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Saturday Night Card Game Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 25, 2015 16 Comments
Some of you may remember my August 22, 2013 post,The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013:
A massive racism hoax took place at Oberlin College in February 2013 in which two students made seemingly racist, anti-Semitic and other such posters, graffiti and emails for the purpose of getting a reaction on campus, not because they believed the hostile messages. At least one of the two was an Obama supporter with strong progressive, anti-racist politics. School officials and local police knew the identity of the culprits, who were responsible for most if not all of such incidents on campus, yet remained silent as the campus reacted as if the incidents were real. National media attention focused on campus racism at Oberlin for weeks without knowing it was a hoax. The hoax was confirmed when Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller recently obtained police records. Now it’s out in the open. Here is the history of how the hoax developed, played out in the media, and was covered up by the Oberlin administration.
Things would get much worse after that at Oberlin, even after the hoax was fully revealed, as we described in Oberlin racism hoax exploited to advance “even more extreme policies”. I explained the Oberlin situation in a radio interview:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 18, 2015 28 Comments
One of the big secrets of the Democratic Party is the deep racial tension between the mostly white elite progressive leaders and activists "of color." We examined this in detail in 2011, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left. In that post, we documented the Twitter war between black activists and Joan Walsh of Salon.com and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:
What is clear is that there is a growing fissure in the Democratic “base” over criticism by the (mostly White) Professional Left, as reflected in this Twitter exchange:
Those tensions have simmered for the past several years, and grown in the past year as the #BlackLivesMatters movement insisted that its voice was not being heard even within progressive circles.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 27, 2015 14 Comments
There, I said it. And so did Hillary Clinton, creating a backlash:
Hillary Rodham Clinton is facing backlash for saying that “all lives matter” in an African-American church in Missouri on Tuesday, offending some who feel that she is missing the point of the “black lives matter” mantra. Mrs. Clinton’s remarks at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Mo. — only a few miles north of Ferguson, where a black teenager was shot by a white police officer last August — came during a broader discussion of civil rights in America. She was talking about how a disproportionate number of young people of color are out of school and out of work and, explaining that everyone needs a “chance and a champion,” she recalled how her mother was abandoned as a teenager and went on to work as a maid. “What kept you going?” Mrs. Clinton remembered asking her mother. “Her answer was very simple. Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered. All lives matter.” The remark caused a stir on social media, with some African-Americans on Twitter suggesting that Mrs. Clinton had lost their votes.
Here's the video:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 20, 2014 10 Comments
It started out sounding like a classic racial profiling case. A white man is in a car kissing a black woman. The cops pull up, suspecting it's a case of prostitution. It wasn't. Just a husband and wife having a little fun, until the worst stereotypes of black women infected police minds. The woman was handcuffed, cried. And her wrists were cut by the handcuffs. The couple claimed the police approached only because they were an interracial couple. And it went viral. I remember seeing it at Buzzfeed via Twitter, and thinking: Not good. But then something happened. Neighbors -- the ones who called the police in the first place because of allegedly lewd public exposure -- produced photos that appeared to show the couple doing the nasty in the front seat. In broad daylight. While parked in a visible and trafficked area. TMZ was all over it:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on August 02, 2014 3 Comments
Stoking racial tension against Israel has been a foundation of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement in the U.S. One pro-Israel student is having none of it. Chloé Simone Valdary is an outspoken pro-Israel student, who is a shining star in the fight against BDS on campus. She is so effective that, during a recent pro-Israel rally in Boston, Chloé was physically assaulted by a woman carrying a pro-BDS poster, who insisted that Jerusalem would be cleansed of Jews: It seems the example of leftist "tolerance" has not dampened Chloé's pro-Israel activism in the slightest. Chloé has  a brilliant and devastating piece in Tablet, which decries the misuse and distortions of the real, historical racism experienced by blacks in this country by pro-Palestinian student groups (via Tammy Bruce).
