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Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 23, 2013 27 Comments
There has been a not too subtle attempt this week to smear the Tea Party as racist and violent in connection with the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What does the Tea Party have to do with the assassination? It's an outgrowth of the discredited and time-worn eliminationist narrative, that the modern "right wing" and the Tea Party in particular are the inheritors of the "paranoid style of politics" from the 1960s. The logic, if you call it that, is that Dallas was a city infused with hate and anti-Catholic bigotry, that bigotry was reflective of a larger Southern bigotry including racism, and that the Tea Party is the outgrowth of that racist, bigoted past which led to the assassination. There is a problem with all this, of course.  Kennedy was killed by a Lee Harvey Oswald, a Commie, not the "right wing." Let me repeat, because this is the internet:

JACK KENNEDY WAS KILLED BY A COMMIE!!!

You would not know that if you read the attempt to portray the Kennedy assassination as the result of right wing, bigoted hatred in the mainstream liberal media and blogosphere: Rich Lowry notes (also see video at bottom of post), The Kennedy Conspiracy in Plain Sight:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 09, 2013 17 Comments
We have written many times before about the "white privilege" industry, a collection of self-perpetuating activists and academics who, not being able to demonstrate racism to justify their salaries and conferences, invent it. The lack of ability to prove racism becomes the best proof of racism.  It's everywhere, unspoken, unseen, lurking behind everything and every person with white skin (whatever that is). It is .... White Privilege. White privilege is adopted wholesale as Salon.com and elsewhere in the left blogosphere as well because it can't be disproven.  It is a prime example of Kafkatrapping -- the denial is the proof. Particularly when combined with maleness and Christianity, white privilege becomes the Swiss Army Knife of race cards. Or maybe the Energizer Bunny is a better reference, because it just keeps going, and going, and going. It's easy to laugh, except when you consider how deeply these theories have has permeated into society. So much so that the Pentagon is preaching the evils of "white privilege" and a male club, as part of its training materials for Equal Opportunity officers. Pentagon training manual: white males have unfair advantages:
A controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers teaches that "healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian" men hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail about a so-called "White Male Club." “Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual created by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). The manual, which was obtained by Fox News, also instructs troops to “support the leadership of people of color. Do this consistently, but not uncritically,” the manual states.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 07, 2013 25 Comments
It's broken windows theory, at a very personal level. If you hang out with people who have zero respect for our laws and who think it is their right to mock us openly and dare us to deport them in accordance with law (knowing full well the political theater that would create), why are you so surprised that they secretly record your meeting and then use it to help their cause even if it embarrasses you? Really, Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez from Illinois, why did you think there would be any honor from these people and that they wouldn't break your window after breaking our immigration windows? Via Fox Latino, Leading Pro-Immigrant Congressman Severs Ties With DREAMer Groups; Calls Them Manipulative, Racists:
U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the vocal proponent in Congress for a change in policy that would give undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as minors a chance to legalize their status, has cut off ties with two groups that have coordinated provocative protests in recent months. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois, on Monday evening issued a press release announcing that he was no longer going to work with the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA) and their affiliated advocates at DREAMActivist.org. The congressman said the final straw in a series of actions by the groups that he has found unsettling was the secret recording by a NIYA representative of what was to have been a confidential discussion last week between Gutierrez and parents of immigrants who are being held in an immigrant detention center in El Paso, Tex. "It just shows me how dangerous they are," Gutierrez said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News Latino....
As to the racism part, you have enabled that too.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 02, 2013 46 Comments
In some countries, making fun of the President results in collective punishment I would not want to live in such a country. Oh, wait. At a Kentucky Hospital Halloween party some guy dressed like Obama in a straitjacket. Someone took offense. As a result, 750 people will get punished with mandatory diversity training, because diversity training has what to do with dressing like Obama for Halloween? No, you cannot keep your Obama Halloween costume even if you like it. Obama costume scares up controversy:
Hopkinsville, KY - - One Halloween costume is scaring up plenty of controversy along the Tennessee-Kentucky border. A person dressed as President Obama wearing a straitjacket is generating lots of complaints.... 1st Street Baptist Church Pastor C.E. Timberlake says it's wrong to portray any president that way. "I think it's very offensive and really that shouldn't have happened," Timberlake said. "There are other characters they could have dressed up and put a straitjacket other than the President of this country," Administrators of the hospital agree releasing a statement saying "no matter who the president is they deserve respect and honor." Joe turner is the Vice Chair of the Christian County Republican Party and he points out President Obama isn't the first to be made fun of on Halloween and believes this costume makes an amusing statement inside a hospital. "We see even still today Richard Nixon masks and George W Bush masks," Turner said.
Someone must be punished. Or better yet, everyone must be punished:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 30, 2013 29 Comments
In our two prior posts, we explained how NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was shouted down at Brown University by protesters against NYC's stop and frisk policy: The protesters decided that others should not get to hear what Kelly had to say on the topic.  One protester, Jenny Li (pictured above) revelled in the shut down:
So we drafted a petition last Thursday and as of today [October 29, 2013] there are over 500 signatures. We delivered it to the Taubman Center [at Brown] and they didn't respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so today we cancelled it for them.
It probably will not surprise you that Li is a fellow at the People for the American Way Foundation, the liberal activist group that runs the Right Wing Watch blog among other activities. Author Mychal Denzel Smith writing at The Nation plays into every stereotype of liberal intolerance in supporting the shout down, and terming it "glorious", Brown University Booed Ray Kelly and Racism (emphasis added):

