opinions are different.” That matters, a lot.
This is our mainstream press — the people charged with the public trust — and it has moved beyond advocacy and into “search and destroy” mode.
This is not about being “right” or “wrong” on an issue. This is about menacing and bullying people into conforming or paying the price. It’s about the bastardization of the word “tolerace” in our society, to the point where the word no longer means “live and let live” or “let people be who they are”; the word has become distorted in a very unhealthy way. Someone’s a bigot? Let him be a bigot; like it or not, a man is entitled to his damn bigotry. Someone’s a curmudgeon? Let him be a curmudgeon. Someone’s a misogynist (or, conversely, a male-hater?) let them be! People are entitled to be who they are — just as a church is entitled to be what it is — free of government compulsion to be what they are not. We cannot “make” people be more loving. We cannot “legislate” kindness. A bigot, or a hater (of any sort) will eventually find himself standing alone, will have to figure things out for himself. Or, not.
If people are no longer entitled to their own opinions, or to think what they think, then we are not free people, at all. Period. Full stop. That’s a fundamental as it gets.
Moreover, where does the “punishment” spiral stop? The press declares Chick-fil-A “homophobic” (a dishonest word) and then the local governments start penalizing them for it; Jim Henson’s outfit stomps off. What next? Will people against gay marriage start boycotting Muppet stuff? Pyres of Elmo in support of Chick-fil-A’s right to be itself?
Hey, anyone has a right to boycott or protest anything, but is it right — is it just — to effect a boycott at the behest of a press so overt, so obvious in its intent to identify-and-harass the boogeymen of their passionate loathings?
Shall honest people consent to such manipulation? Further, can justice-minded people be comfortable with a government interfering with a business on the basis of its opinions?
This reeks of fascism. And frankly, these are acts born out of insecurity, not security, in one’s own position. It is bringing a sledgehammer to a fight, because you cannot trust your own argument.
But distinctions do matter. We were once allowed to be what we held. Catholics were Catholics. Jews were Jews. It was all right. We now have an overarching “law” that tells us that we cannot be what we are. The university, once a place that respected distinctions and diversity of ways of life, is now an engine that allows nothing but its own definition of diversity. And diversity means that nothing can be diverse.
UPDATE II: Okay, here is what I think: free enterprise “conservative” people who are tired of the hysteria surrounding this Chick-fil-A story should take pictures of themselves drinking a Starbucks or eating Ben and Jerrys (Indies should take a picture doing BOTH) and upload them on their sites or onto Facebook and Twitter. With the header…”who’s tolerant, again?”
Mitt Romney delivered what was more or less his stock stump speech to the NAACP last week, famously drawing boos when he promised to repeal ObamaCare. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi professes to regret that the GOP presidential candidate did not offer a more thoughtful disquisition tailored to the audience:
Without accepting blame or admitting guilt, [Romney] could have talked about the increasingly strident tone of the national debate over racially charged issues, and wondered aloud if politicians on both sides perhaps needed to find a new way to talk about these things without fearmongering, stereotyping, or trading accusations. He could have met the racial-tension issue head on, in other words, just by saying out loud the simple truth that white and nonwhite Americans, and Democrats and Republicans both, need to find more civilized ways to talk about their political concerns.
Like all left-wing calls for more civility in politics, this one was insincere. It was unusual only in that its insincerity was especially blatant. Before he got to his pious criticism of Romney for insufficient high-mindedness, Taibbi described the candidate as “not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.” How’s that for fear mongering, stereotyping and trading accusations?
Well, that’s Matt Taibbi for you. Some commentators have a vicious streak; he is a vicious streak. Pretty much his entire shtick consists of overwrought denunciations of those he dislikes. Brilliant on the subject of Thomas Friedman, he is otherwise a predictable bore.
