That is what VDARE’s James Fulford is calling, “The Headline You Won’t See Regarding the Bombay Terrorist Attacks.”
You won’t see it, because it’s true.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Did George W. Bush Cause the Wal-Mart Stampede Killing?
By Nicholas Stix
![[walmart+stampede.jpg]](//4.bp.blogspot.com/_iN6_nIJQcbM/STFUKX6_sdI/AAAAAAAACHg/T_0BzBABjvo/s1600/walmart%2Bstampede.jpg)
The Wal-Mart Stampede
Last updated at 10:04 p.m., Sunday, November 30, 2008.
At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog on the Wal-Mart killing, it took 18 posters, before someone blamed it on Bush:
All you have to do is look at the faces in the picture above, to know that the Black Friday trampling death of 34-year-old Wal-Mart temp, Jdimytai Damour, at the company's Valley Stream, Long Island store was all Bush's fault.
Two comments later, came the following retort:
At the P-I, There’s one huge advantage to blaming everything on George W. Bush in the comments section: You never have to worry about getting censored or banned. On the other hand, blaming the man who calls himself "Barack Obama" could not only get you censored, but arrested, if not trampled to death.
Postscript
At the New York Daily News photo gallery of its Wal-Mart murder story, the caption to picture 12 says the opposite of what the story says:
Caption: “Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby told the News that workers took the store doors off of their hinges as they fought their way into the store.”
Story: "He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.
"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.
"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.
![[walmart+stampede.jpg]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iN6_nIJQcbM/STFUKX6_sdI/AAAAAAAACHg/T_0BzBABjvo/s1600/walmart%2Bstampede.jpg)
The Wal-Mart Stampede
Last updated at 10:04 p.m., Sunday, November 30, 2008.
At the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog on the Wal-Mart killing, it took 18 posters, before someone blamed it on Bush:
Posted by unregistered user at 11/28/08 2:34 p.m.
Posted by unregistered user at 11/28/08 2:05 p.m.
"Our country is going to sh*t"
It started getting worse 8 years ago. I guess the American public deserved the leaders they voted for.
Happy Holidays!
All you have to do is look at the faces in the picture above, to know that the Black Friday trampling death of 34-year-old Wal-Mart temp, Jdimytai Damour, at the company's Valley Stream, Long Island store was all Bush's fault.
Two comments later, came the following retort:
Posted by markcd at 11/28/08 2:41 p.m.
Ah yes. I was wondering when the first "Blame Bush" post would make its presence known. Just as he causes hurricanes and floods, there's no doubt that in his infinite power he forced those people to trample this man to death. Since we're being completely ridiculous, let's blame Obama too. He's brought such hope to the country, those folks must have felt the economy turning around and in their euphoria they broke down the doors and trampled this man to death. Good grief, get a grip.
At the P-I, There’s one huge advantage to blaming everything on George W. Bush in the comments section: You never have to worry about getting censored or banned. On the other hand, blaming the man who calls himself "Barack Obama" could not only get you censored, but arrested, if not trampled to death.
Postscript
At the New York Daily News photo gallery of its Wal-Mart murder story, the caption to picture 12 says the opposite of what the story says:
Caption: “Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby told the News that workers took the store doors off of their hinges as they fought their way into the store.”
Story: "He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.
"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.
"They took me down, too ... I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back," Overby said.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Do You Know What "Mumbai" is?
Last updated at 12:26 a.m., Monday, December 1, 2008.
Yesterday, I read to my wife, who is herself Indian (born and bred in Trinidad), of how Mumbai has 15 million people, most of them dirt poor. Odd, how we could have never heard of one of the world's largest cities.
But of course, we had! Mumbai is Bombay! Bomb-friggin-bay!
We'd known of it since we were practically wearing diapers. Now why would the press and educators use a strange word most people had ever heard of to describe a city that hundreds of millions of people were long familiar with? Because they are conspiring to confuse and confound us, and make us feel ignorant and inadequate, and make themselves look as if they were competent and knowledgeable, which they ain't.
But we don't live in India, so we have no reason to call Bombay, "Mumbai."
I also didn't realize, until reading Indian journalism professor Suketu Mehta's New York Times op-ed,
"What They Hate About Mumbai," that "Mumbai" is the home of "Bollywood."
Then why isn't it called, "Mollywood"? Because almost everyone knows it as Bombay. In his op-ed, Mehta refers repeatedly to "Bombay," and uses it in the title of his book: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
No "Mumbai" there. I wonder if the references to "Mumbai" in his op-ed were even Mehta's idea.
My wife can't believe that CNN refused to tell viewers that it was reporting from Bombay. She thinks "They're trying to be sophisticated."
Now, say after me: Peking (not "Beijing"). Black (not "African-American"). Girls (not "young women"). Ladies. Females. Whores. Prostitutes, not "sex workers." Illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, or illegal human beings, not "undocumented immigrants" or "undocumented workers." Say Gypsies, not "Roma."
Say Calcutta, not "cold cut," or whatever the hell the language police are demanding. Madras, not "Chennai."
Say abortion, not “family planning.” Abortion, not "termination of pregnancy." Abortion, not “choice.” Abortionist, not “abortion provider.”
Say unwed mother, not “single mother.” Say welfare, not "income maintenance."
Say riot, not "demonstration." And insult or criticism, not "verbal assault."
And no pronouncing Spanish names and words, as if we were in Mexico City, while Hispanics disrespect our language, nation, and laws. And it's not, the robber "requested" (or "asked for"), the robber demanded the victim's money.
It's not "international affairs," it's foreign affairs. Foreign travel, not "international travel."
Don't call the Kurosawa movie, "Shichinin no samurai," the way the pretentious morons at the Internet Movie Database started writing a few years ago, as if it were a Japanese Web site, and as if the Japs used the Latin alphabet, call it Seven Samurai! The IMDB censors have even re-written the history of the Oscars, putting the names of Seven Samurai and other foreign films' nominations in phoneticized foreign words, instead of the English titles they were nominated in at the time.
And maybe most important of all, it's not "tolerant, enlightened, progressives" or "multiculturalists" or "liberals," it's ignorant, pretentious, arrogant, smug, intolerant, totalitarian, godless communist bastards!
A tip o' the hat to VDARE's Steve Sailer.
Friday, November 28, 2008
In Hollywood, Bad Culture Kills Off Good Culture
Hit this link for today’s essay on the Hollywood “road rage” murder of jazz pianist John T. Osnes, allegedly by narcissist, er, rap/hip-hop performer David Moses Jassy.
Invisible Victims: Wikipedia (aka The Pretend Encyclopedia) Still Has No Page Devoted to the Winchester Atrocity
By Nicholas Stix
Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak
On October 15, the tortured corpses of newlyweds, Marine Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak, 24, and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were found in their Winchester, CA home. Mrs. Pietrzak had been gang-raped, and husband and wife had each been bound, gagged, and shot, execution-style, in the back of the head.
From left, defendants Kevin Darnell Cox, Emrys Justin John, Tyrone Miller and Kesaun K. Sykes
Four “Marines” are in custody: Pvt. Emrys John, 18; Lance Cpl. Tyrone “Cripgeneral” Miller, 20; Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox, 20; and Pvt. Kesaun “Psycho” Sykes, 21. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, all four confessed to the torture-murders, though there was some dispute as to who the rapists were. Each said he was innocent of the rape—though Sykes confessed to cutting Mrs. Pietrzak’s clothes off of her—but that his three accomplices had raped Mrs. Pietrzak. One thing that Miller, Cox, and Sykes all agreed on, however, was that John was the shooter. (In court, all four suspects have since pleaded “not guilty” to the crimes, which are death-penalty eligible.)
Sgt. Pietrzak was a helicopter mechanic at Miramar Air Station, in San Diego; John and Miller were his subordinates. Pietrzak was white; his wife was black, as are the defendants.
The official story is that the crime was committed for “financial gain,” but there was no financial gain. The killers took the husband’s digital camera and the wife’s engagement ring, but made no effort to sell them.
This was a racial killing. I believe that the motive was humiliation and murder, based on the killers’ racism—and thus their rage that a white man had taken a black woman for his wife—and the items the killers stole souvenirs, with which to recall and savor their crimes. As a black former Marine, Sabrina, who had married a white fellow Marine while in the service and whom black racists put through hell for it argued,
Wikipedia’s Presentation of the Case
Wikipedia claims to provide “the sum of all human knowledge,” yet as of 2:28 a.m., November 28, the only mention of this crime in all of Wikipedia’s “2,638,091 articles in English,” is the following, 22-word mention in the entry for “Winchester, California.”
Then again, as I showed in my Wikipedia exposé in the July issue of American Renaissance, where race is concerned, such non-scholarship is par for the course at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE).
The Real Stuff of Encyclopedias: The “Erdős–Bacon Number”
The Wikipedia habitués whom I call, among other sobriquets, Wikithugs, make sure that none of Wikipedia’s entries on black-on-white atrocities honestly depict the crimes.
TPE also purports to be an inexhaustible font of “knowledge” about things like the “Erdős–Bacon number,” to which a 3,376-word entry has been devoted, replete with 69 footnotes. (See the “Erdős–Bacon number table,” at the bottom of this blog entry, after a large gap caused by the TPE coding.)