The Nation Ray Kelly Booed

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly of stop-and-frisk fame was scheduled to speak at Brown University yesterday and deliver the school's annual Noah Krieger '93 Memorial Lecture. The title of his speech, and I'm not making this up, was "Proactive Policing in America's Biggest City." What happened instead was glorious.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 30, 2013 12 Comments
This is a follow up to our post last night, Brown U. students shout down Ray Kelly. The Brown Political Review has produced an excellent video (embedded at bottom of post) with footage both inside and outside the auditorium as Kelly was shouted down, and interviews with students and administrators. Is is quite clear that there was an organized effort to shut down the Kelly speech, and that many of the people shouting were not even students.  Student Emily Kassie, who produced the video (speaking for herself, not BPR), told me via email:
The protestors were a mix of Providence community members and Brown students. There is a moment in the video where people are asked to raise their hands if they want to hear Kelly speak. About half the room raised their hands.
The woman in the image below (since removed) related how she was called a White Supremacist for wanting to attend the lecture (at 9:30):
I got called a White Supremacist when I tried to go inside, cause I told a man near the front door that I wanted to hear what Kelly had to say.  And I think that's pretty ridiculous. I think the idea that suppressing another person's right to free speech equals exercising your free speech is completely wrong.
In a press release, the BPR described what went on inside the auditorium:
Kelly had time only to thank the event organizers, before a group of students and community members in the audience rose simultaneously to read prepared remarks. “Asking tough questions is not enough!” they read together, fists raised in unison.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 26, 2013 27 Comments
Dick Durbin's Facebook comment that a senior House Republican told Obama "I cannot even stand to look at you" was exposed as a lie. The lie did not originate with Durbin, he merely passed on what Harry Reid told the Senate Democratic caucus based on information provided to Reid by The White House. That White House lie, now admitted but chalked up to a "miscommunication," inspired Chris Matthews and guests David Corn and Cynthia Tucker, to lash out at Republicans for demonizing the President:

Hardball - A Pattern Of Disrespect Screen Shot

A main focus was the disrespect shown by Republicans by repeatedly calling Obama a liar, which the panel agreed was because of hatred of Obama for the "other" and not one of us, and in the case of Tucker, coming right out and calling it racist:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 23, 2013 36 Comments
Joan Walsh of Salon.com threw a classic Salon.com race-card fit the other day because Ted Cruz referred to healthcare.gov as being run by Nigerial scam artists:
Hey, did you hear the one about the disappearing “Nigerian email scammers”? They’ve “become a lot less active lately” because they’ve “all been hired to run the Obamacare website.” That’s Sen. Ted Cruz, folks, on his Reactionary Real America Victory Tour Monday night, and he’ll be here all week, maybe all decade. Tip your waiter! Declaring that our first black president’s signature policy achievement is being run by “Nigerian email scammers” is GOP dog-whistle politics at its finest. Of course, Cruz wasn’t just going for cheap laughs at the expense of the Affordable Care Act. He knows it’s a short hop from Nigeria to Kenya for his Obama-hating Houston audience.

Twitter - @Salon - Nigerian scammer dog whistle

It's actually not a short hop from Nigeria to Kenya, over 2000 miles, but whatever. I think the Nigerian scam artist analogy fits, although there is no single perfect analogy for the redistribution of wealth scheme that is Obamacare. The American people were promised one thing, and are receiving another.  The thing they were promised -- you can keep your doctor and your insurance, and pay less through easy to use exchanges -- never existed, any more than "Mohammed Abacha,the son of the late Nigerian Head of State." But since we have to be absurdly sensitive to "short hops" from Nigeria to Kenya so as to stay off of Salon.com's radar, perhaps we can refer to healthcare.gov, and Obamacare more generally, as BernieMadoff.healthcare.gov.  Again, not a perfect analogy, but it demonstrates a point.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 22, 2013 33 Comments