Yet his commentary on Romney’s NAACP speech is unintentionally revealing. What really got to Taibbi wasn’t the speech itself, but something Romney said to “a mostly white audience in Montana the next night,” which Taibbi quotes as follows:
I gave [the NAACP] the same speech I am giving you. . . . When I mentioned I am going to get rid of ObamaCare they weren’t happy, I didn’t get the same response. That’s O.K, I want people to know what I stand for and if I don’t stand for what they want, go vote for someone else, that’s just fine. . . .
But I hope people understand this, your friends who like ObamaCare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy–more free stuff.
As blogress Ann Althouse notes, Taibbi went “all racial” and omitted what Romney said next, which was a “simple exposition of economic truth”:
But don’t forget nothing is really free. It has to be paid for by people in the private sector creating goods and services, and if people want jobs more than they want free stuff from government, then they are going to have to get government to be smaller. And if they don’t want to repeal ObamaCare they are going to have to give me some other stuff they are thinking about cutting, but my list takes ObamaCare off first and I have a lot of other things I am thinking of cutting.
To put it more concisely: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” As the New York Times’s William Safire noted in a 1993 column, this insight, and the unwieldy abbreviation “tanstaafl,” was popularized by the libertarian science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein in “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (1966) and used, without the double negative, as the title of a 1975 book by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman.
In 2009 Fred Shapiro of Freakonomics.com reported that the phrase had appeared in a 1938 article in the El Paso Herald-Post, titled “Economics in Eight Words”:
This is a fable in which a king asks his advisers to summarize economics in a “short and simple text.” They respond with 87 volumes of 600 pages each, drawing the king’s wrath and accompanying executions. Further demands and more executions force ever-briefer summations, until, finally, the last economist, “a man of profound wisdom,” speaks:
“Sire, in eight words I will reveal to you all the wisdom that I have distilled through all these years from all the writings of all the economists who once practiced their science in your kingdom. Here is my text: ‘There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.’ ”
Seventy-four years later, Matt Taibbi has discovered an invidious racial subtext in this economic truism. Of course, finding implausible racial subtexts has been a favorite pastime of the left since Barack Obama rose to prominence. In the past four years we have learned that all manner of innocuous words, from “skinny” to “professor“–even “European“!–are also racial slurs.
Taibbi’s claim that Romney failed to “have met the racial-tension issue head on” has it precisely backward. As Taibbi acknowledges, what Romney told a mostly black audience was substantively identical to what he tells other audiences. The audience members let him know what they thought, not only by booing the parts they didn’t like but by applauding the parts they did. “Some stood up to do it,” notes John Cassidy of The New Yorker.
Romney and the audience members disagreed openly on some points and seem to have felt perfectly comfortable doing so. It sounds like a healthy exercise in democracy. Where’s the tension Taibbi is so worried about?
Taibbi would have had Romney instead issue a call for less stridency, for “more civilized ways to talk.” Not only does Taibbi not hold himself to any such standard, but surely he would regard it as racially invidious–and not without reason–if Romney had lectured the NAACP that their manner of expression is insufficiently “civilized.”
What Taibbi is really calling for is more political correctness. He wants conservatives to conceal their views for fear of being seen as racist–to act as if they are guilty. But that would reinforce, not reduce, racial tension. If white conservatives in the presence of black people act as if their worldview is a shameful secret, of course black people will think conservatism is racist. Which, of course, would suit lefties like Taibbi just fine.
This column has argued that the Obama presidency poses a deep political and psychological challenge to the Democratic left, which relies on the perception that racism remains prevalent in America, and that the GOP is racist, both to motivate black voters and to maintain its own self-identity as morally superior. That explains the desperate need to stereotype Obama critics, and conservatives more generally, as racist. Of all of the examples of this phenomenon, Taibbi’s may well be the most recent.
‘You Didn’t Build That’
Barack Obama really does seem like an Ayn Rand villain at times. The Washington Times’s Kerry Picket notes an especially glaring example, from a speech the president gave in Roanoke, Va., Friday:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me–because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t–look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something–there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business–you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
Several points beg to be made here. First, as Picket points out, it takes chutzpah for the man who boasts of having personally killed Osama bin Laden to tell businessmen, “You didn’t build that.”