What is an “Erdős–Bacon number,” you ask? Nothing at all, really. The notion is a third-hand trivia game, derived from the trivia game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” which was itself derived—no doubt by a fan of character actor Kevin Bacon—from the notion embodied in the title of John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. Another person—doubtless a camp follower of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—then created an imitation Bacon trivia game, and combined the two.
Guare’s idea is that six degrees of acquaintance separates every human being from every other human being. Thus, limiting the notion’s application to Bacon’s acting career is contrary to Guare’s idea. Of course, few of the multitudes who use the phrase, “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in order to sound hip and knowledgeable have ever heard of, let alone read or seen the stage or film version of Six Degrees of Separation. (This writer has seen both versions.)
During the early 1980s, black con man David Hampton notoriously made fools of a series of white, leftwing, Manhattan socialites, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier (who, unbeknownst to them, had no sons!), in order to momentarily drop into their lives and homes, and by the way, pocket some symbolic small change from them. Guare, who was friends with some of the victims, fictionalized the real-life exploits of Hampton, who died in 2003, in order to meditate on the trivial, empty lives of rich Manhattanites—the lefty part somehow never made it into the play—and their desperate need for connection to “the other.”
(During the same period, I encountered alcoholic hustlers pulling similar cons in Vienna and Paris.)
For all the blather and footnotes, no one reading the Wikipedia/TPE entry for “Erdős–Bacon number” will even learn of this third-hand trivia game’s origins.
But Wikipedians and their third-hand trivia-loving counterparts in the “real” world refuse even to follow the rules of their own game. Thus, the first name on TPE’s Erdős–Bacon number “table” is that of Hank Aaron. But Hank Aaron never authored any mathematical papers. Why is he listed on the table? A Wikipedian gave a “reason,” but since it is completely at odds with the rules of the game, it can’t be the real reason.
What is the point of inventing a game, any game, if the players immediately throw its rules out the window? And aside from the fundamental issue of having “encyclopedia articles” about third-hand trivia games, what is the point of having encyclopedic-looking entries about such games, if those writing them violate their rules, even in their descriptions of the games, and fail to provide their historical background, which is their only aspect which is of intellectual or encyclopedic interest? (In case you were wondering, the “Erdős–Bacon number” entry is not a Wikipedia self-parody. The people dominating TPE suffer from extreme irony deficiency.)
Thus, Wikipedia is worthless, even as a compendium of trivia! That’s why I call it variously The Pretend Encyclopedia and Antipedia.
Let’s Stop Pretending
To learn more about the racist crime that I have dubbed The Winchester Atrocity, start with my two VDARE articles, and then hit the embedded hyperlinks in them to get to other material:
“The Knoxville Horror with a Twist—Four Black Marines Murder Interracial Couple in Winchester, CA; MSM Censors Details, of Course”
and
“The Winchester Atrocity: Down the MSM Memory Hole While Cops Claim It’s Not a ‘Racial Crime’”
(This article used “nofollow” tags in its links to Wikipedia. In getting everyone to link to it, in order to maintain its page rank, TPE is the universe’s biggest spammer, yet it refuses to return the courtesy. It uses “nofollow” tags for all outgoing links, so that hitting them does not help the page rank of any site to which it links, except for those in which Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales has a commercial interest. Thus, I am returning the favor. To find out how you can return the favor to WP/TPE/Wales, read this informative article: “Preventing comment spam.”)
The following note is written in "invisible ink" in the coding to the TPE entry, so that only those reading the coding can see it.
"NOTE: This list, like the rest of Wikipedia, should be verifiable. Please include supporting documentation in the table or in the above text for new additions. Unsourced "Drive-by" additions will be immediately commented out and/or deleted. Poorly sourced older instances should eventually be well-sourced, too."
Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak
On October 15, the tortured corpses of newlyweds, Marine Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak, 24, and Quiana Jenkins-Pietrzak, 26, were found in their Winchester, CA home. Mrs. Pietrzak had been gang-raped, and husband and wife had each been bound, gagged, and shot, execution-style, in the back of the head.
From left, defendants Kevin Darnell Cox, Emrys Justin John, Tyrone Miller and Kesaun K. Sykes
Four “Marines” are in custody: Pvt. Emrys John, 18; Lance Cpl. Tyrone “Cripgeneral” Miller, 20; Pvt. Kevin Darnell Cox, 20; and Pvt. Kesaun “Psycho” Sykes, 21. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, all four confessed to the torture-murders, though there was some dispute as to who the rapists were. Each said he was innocent of the rape—though Sykes confessed to cutting Mrs. Pietrzak’s clothes off of her—but that his three accomplices had raped Mrs. Pietrzak. One thing that Miller, Cox, and Sykes all agreed on, however, was that John was the shooter. (In court, all four suspects have since pleaded “not guilty” to the crimes, which are death-penalty eligible.)
Sgt. Pietrzak was a helicopter mechanic at Miramar Air Station, in San Diego; John and Miller were his subordinates. Pietrzak was white; his wife was black, as are the defendants.
The official story is that the crime was committed for “financial gain,” but there was no financial gain. The killers took the husband’s digital camera and the wife’s engagement ring, but made no effort to sell them.
This was a racial killing. I believe that the motive was humiliation and murder, based on the killers’ racism—and thus their rage that a white man had taken a black woman for his wife—and the items the killers stole souvenirs, with which to recall and savor their crimes. As a black former Marine, Sabrina, who had married a white fellow Marine while in the service and whom black racists put through hell for it argued,
Everything about this case points to a racially motivated hate crime which is fueled by sexual jealousy! It is as much of a hate crime as what happened in 1955 to Emmett Till and in 1998 to Matthew Shepherd….
Wikipedia’s Presentation of the Case
Wikipedia claims to provide “the sum of all human knowledge,” yet as of 2:28 a.m., November 28, the only mention of this crime in all of Wikipedia’s “2,638,091 articles in English,” is the following, 22-word mention in the entry for “Winchester, California.”
Winchester, California
Winchester is a census-designated place (CDP) in Riverside County, California, USA. As of the 2000 census, the CDP had a total population of 2,155.
Largely rural for most of its history, Winchester experienced rapid growth during the housing construction boom in the early to mid 2000s. However, construction and growth slowed when the housing bubble burst in 2007, resulting in a housing market correction. In October of 2008, the town was rocked by the brutal murders of Marine Corps Sgt. Jan Pawel Pietrzak and his wife, Quiana.
Then again, as I showed in my Wikipedia exposé in the July issue of American Renaissance, where race is concerned, such non-scholarship is par for the course at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE).
The Real Stuff of Encyclopedias: The “Erdős–Bacon Number”
The Wikipedia habitués whom I call, among other sobriquets, Wikithugs, make sure that none of Wikipedia’s entries on black-on-white atrocities honestly depict the crimes.
TPE also purports to be an inexhaustible font of “knowledge” about things like the “Erdős–Bacon number,” to which a 3,376-word entry has been devoted, replete with 69 footnotes. (See the “Erdős–Bacon number table,” at the bottom of this blog entry, after a large gap caused by the TPE coding.)
What is an “Erdős–Bacon number,” you ask? Nothing at all, really. The notion is a third-hand trivia game, derived from the trivia game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” which was itself derived—no doubt by a fan of character actor Kevin Bacon—from the notion embodied in the title of John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation. Another person—doubtless a camp follower of Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—then created an imitation Bacon trivia game, and combined the two.
Guare’s idea is that six degrees of acquaintance separates every human being from every other human being. Thus, limiting the notion’s application to Bacon’s acting career is contrary to Guare’s idea. Of course, few of the multitudes who use the phrase, “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” in order to sound hip and knowledgeable have ever heard of, let alone read or seen the stage or film version of Six Degrees of Separation. (This writer has seen both versions.)
During the early 1980s, black con man David Hampton notoriously made fools of a series of white, leftwing, Manhattan socialites, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier (who, unbeknownst to them, had no sons!), in order to momentarily drop into their lives and homes, and by the way, pocket some symbolic small change from them. Guare, who was friends with some of the victims, fictionalized the real-life exploits of Hampton, who died in 2003, in order to meditate on the trivial, empty lives of rich Manhattanites—the lefty part somehow never made it into the play—and their desperate need for connection to “the other.”
(During the same period, I encountered alcoholic hustlers pulling similar cons in Vienna and Paris.)
For all the blather and footnotes, no one reading the Wikipedia/TPE entry for “Erdős–Bacon number” will even learn of this third-hand trivia game’s origins.
A person’s Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one’s Erdős number—which measures the “collaborative distance” in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one’s Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer an individual is to Erdős and Bacon.
But Wikipedians and their third-hand trivia-loving counterparts in the “real” world refuse even to follow the rules of their own game. Thus, the first name on TPE’s Erdős–Bacon number “table” is that of Hank Aaron. But Hank Aaron never authored any mathematical papers. Why is he listed on the table? A Wikipedian gave a “reason,” but since it is completely at odds with the rules of the game, it can’t be the real reason.
What is the point of inventing a game, any game, if the players immediately throw its rules out the window? And aside from the fundamental issue of having “encyclopedia articles” about third-hand trivia games, what is the point of having encyclopedic-looking entries about such games, if those writing them violate their rules, even in their descriptions of the games, and fail to provide their historical background, which is their only aspect which is of intellectual or encyclopedic interest? (In case you were wondering, the “Erdős–Bacon number” entry is not a Wikipedia self-parody. The people dominating TPE suffer from extreme irony deficiency.)
