Oregonian Commissar Betsy Hammond Tries to Get Dissenting Reader Fired from His Job

By Nicholas Stix

It’s Saturday night, which means that while some people have pre-Super Bowl parties, and others count the days till “pitchers and catchers” report (it says here, Valentine’s Day, February 14, though that sounds awfully late to me.), at VDARE.com, it is time for the Saturday Forum devoted entirely to letters from readers and responses, usually by letters editor/columnist, Joe Guzzardi.

While VDARE readers routinely bring disturbing facts to light, I can’t recall the last time I read a more disturbing Forum.

Betsy Hammond is a racist, alleged reporter for Portland’s The Oregonian newspaper. Two weeks ago, she editorialized in a “news” article, “In a changing world, Portland remains overwhelmingly white,” that Portland has way too many white people, and is a racist redoubt. A white VDARE reader, a transplanted Portlander living in Atlanta, criticized Hammond in a letter to VDARE, noting the repeated violent and property crimes he had suffered at the hands of Atlanta blacks, offering to switch places with her.

The reader’s letter had been published by VDARE pseudonymously, and without naming the writer’s employer. However, the letter writer had made the mistake of showing Hammond the courtesy of writing to her under his own name, and mentioning the firm he works for. Hammond responded by writing to the man’s employer, calling on him to fire the employee for his honesty, painting the employee as a racist for being honest about his experiences and his desire to protect his family, and attempting to blackmail the employer into firing the reader, by making a veiled threat to ruin his business by depicting him as employing racists, if he did not submit to her demand.

Fortunately, this particular employer did not submit; as Hammond well knew, most would have.

Betsy Hammond is a monster, but she is hardly unique. The so-called news business has thousands of monsters, just like her. When they learn that some private citizen has disagreed with their politics, they try to destroy him personally and professionally. They will call his employer, and ask the latter how he feels about employing such a man, until the boss fires the worker, to avoid further embarrassment. (I know of a current New York Times “reporter” who did just that a number of years ago to get an American patriot fired from his job. Rather than being fired from his job, the alleged reporter was celebrated for his malicious conduct, and rewarded with his present job.) They will go to the point of inducing people to commit crimes, in order to furnish the alleged reporters with material with which to smear private citizens, as “reporters” did to “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher last summer, when Wurzelbacher disagreed with “Barack Obama” at a public forum, and got “Obama” to drop his guard, and reveal his socialism.

Another tactic will be, when writing a story about a private citizen a “reporter” hates who has not been formally charged with a crime by the criminal justice system, but who has nonetheless been unofficially charged by enemies with having committed crimes, for the “reporter” to walk around the target’s neighborhood, knocking on every door, saying, “Did you know that your neighbor, Joe Schmoe, has been charged with X, Y, and Z? What do you think about that?” The point is to ruin the target’s life.

The “news” business is dominated by extremely opinionated leftists who, like the Führer, don’t give a damn about truth. They are concerned only with power. The Betsy Hammonds of the world are not journalists; they are political commissars.

The danger the Betsy Hammonds of the world pose, is one reason why I recommend submitting pseudonymous letters to newspapers.