We've seen years of offensive name calling and antics from Alan Grayson. He called a Federal reserve lobbyist a whore, and most famously claimed that Republicans want people to die quickly. Grayson's latest, however, is his worst yet, via NRO, Dem Rep. Uses Burning KKK Cross to...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 12, 2013 22 Comments
When it comes to Salon.com, I've always wondered if they really believe all their outlandish accusations of Tea Party and Republican racism, or it's just the niche they've carved out and click bait.  Look at me, I'm not Slate.com, I'm Salon.com. Whether it's David Sirota's rants about hoping the Boston Bombers were White Americans, Salon energizing its White Privilege Branding over the Zimmerman trial, or Joan Walsh writing that the "shutdown" (more like a scale back) is the culmination of 50 years of GOP race-baiting, do they actually believe what they write? When it comes to the "shutdown" Salon has caught a Confederate fever, and the only prescription, is more Confederate. Salon has several lead articles in recent days arguing that the Tea Party in general and the "shutdown" in particular are the fulfillment White racist Confederate dreams. By, um, Rafael Edward Cruz?  They never quite address that problem in their argument. Salon is not alone in raising the alleged rise of the Confederacy to demonize the Tea Party, but Salon has taken it to an obsessive level, once again. This would all be laughable, if it weren't so poisonous to the national political dialogue, and if so many liberals didn't actually believe this nonsense and treat it as an absolute truth (just read the comments there). (click each image for link to article, or not): Salon.com Tea Party Avenging surrender of the South Salon.com GOP confederate fantasies

Posted by Mandy Nagy on September 09, 2013 19 Comments
NAACP President Ben Jealous says he is stepping down at the end of the year to spend time with his family and pursue a career in teaching. From ABC News:

NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous, who is credited with boosting finances at the nation's largest civil rights organization and helping to stabilize it, said Sunday that he plans to step down at the end of the year.

The Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said that its rosters of online activists and donors have grown tremendously during his five-year tenure. Jealous was the group's youngest-ever leader when he was hired as its president at age 35 in 2008.

In a written statement Sunday, Jealous, now 40, said he plans to pursue teaching at a university and wants to spend time with his young family.

Jealous most recently pressed for the DoJ to pursue a civil rights case against George Zimmerman. Of course, Tea Party members will also remember Jealous most for his 2010 speech when he angrily demanded that the Tea Party expel its “bigots and racists,” as the NAACP passed a resolution condemning the Tea Party as racist.
My message to the Tea Party is this: you must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions. We will no longer allow you to hide like cowards behind signs that say, "lynch our President" or anyone else.
During his speech, Jealous had also cited in part as proof of the so-called racism the phantom N-word incident that supposedly occurred outside the Capitol steps in DC at the height of the health care debate.  This despite the fact numerous videos surfaced that showed no signs of truth to claims of use of the n-word and intentional spitting on a congressman.  As more began to question the validity of the accusations, even some of the MSM began to back away from such strong charges and tried to change the direction of the narrative. Jealous and his NAACP followed with a campaign to further smear the Tea Party as racist when it teamed with other left wing groups to launch TeaPartyTracker.org, a campaign based on the same model as Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch blog.  It was a short lived one, as Professor Jacobson noted at the time:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 25, 2013 14 Comments

I smelled a rat in the Oberlin racism narrative, and so did some other people in the conservative blogosphere, including but not limited to Michelle Malkin and Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller (who obtained the police report that confirmed our suspicions that this was...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 24, 2013 15 Comments
As longtime readers know, we're not big fans of the White Privilege verbiage, or the White Privilege consultant and pontificating class: In an otherwise good article about the Oberlin racism hoax, Conor Friedersdorf uses the term "white privilege" to describe the actions of the perpetrators:
White kids spreading the n-word and Nazi flags around campus for kicks, without giving a damn how many minorities they scare or upset, does seem like a great example of white privilege!
The editors or Friedersdorf chose to highlight and repeat that sentence as an insert mid-article:

Friedersdorf White Privilege

The problem is that the analysis and the entire post left something out, these were white liberal kids trying to make a liberal talking point come to life in a performance-art style endeavor: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370929969913806849 Those white liberal college students had a privilege above and beyond mere ordinary whites. That extra-special privilege was to have the mainstream media largely ignore that the performance-art inspired racial narrative which covered the news cycle in March 2013 was a hoax.  Only the conservative media seems to care. I have written to just about everyone I could find at an MSM or left-wing website who ran with the Oberlin racism narrative back in March, and almost no one has updated their stories. I emailed reporters and/or editors at The NY Times, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Slate.com, Huffington Post, and CNN, among others. Here's a typical email, which I sent to Slate.com:
You covered the racial incidents at Oberlin last March. It turned out to be a hoax, The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013. Will you update?
Here's another one, sent to the "scoop" line at HuffPo:
Huffington Post ran numerous stories in various sections about racial incidents on Oberlin College's campus in March 2013. It turns out those were hoaxes perpetrated by progressive pro-Obama activists in order to get a reaction, http://t.co/BAACsOTX0g. Will you report the hoax and correct prior stories?
And The NY Times:
You covered this story last March, Photos of Oberlin College Students Rallying Against Hate Incidents. Turns out it was a hoax. Thought you'd want to know, since NYT may want to follow up now that the story has changed.
I also sent tweets to reporters who covered the story but for whom I didn't have email addresses: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370638270067003393 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370639994714476544
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