Thus, Wikipedia is worthless, even as a compendium of trivia! That’s why I call it variously The Pretend Encyclopedia and Antipedia.
Let’s Stop Pretending
To learn more about the racist crime that I have dubbed The Winchester Atrocity, start with my two VDARE articles, and then hit the embedded hyperlinks in them to get to other material:
“The Knoxville Horror with a Twist—Four Black Marines Murder Interracial Couple in Winchester, CA; MSM Censors Details, of Course”
and
“The Winchester Atrocity: Down the MSM Memory Hole While Cops Claim It’s Not a ‘Racial Crime’”
(This article used “nofollow” tags in its links to Wikipedia. In getting everyone to link to it, in order to maintain its page rank, TPE is the universe’s biggest spammer, yet it refuses to return the courtesy. It uses “nofollow” tags for all outgoing links, so that hitting them does not help the page rank of any site to which it links, except for those in which Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales has a commercial interest. Thus, I am returning the favor. To find out how you can return the favor to WP/TPE/Wales, read this informative article: “Preventing comment spam.”)
The following note is written in "invisible ink" in the coding to the TPE entry, so that only those reading the coding can see it.
"NOTE: This list, like the rest of Wikipedia, should be verifiable. Please include supporting documentation in the table or in the above text for new additions. Unsourced "Drive-by" additions will be immediately commented out and/or deleted. Poorly sourced older instances should eventually be well-sourced, too."
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving to All My Readers!
When you get a moment, I think you’ll enjoy reading “The War against Thanksgiving” by VDARE’s James Fulford, as well as some or all of VDARE’s previous annual Thanksgiving essays.
You can tell that the War against Christmas is coming soon, because it's War Against Thanksgiving time!
Saturday, November 22, 2008
The Death of a President
Forty-six years ago on this day, communist Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy, 35th President of these United States, in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, as the President’s motorcade passed by the Texas School Book Depository Building, where Oswald worked.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
And the Band Played on
By Nicholas Stix
When the Great Depression hit, America had 122,288,177 people; the world’s most massive factory system manufacturing everything under the sun; a labor-intensive agricultural sector; illegitimacy was rare and scandalous, and the nation’s moral fabric and the nuclear family were both intact; the economy was run by captains of industry rather than Ponzi schemers, and men did not have to compete for jobs with women or over 20 million illegal immigrants. And we had the world’s greatest popular music and entertainment.
Today, America has 305,688,195 people and counting, according to the Census Bureau’s low-ball estimate; agriculture is variously mechanized or done by illegal aliens; the factories are almost all gone, the economy has fallen into the hands of men who only know how to make a profit through fraud, by cheating workers out of pay and benefits, or by cutting labor out of the picture altogether; and what passes for music and entertainment gives a civilized man earaches and headaches.
I feel like I’m on the deck of the Titanic, watching my country sink into the frigid North Atlantic.
The “Minute Waltz,” please!
Stumble It!
Conservative talking heads are saying GM is a "failed business model" unworthy of a $25 billion bailout. These are the same talking heads who favored pouring $700 billion into a failed financial model….
Any bailout has its downsides. But if America loses its auto industry, it will lose the suppliers as well and will cease to have a manufacturing sector. For years no-think economists have been writing off America’s manufacturing jobs, while deluding themselves and the public with propaganda about a New Economy based on finance.
A country that doesn’t make anything doesn’t need a financial sector as there is nothing to finance.
"The Crisis Has Hardly Begun," by Paul Craig Roberts, November 16, 2008, VDARE.com.
When the Great Depression hit, America had 122,288,177 people; the world’s most massive factory system manufacturing everything under the sun; a labor-intensive agricultural sector; illegitimacy was rare and scandalous, and the nation’s moral fabric and the nuclear family were both intact; the economy was run by captains of industry rather than Ponzi schemers, and men did not have to compete for jobs with women or over 20 million illegal immigrants. And we had the world’s greatest popular music and entertainment.
Today, America has 305,688,195 people and counting, according to the Census Bureau’s low-ball estimate; agriculture is variously mechanized or done by illegal aliens; the factories are almost all gone, the economy has fallen into the hands of men who only know how to make a profit through fraud, by cheating workers out of pay and benefits, or by cutting labor out of the picture altogether; and what passes for music and entertainment gives a civilized man earaches and headaches.
I feel like I’m on the deck of the Titanic, watching my country sink into the frigid North Atlantic.
The “Minute Waltz,” please!
Stumble It!
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Barack Obama is Riding High on “The Chicago Way”
By Nicholas Stix
Is Barack “Obama” a racial socialist, er, reformer, or just a corrupt Chicago hack politician? Who says it’s one or the other? See my essay at VDARE.com.
Is Barack “Obama” a racial socialist, er, reformer, or just a corrupt Chicago hack politician? Who says it’s one or the other? See my essay at VDARE.com.
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name
By Nicholas Stix
The Pietrzaks were in a state of bliss. Once upon a time, they would have been legally barred from marrying, but no more. They had exercised their civil rights to wed only two months before, and had just bought a five-bedroom house off the foreclosure market. A pile of wedding thank-you cards sat on a table, ready to go out with the wedding pictures that would arrive any day, now.
Only the cards never went out. The next day, deputies found the Pietrzaks’ tortured corpses, when neither showed up for work.
The Pietrzaks were murdered in a hate crime, because of who they were. But the MSM won’t tell you about it.
Read the rest of the Winchester Atrocity story at VDARE.com.
The Pietrzaks were in a state of bliss. Once upon a time, they would have been legally barred from marrying, but no more. They had exercised their civil rights to wed only two months before, and had just bought a five-bedroom house off the foreclosure market. A pile of wedding thank-you cards sat on a table, ready to go out with the wedding pictures that would arrive any day, now.
Only the cards never went out. The next day, deputies found the Pietrzaks’ tortured corpses, when neither showed up for work.
The Pietrzaks were murdered in a hate crime, because of who they were. But the MSM won’t tell you about it.
Read the rest of the Winchester Atrocity story at VDARE.com.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Running Nowhere: Making My Undervote Count
By Nicholas Stix
Though I had a cold and my feet hurt, I ran most of the way to the polling place on Election Day. I got in at 8:56 p.m., the last voter.
But I didn’t go to vote. I knew I had nowhere to go.
Had he been on the ballot, I would likely have voted for the Constitution Party candidate, Chuck Baldwin, for President.
The ballot listed Ralph Nader (Populist); Bob Barr (Libertarian); Cynthia McKinney (Green); Gloria LaRiva (Socialist and Liberation parties); Roger Calero (Socialist Workers) … and the other two. Of seven candidates, four were communists, and one (Nader) was a socialist. That must be some kind of record.
That left the man who had switched parties, only to be ambushed by his adopted party (Media); who had switched peoples, only to be rejected by his adopted people (Hispanics); and who, in an election that was all about race, and in which he had both extraordinary disadvantages and advantages, refused to engage the enemy. John McCain had all the fearsomeness of a lone National Guardsman marching through a riot zone, carrying an unloaded weapon.
(Disadvantages: George W. Bush, the diversity meltdown; advantages: The fact that his Democratic opponent was a black supremacist, a socialist at best and communist at worst, and crook; that approximately 75 percent of eligible voters were white; and that the immigration issue was sitting there, waiting for him to pick it up and run with it).
In McCain’s concession speech, he said, “We [Americans] never give up, we never quit, we don’t hide from history, we make history.”
But in letting his racist, Marxist opponent set the terms of debate, McCain gave up before he ever got started. Faced with the historic challenge of a thoroughly racialized election, John McCain ran screaming from history.
And so, for the second consecutive major election, I voted for no one.
(My family doesn’t know this. They gave me strict orders to vote for McCain. Let that be our little secret.)
In 2005, incumbent New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a liberal Democrat running as a Republican, was challenged by official Democratic candidate, Fernando “Freddie” Ferrer. Both were hostile towards working and middle-class whites and Asians (my wife is of Indian descent).
In 2008, as in 2005, I pulled the steel bar to the right, to close the booth’s curtains, and then, without voting for a candidate, back to the left, to re-open them and register my undervote.
That I went to the polls at all last Tuesday, was out of religious observance. I was raised an Orthodox Democrat; in my family, we worshiped FDR.
Every year, my Hungarian-born Nana (1893?-1976) went to vote, and needed only to know where the Democratic column was. She’d push down each lever in the row, regardless of whether she’d ever even heard of the candidate.
It would have been an act of sacrilege for me to spend an entire Election Day, without entering a polling booth.
And I’ve always been a registered Democrat.
“Obama”* won a majority of the popular vote, 52.6 to 46.1 percent for McCain, and an Electoral College landslide, 364 to 163 so far, with 11 electoral votes yet to be awarded.
On election night, Obama’s media acolytes echoed his campaign talking point, insisting that the turnout was “huge,” in order to try and fool viewers into believing that he was much more popular than he was. This was an implicit continuation of their fraudulent pre-election polls, showing Obama with double-digit leads of up to 18 points.
*(On January 20, 2009, will a man be sworn in as America's President under an assumed name, or did the President-elect at some point change his legal name from Barry Soetoro to Barack Hussein Obama? Throughout this essay, quotation marks around the name Obama are implicit.)
But how, in a nation dominated by “racist white voters,” could Obama have had any chance at all?