To the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Letter From an Angry Black Woman The student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is prominent on many college campuses, preaching a mantra of “Freeing Palestine.” It masquerades as though it were a civil rights group when it is not. Indeed, as an African-American, I am highly insulted that my people’s legacy is being pilfered for such a repugnant agenda. It is thus high time to expose its agenda and lay bare some of the fallacies they peddle.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 05, 2014 22 Comments
Please make it stop. First they came for Black List, Baa Baa Black Sheep,Rejigger, Providence Plantations, Black Friday, Gobbledygook, Illegal Immigrant, Undocumented Immigrant, Master Bedroom, Chink in the Armor, and even the use of white copy paper and brown bagging it to lunch. Politically correct speech has become an Albatross around our necks. Then they came for the paint, and there were few words left to defend it. Fired employee sues paint company over racist paint names:
A black man in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, Benjamin Moore Paints, which he says named one of its paint colors after him and then fired him when he complained.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on June 14, 2014 6 Comments
It can be very hard to distinguish progressive political and social positions from parody. Remember the video “White Guys: We Suck and We’re Sorry”? Was it parody?  Not sure we ever got a definitive answer on that. What about Salon.com's white writers' obsession with Whiteness? Real. White privilege conferences? Real. There is a strange lack of connection of so many progressive manias to reality, that it's hard to know what is real or not.  Even for progressives. There was a major trolling of leftist feminists and Gender Studies types on Twitter, with the hastage "#EndFathersDay."  It was started at 4Chan, but feminists ran with it apparently believing it to be true.  Some of the tweets were hysterical -- but impossible to tell if part of the group trolling or the leftist feminists who thought it was real. Twitchy and Frontpage Mag collected some of the tweets of people who thought it was real. Some had been deleted after being highlighted as stupid, such as this one (screenshot saved by Weasel Zippers): http://weaselzippers.us/189670-tweet-of-the-day-feminist-loon-says-end-fathers-day-because-celebrating-patriarchy-and-male-dominance-is-rape-culture/ These people had a good laugh:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 31, 2014 20 Comments
White privilege is the political Swiss Army Knife of the progressive movement. There is literally nothing that happens in the country for which white privilege does not serve as a tool. If you are white, you have white privilege. If you are not, you suffer from lack of white privilege. The insane White Privilege Conference exposed recently is just one example, but certainly liberal websites partake as well. But what to make of our increasingly multi-racial society? How do you squeeze white privilege into the actions of multi-racial perps? We know that with George Zimmerman, the problem of half-whiteness was solved by labeling him just plain old white, or at most, a white Hispanic. Never was Zimmerman just Hispanic. What to make of the UCSB mass murderer who was half white and half Asian? Salon.com is a long-time purveyor of all manner of white privilege political arguments.  Joan Walsh has twisted into an intellectual knot to justify bringing white privilege to bear while also acknowledging the half-whiteness. The answer? Half-White Privilege. Elliot Rodger’s half-white male privilege:
Not that I have a lot of sympathy for Rodger, but it twists his already twisted story to label him simply white.... Why is it so hard to recognize Rodger as of mixed racial descent? It certainly doesn’t negate the role white entitlement and privilege played in his “syndrome.” Rodger is at least partly a victim of the ideology of white supremacy, as well as its violent enforcer....

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 24, 2014 34 Comments
We previously addressed The dead-end Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ backwards looking road to nowhere:
Coates never gives the answer as to who gets what and how. And that’s ultimately the problem with reparations arguments that are not based upon the people causing the harm paying the people directly harmed by specific conduct soon after the conduct is remedied.