Second, the government did not create the Internet “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” It developed the Internet’s predecessor, the Arpanet, as part of what everybody agrees is the legitimate function of national defense–the one area of government Obama is anxious to cut.
Finally, Obama didn’t even come up with this noxious idea himself. He ripped it off from Elizabeth Warren. First the white man steals her ancestors’ land–well, 31/32nds of her ancestors steal the other 1/32nd’s land, anyway–and now this.
When Scoffers Make Unwelcome Offers
“As skeptics, atheists and humanists prepare to gather for their largest meeting in Las Vegas this weekend, attendance by women is expected to be down significantly,” reports the Religion News Service:
Officials for The Amazing Meeting, or TAM, said Wednesday (July 11) that women would make up 31 percent of the 1,200 conference attendees, down from 40 percent the year before. A month before the conference, pre-registration was only 18 percent women, organizers said.
The explanations are many–the bad economy, that women, as caregivers, are less able to get away, and that more men than women identify as skeptics, whose worldview rejects the supernatural and focuses on science and rationality.
But in the weeks preceding TAM, another possible explanation has roiled the nontheist community. Online forums have crackled with charges of sexism in TAM’s leadership and calls for the ouster of D.J. Grothe, the male president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, TAM’s organizer. In June, Rebecca Watson, a skeptic blogger and speaker, canceled her TAM appearance because, she said on her blog, she does “not feel welcome or safe.”
Other nontheists–both male and female–have shared stories of unwanted sexual attention at nontheist gatherings, including propositions for sex and unwelcome touching. Chatter has ranged from calls for more women to attend nontheist events to personal attacks on prominent female skeptics for discussing harassment. Meanwhile, two more skeptic/feminist bloggers announced they will not attend TAM.
This story caught our attention because we recently read “Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question,” whose authors, Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord, argue that cultures with high sex ratios–that is, more men than women–almost always tend to treat women far more protectively than low-sex-ratio ones. The “skeptic community,” as the RNS story calls it, would appear to be an exception.
Of course atheists are not as isolated as some of the cultures Guttentag and Secord studied, such as Orthodox Jewish communities, so their customs and norms would be shaped to a considerable degree by the broader, low-sex-ratio culture.
Also, the “skeptic community” is a self-selecting group, and it may be that the behavior the RNS story notes is a product of this selection. One hypothesis is that male skeptics are less socially adept than believers, because the former group either missed the socialization that comes with a religious upbringing or rebelled against it. And, as the RNS article notes, women are generally more religious than men. That would be consistent with the hypothesis that female skeptics tend to be more masculine than the average woman.
If our hypotheses are correct, then The Amazing Meeting is a confab of socially inept guys competing for the attention of a smaller number of unusually masculine women–and being rebuffed most of the time, to judge by the report.
Which raises the question: Why in the world would anyone want to go? They must really believe in their cause.
Great Expectorations
If there were a Pulitzer Prize for Puff Pieces, the Chicago Tribune would be a front-runner for its preposterous editorial the other day on Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who has disappeared and is said to be receiving treatment for unspecified disorders of the mind:
We first met and observed him in action three decades ago. A mob of reporters had descended on Operation PUSH headquarters in pursuit of some news story involving his peripatetic father. Junior was a kid on the cusp of college. Unlike so many children of the prominent and privileged, though, he was neither pleaser nor prima donna. Directing network camera crews and resolving problems borne [sic] of too many journalists in too little space, he was intense. Controlling. Taciturn far beyond his years. With the most minimal gestures–his eyes and nostrils communicated volumes–he comfortably commanded respect, obedience really, from people twice and thrice his age.
To take just the worst phrase, his “nostrils communicated volumes”? Never mind what ails him, it sounds as if he should have been quarantined as a potential threat to public health.