Had the poll numbers been legitimate, Obama’s margin of victory would have exceeded Ronald Reagan’s 1984 popular vote landslide over Walter Mondale.
The phony polls were meant to discourage Republicans from voting, in order to ensure an Obama victory. The strategy was a national version of TV news divisions’ nearly successful 2000 ploy of announcing early that Gore had won Florida, in order to discourage Bush voters in Florida’s Panhandle, where the polls were open for another hour, from going to vote.
In 2004, the Democratic Party decided it would steal the election in Ohio, first by publicizing false exit poll numbers beginning in the early afternoon that showed John Kerry running away with the Buckeye State, and when that ruse failed, by getting ABC, CBS, and CNN to refrain from calling it for Bush, while working through the wee hours at “finding the votes” necessary, Daley-style, to steal Ohio back for Kerry.
The only reason we didn’t have another Al Gore-style crisis in 2004 was that, for once in his life, John Kerry did the right thing and threw in the towel, even if Dan Rather and Katie Couric refused to.
In 2008, the Party was determined not to let the same thing happen again. Helping McCain win the GOP nomination was a crucial piece of strategy.
Just over 125 million votes were cast. In 2004, during a less historic vote, 122 million votes were cast, even though at least five million more black, young, and fraudulent ACORN voters went to the polls this time.
(“Reporters” and “experts” keep telling us that the black portion of voters was “13.0%,” but the black portion of the citizenry is only 12.3 percent. Considering that at least one million black felons have lost the franchise, the black portion of eligible voters can’t be over 12.0 percent. On the other hand, if every instance of a “black voter” that ACORN “registered” to vote did so, and all of the voters in Philadelphia, where, as usual, there were more registered voters than living citizens voted, the black portion of the electorate might just have made it to 13 percent.
In 2007, “reporters” began claiming that blacks made up 13 percent of the citizenry, the Census be damned. I believe they were doing this out of loyalty to blacks, and in the face of the swelling numbers of Hispanics, who had just passed blacks as the nation’s leading “minority.”
The “experts” at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE), aka Wikipedia, go further to claim that, according to the 2000 Census, blacks comprise 13.8 percent of the American citizenry, and that in a mere 10 years—1990-2000—America’s black population rose 15 percent. Note that TPE’s claims are not linked to the U.S. Census, but instead to non-supporting “sources,” an old TPE trick.
In fact, the 2000 Census determined that 12.3 percent of America was black, not 13.8 percent, and the 1980 and 1990 Censuses determined that blacks comprised 11.7 and 12.1 percent of the country, respectively.)
The vast majority of the five million or more voters who stayed home or undervoted in this election (over and above those who undervoted last time) had likely voted Republican in 2004.
CNN Obama cheerleader—if you’ll pardon the redundancy—Gloria Berger gushed, “Obama used his money wisely in Florida,” in determining the identities of 600,000 black voters who were registered for the 2004 election but who did not vote, in order to ensure that every one of them voted this time.
Wisdom had nothing to do with it. A real journalist would have noted that, with a $640 million war chest, Obama had almost twice as much money as McCain, who had $370 million to work with. Obama’s advantage was due to his flouting of his former bedrock principle of public campaign financing, while McCain accepted the public financing limits. McCain adhered more to Democratic Party principles than Obama!
Just as Obama’s surrogates have done all along, in accusing McCain of racism, no matter how much he avoided race, they continued to lie, in claiming that Obama “reached out to many groups,” while asserting that McCain increasingly limited himself.
If only McCain had focused on wooing the white vote, as per the Sailer Strategy, he would have won. But that would have meant supporting Middle America, and John McCain would rather lose, and take the GOP and the country down in flames with him, than do that.
The Principle of Selling Out Your own Country
In October 2006, he grudgingly agreed to support border security:
He reverted to form on September 15, telling Mexican host Jorge Ramos on Spanish-language Univision TV of his intention to present an illegal alien amnesty plan “in the first day” of his administration.
McCain lost the Hispanic vote, 66-32 percent, or 67-31 percent, depending on the exit poll in question; pandering does not pay.
It is not alienating the Hispanic, but alienating the white vote that carries with it a high price for Republican politicians. In national elections, Hispanics almost always vote for Democrats 2-to-1 over Republicans. Even in the 2004 election, they chose John Kerry 61-39 percent over George Bush, though the MSM have promoted the myth that Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote ever since. And yet, even if we accepted the myth, it would still show that the Hispandering Bush decisively lost the Hispanic vote.
A Republican who had wooed the white vote, and then served the interests of white Americans, would have nothing to worry about from Hispanics, since roughly half of Hispanic Americans support enforcing the nation’s immigration laws; even if they didn’t support enforcement, they would be too small to avenge themselves on Republicans, given the over 60 percent support th elatter would get form whites; and a patriotic President serving and backed up by America’s historic majority would have little problem in deporting enough of the over 20 million foreign invaders in our midst, as well as the millions of their anchor baby children, (whom the Supreme Court has falsely claimed are citizens), that the rest would self-deport.
The problem with Hispanderers like McCain is that they are bringing about a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you refuse to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, because you assume the Hispanic invaders are taking over, then they will take over, but not because there was anything inevitable about the takeover.
We Love Barack!
CNN’s Obamanoids held a can-you-top-this competition, to see who could pay Obama the most mindless compliment.
Early on, David Gergen, still auditioning for his next White House job, invoked Martin Luther King’s “I Have been to the Mountaintop” speech.
(In his race-baiting of whites, there is no depth to which Gergen has not been willing to stoop. Yet these days, TV agitprop is so leftwing that Gergen passes for a “conservative.”)
Roland Martin, who is black, claimed that other candidates said “I,” while Obama said “we us our.” Martin waxed biblical, invoking Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem.
White socialist Jeffrey Toobin simply seconded Martin.
Hilary Rosen, the editor of the Obamanoid Huffington Post, remembered to say it was a “post-racial election.”
It’s Already 2050
CNN’s champion Obama groupies proved to be Gloria Berger and Soledad O’Brien, who were apparently also auditioning for the Obama White House. Berger, who is white, kept repeating, “He’s got the power!”
O’Brien is yet another mulatto child of a devoted white parent (her father) who grew up privileged, has benefited her entire professional life from affirmative action, and hates whites. She could not control herself, and spilled out Obama’s true message of white disenfranchisement. After swooning over Obama’s numbers among black, Hispanic, and young voters she opined, “So, there is definitely this issue of inclusion. Also, it’s the symbol of the new America, the America of 2050, in which minorities are the majority. It’s not the America of Joe the Plumber.”
“Inclusion”=Exclusion.
O'Brien: “It’s a symbol to so many people who waited such a long time, and it’s a new age.”
But I thought it “wasn’t about race”?
At least, O’Brien didn’t make us wait until 2050—or 2042 or even 2030—to learn what she and her comrades have planned for us.
At no point during the night did any CNN talking head mention that McCain had won the white vote (55-43 percent). Caring about the white vote is s-o-o-o 2049. After all, everyone knows that Hispanics' seven percent of votes count for much more than whites' mere 75 percent of votes.
Donna Brazille got in too late to do much gushing, but her presence alone was significant. She’s been ubiquitous as a paid TV talking head since the 2000 election, which is my point.
When the Democrats decided to try and steal that election, Brazille, who was Al Gore’s campaign manager, spread the most despicable of all the post-Election Day hoax stories, claiming that at Florida polling places, police were chasing off black voters with guns and dogs.
In a sane world, Brazille’s name would have become the political equivalent of journalism hoaxer Janet Cooke, and she would have been lucky to get a counter job at a McDonald’s. Instead, she was treated like royalty by the Democratic Party’s TV and publishing agitprop divisions, and became rich.
What was striking about this election was not the MSM’s power, but the crudeness of their cheerleading for Obama. They made no effort to conceal their support for him, or their dirty tricks against McCain and Palin.
Nor were they embarrassed. These are people, after all who, when they ogle the Anointed One’s crotch on his campaign plane, shout at a Secret Service agent to get out of their line of sight.
Didn’t John McCain realize, say, after the 100th op-ed or TV “news” story accusing his every criticism of Obama, no matter how racially neutral, of being “deliberately and deceptively racist,” that he’d been had by his media “friends”? Or perhaps after the thousandth puff piece on the Obamas, or vicious personal attack on Sarah Palin (e.g., claiming that her new baby was really her daughter’s child), or the refusal of the MSM to investigate Obama? Did McCain ever realize that he’d sacrificed the First Amendment, to bribe the MSM with “campaign finance reform,” and gotten nothing in return? Did any of his aides beg him to take off the gloves? He had nothing to lose, and everything to gain by making media corruption and anti-white racism the issue.
When he finally could have put his notorious nastiness to good use, McCain suddenly became Sen. Nice. Did the MSM blackmail him, by threatening to publish choice quotes from the Straight Talk Express 2000, if he got aggressive?
On January 8, following McCain’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, I wrote:
They did that, so that he could win the GOP nomination, and they could then deliver the coup de grace during the general election campaign, just as they’d planned to do in 2000, before George W. Bush derailed the Straight Talk Express.
More Rhetorical Magic Shows
In Obama’s victory speech, he skillfully mixed his two contradictory messages: “There’s one America, not two!” and “Yes, we can!” His best use of deception was in quoting from King’s “Mountaintop” speech: “We will get there as a people.” He can insist that he meant the entire American people, but blacks know full well that he meant them.