As Coates explained his views to Melissa-Harris Perry this morning, it became clear that there is no sense at all of holding the guilty accountable in the sense we normally do, or compensating actual victims. There is a complete disconnect between cause and effect -- anyone with a particular skin color is presumed to be a victim of policies even from generations earlier. It's a simplistic and non-evidentiary approach which generalizes anecdotes and ignores the myriad of factors that influence success or failure in life. Rather, this is a societal redistribution, in which the not actually guilty pay, and the not actually injured get compensated, via the power of government to redistribute wealth. It's just redistribution with a different justification.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 26, 2014 7 Comments
We mentioned before how Christian Zionist college student Chloe Valdary has come under highly racialized attack from anti-Israel Jewish leftists like Richard Silverstein, The ugly, repugnant attack on a pro-Israel black American student: https://twitter.com/richards1052/status/437086594546536448 She also is a frequent target of other anti-Zionist fanatics who find a unique threat in a black American female Zionist, because dividing people along racial lines is a key anti-Israel boycott tactic. In this interview at the AIPAC conference, Valdary explains how she has dealt with the attacks, how her Zionism is consistent with that of the great civil rights leaders of the 1960s and why (at 2:20):
"As a free woman of color, of course I would be a Zionist, it's only natural"
Valdary also discussed her own experiences in Israel, and the modern blood libel that Israel is an Apartheid state (at 8:45):
"There is no Apartheid in Israeli society ... it's an insult to the people who suffered from Apartheid in South Africa"
(Via CiFWatch) Valdary goes into even more depth about the racism of the anti-Israel left in this interview:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 19, 2014 64 Comments
I don't think we've written here yet about the Bundy Ranch standoff, mostly because we didn't have enough information about the situation to make a judgment about what really was going on. And I didn't have enough time to figure it all out. Was it, as some portrayed, a heroic struggle against an overbearing and overly aggressive federal government (in which case we might have taken the side of the underdog) or, as Harry Reid has portrayed it, a bunch of domestic terrorists looking for a shoot up? Or somewhere in between? Which gets me to the title of this post, "What if Bundy Ranch Were Owned by a Bunch of Black People?," which is the question posed by Jamelle Bouie at Slate.com:
A few things. First, this entire incident speaks to the continued power of right-wing mythology. For many of the protesters, this isn’t about a rogue rancher as much as it’s a stand against “tyranny” personified in Barack Obama and his administration. Second, it won’t happen, but right-wing media ought to be condemned for their role in fanning the flames of this standoff. After years of decrying Obama’s “lawlessness” and hyperventilating over faux scandals, it’s galling to watch conservatives applaud actual lawbreaking and violent threats to federal officials.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 12, 2014 9 Comments
Oh, they thought they had Fox News right where they wanted it.  The proof they'd been waiting for that Fox News was racist. Heather Childers on Fox & Friends First mistakenly referred to U. Conn. as the NAACP champs rather than NCAA champs. There was pure joy in Mudville.  As of this writing, this TPM video has over 800,000 views: The Raw Story headlined it as "A Freudian Slip?" (emphasis in original):
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — or NAACP — is a civil rights organization focusing on equality for African-Americans and other minorities. At least 10 of the 15 players on the winning UConn team were African-Americans.
The never subtle Gawker proclaimed it outright racism:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 05, 2014 19 Comments
I don't know much about Chris McDaniel, who is challenging Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Republican Senate primary. I also don't know much about Thad Cochran. I haven't studied the race, or taken a position. I don't back a challenger just for the sake of backing a challenger. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, however, backs an incumbent just for the sake of backing an incumbent. NRSC is, in Prof. Reynold's words, "an incumbent-protection club. That’s basically its job." Which means backing any Republican Senate incumbent, no matter how bad and no matter how good the challenger. That means Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey; Bob Bennett over Mike Lee, and so on. Brad Dayspring is the Communications Director and Strategist for NRSC. While his Twitter feed has the obligatory disclaimer that his tweets are his own, he does seem to use his Twitter feed as part of his NRSC mission. A tweet on April 3 by Dayspring about McDaniel accused McDaniel of "associat[ing] with white nationalists & segregationists" based on a linked story at Talking Points Memo. (H/t The Other McCain) The TPM story reported that McDaniel backed out of an event after it was revealed -- by a local pro-Cochran blog -- that one of the vendors displaying at the event was pro-segregation. That's it. No allegation that McDaniels himself was pro-segregation, or speaking at a pro-segregation event. Only that there was a vendor at the event. That's the sort of guilt by remote association we expect TPM and others to use against Republicans. Robert Stacy McCain, who has an extensive write up on it, correctly states:
The attempt to turn this into a scandal is like saying that if a candidate campaigns at a county fair, he thereby endorses every rip-off carnival game at the fair.
It's not surprising that NBC picked up on it, which Dayspring also tweeted out, asserting that McDaniel was not vetted:
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