All year long, blacks kept up the public ruse of saying, “It’s not about race,” and the media collaborated with them on it. Then, once both groups got what they wanted, blacks dropped the pretext, and the media were beside themselves with happiness for their allies.
Logically, now that they’ve reached “the promised land,” blacks should no longer be screaming “racism” morning, noon, and night. And if you believe that, I’ve got a great deal for you on a plot of federal land on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Patriotism
Usually, I have a visceral relation to presidents whose administrations I’ve lived through, and an academic relation to those who were elected when I was very young, or not yet born. I have neither type of relationship to Ronald Reagan. I split the run-up to the 1980 Republican National Convention between college and washing pots, and lacked access to a TV. Shortly after the convention, I left the country, and lived in then-West Germany for over five years. By the time of my return, Reagan was a lame duck. I was in grad school then, and didn’t buy my first TV—a used, 9” B&W for $10—until 1986.
Having been raised a liberal Democrat, I was hostile towards Reagan. But he was my President.
(I’m no longer hostile towards him, but the man remains a mystery to me.)
In 1981, when he was shot, I was working on a West German assembly line, and almost punched out the gloating Turk who told me.
In 1985, while visiting with 85-year-old West German legal philosopher Erich Fechner, the subject of Reagan came up. I said I didn’t like him, “Aber er is nun mein President.” (“But he is my president.”)
“Sie sind Patriot,” responded my host. (“You’re a patriot.”)
I was deeply flattered.
I’m still a patriot, and that is why "Barack Obama," whatever his real name is, is not my President. He will never be my President.
Though I had a cold and my feet hurt, I ran most of the way to the polling place on Election Day. I got in at 8:56 p.m., the last voter.
But I didn’t go to vote. I knew I had nowhere to go.
Had he been on the ballot, I would likely have voted for the Constitution Party candidate, Chuck Baldwin, for President.
The ballot listed Ralph Nader (Populist); Bob Barr (Libertarian); Cynthia McKinney (Green); Gloria LaRiva (Socialist and Liberation parties); Roger Calero (Socialist Workers) … and the other two. Of seven candidates, four were communists, and one (Nader) was a socialist. That must be some kind of record.
That left the man who had switched parties, only to be ambushed by his adopted party (Media); who had switched peoples, only to be rejected by his adopted people (Hispanics); and who, in an election that was all about race, and in which he had both extraordinary disadvantages and advantages, refused to engage the enemy. John McCain had all the fearsomeness of a lone National Guardsman marching through a riot zone, carrying an unloaded weapon.
(Disadvantages: George W. Bush, the diversity meltdown; advantages: The fact that his Democratic opponent was a black supremacist, a socialist at best and communist at worst, and crook; that approximately 75 percent of eligible voters were white; and that the immigration issue was sitting there, waiting for him to pick it up and run with it).
In McCain’s concession speech, he said, “We [Americans] never give up, we never quit, we don’t hide from history, we make history.”
But in letting his racist, Marxist opponent set the terms of debate, McCain gave up before he ever got started. Faced with the historic challenge of a thoroughly racialized election, John McCain ran screaming from history.
And so, for the second consecutive major election, I voted for no one.
(My family doesn’t know this. They gave me strict orders to vote for McCain. Let that be our little secret.)
In 2005, incumbent New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a liberal Democrat running as a Republican, was challenged by official Democratic candidate, Fernando “Freddie” Ferrer. Both were hostile towards working and middle-class whites and Asians (my wife is of Indian descent).
In 2008, as in 2005, I pulled the steel bar to the right, to close the booth’s curtains, and then, without voting for a candidate, back to the left, to re-open them and register my undervote.
That I went to the polls at all last Tuesday, was out of religious observance. I was raised an Orthodox Democrat; in my family, we worshiped FDR.
Every year, my Hungarian-born Nana (1893?-1976) went to vote, and needed only to know where the Democratic column was. She’d push down each lever in the row, regardless of whether she’d ever even heard of the candidate.
It would have been an act of sacrilege for me to spend an entire Election Day, without entering a polling booth.
And I’ve always been a registered Democrat.
“Obama”* won a majority of the popular vote, 52.6 to 46.1 percent for McCain, and an Electoral College landslide, 364 to 163 so far, with 11 electoral votes yet to be awarded.
On election night, Obama’s media acolytes echoed his campaign talking point, insisting that the turnout was “huge,” in order to try and fool viewers into believing that he was much more popular than he was. This was an implicit continuation of their fraudulent pre-election polls, showing Obama with double-digit leads of up to 18 points.
*(On January 20, 2009, will a man be sworn in as America's President under an assumed name, or did the President-elect at some point change his legal name from Barry Soetoro to Barack Hussein Obama? Throughout this essay, quotation marks around the name Obama are implicit.)
But how, in a nation dominated by “racist white voters,” could Obama have had any chance at all?
Had the poll numbers been legitimate, Obama’s margin of victory would have exceeded Ronald Reagan’s 1984 popular vote landslide over Walter Mondale.
The phony polls were meant to discourage Republicans from voting, in order to ensure an Obama victory. The strategy was a national version of TV news divisions’ nearly successful 2000 ploy of announcing early that Gore had won Florida, in order to discourage Bush voters in Florida’s Panhandle, where the polls were open for another hour, from going to vote.
In 2004, the Democratic Party decided it would steal the election in Ohio, first by publicizing false exit poll numbers beginning in the early afternoon that showed John Kerry running away with the Buckeye State, and when that ruse failed, by getting ABC, CBS, and CNN to refrain from calling it for Bush, while working through the wee hours at “finding the votes” necessary, Daley-style, to steal Ohio back for Kerry.
The only reason we didn’t have another Al Gore-style crisis in 2004 was that, for once in his life, John Kerry did the right thing and threw in the towel, even if Dan Rather and Katie Couric refused to.
In 2008, the Party was determined not to let the same thing happen again. Helping McCain win the GOP nomination was a crucial piece of strategy.
Just over 125 million votes were cast. In 2004, during a less historic vote, 122 million votes were cast, even though at least five million more black, young, and fraudulent ACORN voters went to the polls this time.
(“Reporters” and “experts” keep telling us that the black portion of voters was “13.0%,” but the black portion of the citizenry is only 12.3 percent. Considering that at least one million black felons have lost the franchise, the black portion of eligible voters can’t be over 12.0 percent. On the other hand, if every instance of a “black voter” that ACORN “registered” to vote did so, and all of the voters in Philadelphia, where, as usual, there were more registered voters than living citizens voted, the black portion of the electorate might just have made it to 13 percent.
In 2007, “reporters” began claiming that blacks made up 13 percent of the citizenry, the Census be damned. I believe they were doing this out of loyalty to blacks, and in the face of the swelling numbers of Hispanics, who had just passed blacks as the nation’s leading “minority.”
The “experts” at The Pretend Encyclopedia (TPE), aka Wikipedia, go further to claim that, according to the 2000 Census, blacks comprise 13.8 percent of the American citizenry, and that in a mere 10 years—1990-2000—America’s black population rose 15 percent. Note that TPE’s claims are not linked to the U.S. Census, but instead to non-supporting “sources,” an old TPE trick.
In fact, the 2000 Census determined that 12.3 percent of America was black, not 13.8 percent, and the 1980 and 1990 Censuses determined that blacks comprised 11.7 and 12.1 percent of the country, respectively.)
The vast majority of the five million or more voters who stayed home or undervoted in this election (over and above those who undervoted last time) had likely voted Republican in 2004.
CNN Obama cheerleader—if you’ll pardon the redundancy—Gloria Berger gushed, “Obama used his money wisely in Florida,” in determining the identities of 600,000 black voters who were registered for the 2004 election but who did not vote, in order to ensure that every one of them voted this time.
Wisdom had nothing to do with it. A real journalist would have noted that, with a $640 million war chest, Obama had almost twice as much money as McCain, who had $370 million to work with. Obama’s advantage was due to his flouting of his former bedrock principle of public campaign financing, while McCain accepted the public financing limits. McCain adhered more to Democratic Party principles than Obama!
Just as Obama’s surrogates have done all along, in accusing McCain of racism, no matter how much he avoided race, they continued to lie, in claiming that Obama “reached out to many groups,” while asserting that McCain increasingly limited himself.
If only McCain had focused on wooing the white vote, as per the Sailer Strategy, he would have won. But that would have meant supporting Middle America, and John McCain would rather lose, and take the GOP and the country down in flames with him, than do that.
The Principle of Selling Out Your own Country
In October 2006, he grudgingly agreed to support border security:
A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. “In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,” he said. “In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.” Then he added, unable to help himself, “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.”
He reverted to form on September 15, telling Mexican host Jorge Ramos on Spanish-language Univision TV of his intention to present an illegal alien amnesty plan “in the first day” of his administration.
McCain lost the Hispanic vote, 66-32 percent, or 67-31 percent, depending on the exit poll in question; pandering does not pay.
It is not alienating the Hispanic, but alienating the white vote that carries with it a high price for Republican politicians. In national elections, Hispanics almost always vote for Democrats 2-to-1 over Republicans. Even in the 2004 election, they chose John Kerry 61-39 percent over George Bush, though the MSM have promoted the myth that Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote ever since. And yet, even if we accepted the myth, it would still show that the Hispandering Bush decisively lost the Hispanic vote.
A Republican who had wooed the white vote, and then served the interests of white Americans, would have nothing to worry about from Hispanics, since roughly half of Hispanic Americans support enforcing the nation’s immigration laws; even if they didn’t support enforcement, they would be too small to avenge themselves on Republicans, given the over 60 percent support th elatter would get form whites; and a patriotic President serving and backed up by America’s historic majority would have little problem in deporting enough of the over 20 million foreign invaders in our midst, as well as the millions of their anchor baby children, (whom the Supreme Court has falsely claimed are citizens), that the rest would self-deport.
The problem with Hispanderers like McCain is that they are bringing about a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you refuse to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, because you assume the Hispanic invaders are taking over, then they will take over, but not because there was anything inevitable about the takeover.
We Love Barack!
CNN’s Obamanoids held a can-you-top-this competition, to see who could pay Obama the most mindless compliment.
Early on, David Gergen, still auditioning for his next White House job, invoked Martin Luther King’s “I Have been to the Mountaintop” speech.
(In his race-baiting of whites, there is no depth to which Gergen has not been willing to stoop. Yet these days, TV agitprop is so leftwing that Gergen passes for a “conservative.”)
Roland Martin, who is black, claimed that other candidates said “I,” while Obama said “we us our.” Martin waxed biblical, invoking Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem.
White socialist Jeffrey Toobin simply seconded Martin.
Hilary Rosen, the editor of the Obamanoid Huffington Post, remembered to say it was a “post-racial election.”
It’s Already 2050
CNN’s champion Obama groupies proved to be Gloria Berger and Soledad O’Brien, who were apparently also auditioning for the Obama White House. Berger, who is white, kept repeating, “He’s got the power!”
O’Brien is yet another mulatto child of a devoted white parent (her father) who grew up privileged, has benefited her entire professional life from affirmative action, and hates whites. She could not control herself, and spilled out Obama’s true message of white disenfranchisement. After swooning over Obama’s numbers among black, Hispanic, and young voters she opined, “So, there is definitely this issue of inclusion. Also, it’s the symbol of the new America, the America of 2050, in which minorities are the majority. It’s not the America of Joe the Plumber.”
“Inclusion”=Exclusion.
O'Brien: “It’s a symbol to so many people who waited such a long time, and it’s a new age.”
But I thought it “wasn’t about race”?
At least, O’Brien didn’t make us wait until 2050—or 2042 or even 2030—to learn what she and her comrades have planned for us.
At no point during the night did any CNN talking head mention that McCain had won the white vote (55-43 percent). Caring about the white vote is s-o-o-o 2049. After all, everyone knows that Hispanics' seven percent of votes count for much more than whites' mere 75 percent of votes.
Donna Brazille got in too late to do much gushing, but her presence alone was significant. She’s been ubiquitous as a paid TV talking head since the 2000 election, which is my point.
When the Democrats decided to try and steal that election, Brazille, who was Al Gore’s campaign manager, spread the most despicable of all the post-Election Day hoax stories, claiming that at Florida polling places, police were chasing off black voters with guns and dogs.
In a sane world, Brazille’s name would have become the political equivalent of journalism hoaxer Janet Cooke, and she would have been lucky to get a counter job at a McDonald’s. Instead, she was treated like royalty by the Democratic Party’s TV and publishing agitprop divisions, and became rich.
What was striking about this election was not the MSM’s power, but the crudeness of their cheerleading for Obama. They made no effort to conceal their support for him, or their dirty tricks against McCain and Palin.
Nor were they embarrassed. These are people, after all who, when they ogle the Anointed One’s crotch on his campaign plane, shout at a Secret Service agent to get out of their line of sight.
Didn’t John McCain realize, say, after the 100th op-ed or TV “news” story accusing his every criticism of Obama, no matter how racially neutral, of being “deliberately and deceptively racist,” that he’d been had by his media “friends”? Or perhaps after the thousandth puff piece on the Obamas, or vicious personal attack on Sarah Palin (e.g., claiming that her new baby was really her daughter’s child), or the refusal of the MSM to investigate Obama? Did McCain ever realize that he’d sacrificed the First Amendment, to bribe the MSM with “campaign finance reform,” and gotten nothing in return? Did any of his aides beg him to take off the gloves? He had nothing to lose, and everything to gain by making media corruption and anti-white racism the issue.
When he finally could have put his notorious nastiness to good use, McCain suddenly became Sen. Nice. Did the MSM blackmail him, by threatening to publish choice quotes from the Straight Talk Express 2000, if he got aggressive?
On January 8, following McCain’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, I wrote:
This is amazing, when you consider that:
1. McCain is the media’s own Frankenstein monster, created in 2000, and that the media brought his campaign back from the dead months ago, and kept it alive…
They did that, so that he could win the GOP nomination, and they could then deliver the coup de grace during the general election campaign, just as they’d planned to do in 2000, before George W. Bush derailed the Straight Talk Express.
More Rhetorical Magic Shows
In Obama’s victory speech, he skillfully mixed his two contradictory messages: “There’s one America, not two!” and “Yes, we can!” His best use of deception was in quoting from King’s “Mountaintop” speech: “We will get there as a people.” He can insist that he meant the entire American people, but blacks know full well that he meant them.
All year long, blacks kept up the public ruse of saying, “It’s not about race,” and the media collaborated with them on it. Then, once both groups got what they wanted, blacks dropped the pretext, and the media were beside themselves with happiness for their allies.
Logically, now that they’ve reached “the promised land,” blacks should no longer be screaming “racism” morning, noon, and night. And if you believe that, I’ve got a great deal for you on a plot of federal land on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Patriotism
Usually, I have a visceral relation to presidents whose administrations I’ve lived through, and an academic relation to those who were elected when I was very young, or not yet born. I have neither type of relationship to Ronald Reagan. I split the run-up to the 1980 Republican National Convention between college and washing pots, and lacked access to a TV. Shortly after the convention, I left the country, and lived in then-West Germany for over five years. By the time of my return, Reagan was a lame duck. I was in grad school then, and didn’t buy my first TV—a used, 9” B&W for $10—until 1986.
Having been raised a liberal Democrat, I was hostile towards Reagan. But he was my President.
(I’m no longer hostile towards him, but the man remains a mystery to me.)
In 1981, when he was shot, I was working on a West German assembly line, and almost punched out the gloating Turk who told me.
In 1985, while visiting with 85-year-old West German legal philosopher Erich Fechner, the subject of Reagan came up. I said I didn’t like him, “Aber er is nun mein President.” (“But he is my president.”)
“Sie sind Patriot,” responded my host. (“You’re a patriot.”)
I was deeply flattered.
I’m still a patriot, and that is why "Barack Obama," whatever his real name is, is not my President. He will never be my President.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Whom is David Brooks Currently Serving?
By Nicholas Stix
The following letter came from a reader one month ago, but I just responded to it a couple of days ago. As I’ve said before, I’m not sure if “David Brooks” and “David Brock” are really two different people. Has anyone ever seen them in the same room together?
In a message dated 10/8/2008 5:35:39 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, **********@att.net writes:
Subject: WEBCommentary.com Comments/Feedback to Contributor
Comments/Questions/Feedback: Just finished reading your Krauthammer/Brooks column.
Now that Brooks has stated that Palin "represents a cancer on the
Republican Party" and that Obama will win by nine points, what do you
think?
NS: I'm shocked. Not that Brooks would despise Palin—he's always despised populists—but that he would say so, since he knew that doing so would harm McCain. Brooks had supported McCain for at least nine years, going back to his days at the weekly standard.
But Brooks is a courtier. The question then is, Who is he courting? The biggest power in his professional life right now, is his publisher, Pinch Sulzberger. Granted, Pinch is a communist, but as a courtier, Brooks is going to do whatever he thinks will protect him and his family. And when he jumped ship to the Times, he put himself at Sulzberger's mercy.
If I'm wrong, look for Brooks to jump ship from the Times to whoever he was doing a favor by planting the shiv in John McCain's back.
The following letter came from a reader one month ago, but I just responded to it a couple of days ago. As I’ve said before, I’m not sure if “David Brooks” and “David Brock” are really two different people. Has anyone ever seen them in the same room together?
In a message dated 10/8/2008 5:35:39 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, **********@att.net writes:
Subject: WEBCommentary.com Comments/Feedback to Contributor
Comments/Questions/Feedback: Just finished reading your Krauthammer/Brooks column.
Now that Brooks has stated that Palin "represents a cancer on the
Republican Party" and that Obama will win by nine points, what do you
think?
NS: I'm shocked. Not that Brooks would despise Palin—he's always despised populists—but that he would say so, since he knew that doing so would harm McCain. Brooks had supported McCain for at least nine years, going back to his days at the weekly standard.
But Brooks is a courtier. The question then is, Who is he courting? The biggest power in his professional life right now, is his publisher, Pinch Sulzberger. Granted, Pinch is a communist, but as a courtier, Brooks is going to do whatever he thinks will protect him and his family. And when he jumped ship to the Times, he put himself at Sulzberger's mercy.
If I'm wrong, look for Brooks to jump ship from the Times to whoever he was doing a favor by planting the shiv in John McCain's back.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
GOP Web Sites Suppress Immigration Debate
(For one side of the explanation why “Barack Obama” had such an easy time of it in this election, read the following article from March, 2005. The other side is, of course, the thinly veiled MSM conspiracy to rig the election for the black supremacist-communist candidate.)
By Nicholas Stix
In the wake of the 2004 election, many supporters of Pres. Bush have spoken of “The death of Old Media,” which they believe have been supplanted by “New Media,” including the Internet, and of a 50-year GOP reign.
Republican activists accurately depict the Old Media as suppressing wide-ranging debate. And yet, the New Media are also being used to silence dissent. The owners of influential Republican Web sites, most notably freerepublic.com, lucianne.com, and townhall.com, have largely made discussions of immigration reform taboo, by banning any material from prominent Web sites and writers who call for the enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Meanwhile, Pres. Bush seeks anew to impose his stealth amnesty (aka guest worker program) for illegal immigrants on the American people, which his own party’s base and the public at large oppose, without the matter being debated.
Free Republic, founded in 1996 by retired seaman and Vietnam veteran Jim Robinson, has over 100,000 registered members, including this writer. “FR” was influential as a gathering point for GOP activists in the 2000 and 2004 elections, and still sponsors rallies, counter-demonstrations, and fundraisers around the country. For most members, who are known as “FReepers,” FR is a place to post, read, and debate political articles. FR is run through donations.
The site achieved its high point last September, when it spearheaded the exposure of Dan Rather’s use of forged “documents” in an attempt to smear Pres. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record, in the Rathergate/Memogate scandal.
Although a large plurality of FReepers support immigration enforcement, Jim Robinson has little tolerance for that position. His computer software automatically blocks any posts linking to the premier anti-illegal immigration Web site, VDARE.com, and his moderators delete any posts of articles by prominent restrictionist writer Steve Sailer. When I once sought to post one of Sailer’s articles, Robinson threatened to ban me from the site.
Meanwhile, Robinson permits writings by the open borders lobby (which Michelle Malkin has dubbed “OBL”), effectively rigging the debate.
On February 11, William Gheen, the president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC wrote at VDARE, “The shot heard around the Internet has been fired on FreeRepublic.com. The owner Jim Robinson and his moderators have launched a sniper style purge against members that disagree with the President's 'guest worker' amnesty or support more control of illegal immigration.”
Actually, the purge has been ongoing since at least November, 2000.
Robinson’s practices give the lie to his defense in a 1998 Los Angeles Times/Washington Post copyright infringement lawsuit, which he lost: “Before creating Free Republic, Robinson frequented other internet discussion sites and was frustrated by their censorship and restrictions on free expression of ideas.”
Steve Sailer responded to a query from Middle American News with an e-mail:
“My work seems to be more acceptable at the New York Times than at Free Republic.
“I got permanently banned, along with the rest of VDARE, after somebody posted this article on Free Republic back in late 2000 [“GOP Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote”], in which I argue that the GOP didn't have to sell out on immigration to get more Hispanic votes to remain electable. All it had to do was boost its share of the white vote from the 54% that Bush won in 2000 to 57%. And indeed, that's what happened, with Bush getting 58% of the white vote in 2004 and winning.”
VDARE has since dubbed Sailer’s advice “the Sailer Strategy.”
Robinson has also banned the restrictionist Web site American Patrol.
The only prominent critic of illegal immigration who may be posted at FR is Michelle Malkin. Significantly, the banned writers are white, while Malkin is of Filipino descent.
Robinson notwithstanding, in a mid-February opinion poll at FR, of 3,812 members who responded, 94.2% agreed with the statement, “I OPPOSE open borders and illegal immigration,” 3.3% were undecided, and only 2.5% agreed with the statement, “I SUPPORT open borders and illegal immigration.”
In a telephone interview, VDARE publisher Peter Brimelow said of Jim Robinson, “He’s found a niche in that part of the ‘great civil war’ that’s breaking out in the conservative movement.”
Robinson did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this article.
At Lucianne.com, owned by Lucianne Goldberg, things are even worse, in terms of diversity of opinion. Searches of the site in early to mid-February turned up no American restrictionist writings. Already in 2000, under various pretexts, Goldberg was notorious for banning members for any and no reason, and banned all manner of conservative Web sites, while permitting unlimited postings from liberal, libertarian, and neoconservative OBL organs such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review and weekly standard.
Lucianne Goldberg is a veteran Republican political operative best known for inducing Pentagon official Linda Tripp, who thought Goldberg was her friend, to secretly tape record conversations Tripp had in 1997 with her friend, White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The tape recordings proved that President Clinton was having an affair with Lewinsky.
Goldberg’s career on the Internet followed a similar trajectory. In the late 1990s, she established herself as a personality at Free Republic, where she was known as “Trixie,” until she had developed enough of a following to found her own Web site. To induce her FReeper fans to leave FR in 1999 for her new site, Goldberg charged Jim Robinson with anti-Semitism.
Neither Goldberg nor her editor-in-chief, Amy Sheehan, responded to e-mail queries from Middle American News.
Townhall.com, which is run by the Heritage Foundation, is one of the most influential sites on the Internet. Town Hall’s most popular feature is its roll of over 50 syndicated Republican columnists, of whom only Michelle Malkin clearly supports the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. The site used to regularly publish the influential restrictionist columnists Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts, but dropped both in the course of 2004.
Townhall.com editor Jonathan Garthwaite did not respond to e-mail and telephone queries from Middle American News for this story. Columnist and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who is also the editor of the paleoconservative American Conservative magazine, responded by e-mail to a query from Middle American News, “To my knowledge, Heritage and Townhall.com only rarely carry my column as I have not always been in agreement with that brand of conservatism.”
A source from Heritage, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the lack of immigration enforcement voices at Heritage/Town Hall is due to two problems. First, “They’re too damn close to the GOP!” Second, as an organization dependent on donations, and given conservatism’s split between social conservatives and libertarians, discussion of any position “is guaranteed to tick off 50% of their supporters.”
In neocon magazine Commentary’s October 2002 issue, Joshua Muravchik argued that the sort of issues raised by conservatives critical of the GOP and of neoconservatism – race, ethnicity, the welfare state – simply have no place in conservatism.
In a telephone interview with Middle American News, Pat Buchanan summed up the conflict thusly,
If the GOP’s editorial bosses refuse to permit respectable, rational criticism of policies killing off American sovereignty, the members of the GOP’s conservative majority shall find themselves with different standard bearers and media, and possibly, a different party.
Meanwhile, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is triangulating in the manner of the master, Bill Clinton, for the 2008 presidential election. With her ear closer to the ground than the GOP leadership, the hard-core leftist senator has come out with a stand against illegal immigration that is far to the right of the GOP. So much for the Republican Party’s 50-year political empire.
Originally published in Middle American News.
By Nicholas Stix
In the wake of the 2004 election, many supporters of Pres. Bush have spoken of “The death of Old Media,” which they believe have been supplanted by “New Media,” including the Internet, and of a 50-year GOP reign.
Republican activists accurately depict the Old Media as suppressing wide-ranging debate. And yet, the New Media are also being used to silence dissent. The owners of influential Republican Web sites, most notably freerepublic.com, lucianne.com, and townhall.com, have largely made discussions of immigration reform taboo, by banning any material from prominent Web sites and writers who call for the enforcement of America’s immigration laws. Meanwhile, Pres. Bush seeks anew to impose his stealth amnesty (aka guest worker program) for illegal immigrants on the American people, which his own party’s base and the public at large oppose, without the matter being debated.
Free Republic, founded in 1996 by retired seaman and Vietnam veteran Jim Robinson, has over 100,000 registered members, including this writer. “FR” was influential as a gathering point for GOP activists in the 2000 and 2004 elections, and still sponsors rallies, counter-demonstrations, and fundraisers around the country. For most members, who are known as “FReepers,” FR is a place to post, read, and debate political articles. FR is run through donations.
The site achieved its high point last September, when it spearheaded the exposure of Dan Rather’s use of forged “documents” in an attempt to smear Pres. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record, in the Rathergate/Memogate scandal.
Although a large plurality of FReepers support immigration enforcement, Jim Robinson has little tolerance for that position. His computer software automatically blocks any posts linking to the premier anti-illegal immigration Web site, VDARE.com, and his moderators delete any posts of articles by prominent restrictionist writer Steve Sailer. When I once sought to post one of Sailer’s articles, Robinson threatened to ban me from the site.
Meanwhile, Robinson permits writings by the open borders lobby (which Michelle Malkin has dubbed “OBL”), effectively rigging the debate.
On February 11, William Gheen, the president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC wrote at VDARE, “The shot heard around the Internet has been fired on FreeRepublic.com. The owner Jim Robinson and his moderators have launched a sniper style purge against members that disagree with the President's 'guest worker' amnesty or support more control of illegal immigration.”
Actually, the purge has been ongoing since at least November, 2000.
Robinson’s practices give the lie to his defense in a 1998 Los Angeles Times/Washington Post copyright infringement lawsuit, which he lost: “Before creating Free Republic, Robinson frequented other internet discussion sites and was frustrated by their censorship and restrictions on free expression of ideas.”
Steve Sailer responded to a query from Middle American News with an e-mail:
“My work seems to be more acceptable at the New York Times than at Free Republic.
“I got permanently banned, along with the rest of VDARE, after somebody posted this article on Free Republic back in late 2000 [“GOP Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote”], in which I argue that the GOP didn't have to sell out on immigration to get more Hispanic votes to remain electable. All it had to do was boost its share of the white vote from the 54% that Bush won in 2000 to 57%. And indeed, that's what happened, with Bush getting 58% of the white vote in 2004 and winning.”
VDARE has since dubbed Sailer’s advice “the Sailer Strategy.”
Robinson has also banned the restrictionist Web site American Patrol.
The only prominent critic of illegal immigration who may be posted at FR is Michelle Malkin. Significantly, the banned writers are white, while Malkin is of Filipino descent.
Robinson notwithstanding, in a mid-February opinion poll at FR, of 3,812 members who responded, 94.2% agreed with the statement, “I OPPOSE open borders and illegal immigration,” 3.3% were undecided, and only 2.5% agreed with the statement, “I SUPPORT open borders and illegal immigration.”
In a telephone interview, VDARE publisher Peter Brimelow said of Jim Robinson, “He’s found a niche in that part of the ‘great civil war’ that’s breaking out in the conservative movement.”
Robinson did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this article.
At Lucianne.com, owned by Lucianne Goldberg, things are even worse, in terms of diversity of opinion. Searches of the site in early to mid-February turned up no American restrictionist writings. Already in 2000, under various pretexts, Goldberg was notorious for banning members for any and no reason, and banned all manner of conservative Web sites, while permitting unlimited postings from liberal, libertarian, and neoconservative OBL organs such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review and weekly standard.
Lucianne Goldberg is a veteran Republican political operative best known for inducing Pentagon official Linda Tripp, who thought Goldberg was her friend, to secretly tape record conversations Tripp had in 1997 with her friend, White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The tape recordings proved that President Clinton was having an affair with Lewinsky.
Goldberg’s career on the Internet followed a similar trajectory. In the late 1990s, she established herself as a personality at Free Republic, where she was known as “Trixie,” until she had developed enough of a following to found her own Web site. To induce her FReeper fans to leave FR in 1999 for her new site, Goldberg charged Jim Robinson with anti-Semitism.
Neither Goldberg nor her editor-in-chief, Amy Sheehan, responded to e-mail queries from Middle American News.
Townhall.com, which is run by the Heritage Foundation, is one of the most influential sites on the Internet. Town Hall’s most popular feature is its roll of over 50 syndicated Republican columnists, of whom only Michelle Malkin clearly supports the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. The site used to regularly publish the influential restrictionist columnists Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts, but dropped both in the course of 2004.
Townhall.com editor Jonathan Garthwaite did not respond to e-mail and telephone queries from Middle American News for this story. Columnist and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who is also the editor of the paleoconservative American Conservative magazine, responded by e-mail to a query from Middle American News, “To my knowledge, Heritage and Townhall.com only rarely carry my column as I have not always been in agreement with that brand of conservatism.”
A source from Heritage, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the lack of immigration enforcement voices at Heritage/Town Hall is due to two problems. First, “They’re too damn close to the GOP!” Second, as an organization dependent on donations, and given conservatism’s split between social conservatives and libertarians, discussion of any position “is guaranteed to tick off 50% of their supporters.”
In neocon magazine Commentary’s October 2002 issue, Joshua Muravchik argued that the sort of issues raised by conservatives critical of the GOP and of neoconservatism – race, ethnicity, the welfare state – simply have no place in conservatism.
In a telephone interview with Middle American News, Pat Buchanan summed up the conflict thusly,
The neoconservatives, I think are, given their roots, wherever you want to place them, by nature intolerant of dissent. They are not conservatives in the old tradition of National Review, where there was a robust contest every two weeks, with Russell Kirk and Frank Myer and James Burnham and Buckley and Whittaker Chambers... They could [unclear] disagree, but it was a wonderful magazine. My feeling is that the neoconservatives fundamentally come out of the Left. You find it in the rhetoric, the constant iteration of the use of the word ‘fascist,’ and the kind of demonizing rhetoric that the Left has always used and the idea that the other points of view on the right not only don’t have to be answered but they ought to be squashed.
… with regard to immigration, we’ve had many of the old Republican conservatives [who] were both protectionists and in favor of restrictive immigration policies, so you could assimilate immigrants and that’s all consistent with traditional Republicanism and conservatism. And the idea’s been demonized, and more than demonized, it’s been denied a hearing. That suggests that the people who are now defining conservatism are not really conservatives at all.
If the GOP’s editorial bosses refuse to permit respectable, rational criticism of policies killing off American sovereignty, the members of the GOP’s conservative majority shall find themselves with different standard bearers and media, and possibly, a different party.
Meanwhile, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is triangulating in the manner of the master, Bill Clinton, for the 2008 presidential election. With her ear closer to the ground than the GOP leadership, the hard-core leftist senator has come out with a stand against illegal immigration that is far to the right of the GOP. So much for the Republican Party’s 50-year political empire.
Monday, November 03, 2008
The General Patton of the Testing Wars
by Nicholas Stix
March 10, 2004
A week doesn’t go by, without a mainstream media story on the “horrors” of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.
The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that columnists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.
For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers’ unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing.
As Phelps tells it, Kill the Messenger “is as much about censorship and professional arrogance as it is about testing.” The author contends that the teachers and administrators who control the public education monopoly, and the teacher education professors who monopolize teacher credentialing, oppose standardized testing in order to shield themselves from public scrutiny and accountability. “…it is disturbing, because school administrators and education professors represent a group of public servants who should serve as models to our children. We pay them high salaries and give them very secure jobs. Then, we give them our children. Is just a little bit of external, objective evaluation of what they do with our money and our children really asking so much.”
Influential test-bashers include Walter Haney, Linda McNeil of Rice University, Harvard’s Howard Gardner, University of California president Richard Atkinson, writers Alfie Kohn and Nicholas Lemann, the privately funded organization, Fair Test, and the taxpayer-funded organizations, CRESST at UCLA, and Boston College’s CSTEEP. (CRESST stands for “National Center for Research on Evaluations, Standards, and Student Testing”; CSTEEP stands for “the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy.”)
Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children’s academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. “Objective” is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. “External” means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. “Standardized” means that a test “is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way.” And “high stakes” means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and “portfolios” of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.
Phelps sets out test-bashers’ strategies and tactics; presents case studies of campaigns against the SAT, the Texas teachers’ literacy test, and the 2000 October Surprise attack on the “Texas Miracle” of educational progress under then-Gov. George W. Bush; media coverage; the “benefits of testing”; legitimate concerns about testing; and “alternatives to standardized testing.” Two appended glossaries translate test-bashers’ Orwellian jargon, and explain testing terms. Richard Phelps drives through the armies of test-bashers like Patton’s Third Army cutting through France in the summer of ‘44. He catalogues and refutes the misrepresentations they have spread.
For instance, test-bashers have for years insisted that American students are tested more than students in any other country, and that high-stakes, standardized testing causes dropout rates to increase, and educators to “teach to the test.” And liberal reporters eat this stuff up!
Phelps scolds the test-bashers for being too lazy to make a couple of calls abroad, to determine that their assumption is false. “Virtually every other industrialized country in the world tests its students more, and with greater consequences riding on the results, than we do.” He shows how education professor Walter Haney inflates dropout figures by stealthily employing a highly irregular definition, whereby he counts anyone who fails to graduate on time with his age group as a “dropout,” and then leaps to the baseless conclusion that the fictional dropouts were caused by standardized testing. Noting that it would be irresponsible not to teach to the test, Phelps responds to that charge, “So, they should instead teach material that the test will not cover? They should ‘teach away from the test’?”
Kill the Messenger could have been called Coloring Education News, since it does for education reporting what William McGowan’s Coloring the News did for journalism in general. Phelps’ analyses of media bias, including statistical breakdowns showing how the media let test-bashers dominate the testing debate, provide a model for media criticism. He also reports on the undisguised hostility some reporters and producers show scholars who fail to tow the party line. (Full disclosure: Phelps praises my education reporting.)
Phelps suggests that the most insidious test-bashers of all are those who claim to support testing ... just not any existing test. For such people, “more research” is always required. “Given all the variety and all the experience, anyone who cannot be satisfied by any current testing program can never be satisfied with any testing program.”
Ultimately, Phelps writes, “Most of the attacks on student testing, indeed, are attacks on measurement ... of any kind ... or, more specifically, any measurement made by groups ‘external’ to the group being measured.” Phelps cautions the reader, however, that any test is only as good as the curriculum and instructional theory it is tied to.
Written largely in a conversational style, notwithstanding its staggering scholarship, Kill the Messenger casts much needed light on a public policy issue that affects us all, but which those holding the public’s trust have kept shrouded in darkness. As Phelps argues, “the debate on testing ... is part of a war for the control of our country’s schools ... The booty is our children’s futures. The stakes are enormous.
March 10, 2004
A week doesn’t go by, without a mainstream media story on the “horrors” of standardized testing, in which reporters tell of widespread testing error, of how testing is causing students to drop out of school, or of how testing is causing an epidemic of cheating.
The story behind the stories is that the relative prevalence of testing error is infinitesimal, that columnists stressing the dropout factor are mindlessly repeating a myth invented by radical Boston College teacher education professor Walter Haney, and that cheating is more easily prevented on standardized tests than with their alternatives.
For years, the American public has been force-fed a diet of test-bashing by the establishment media, the teachers’ unions, professors of teacher education and well-financed anti-testing organizations, in which test-bashers have twisted existing data, ignored contrary data, and fabricated data outright. So reports Richard Phelps in his brilliant, new book, Kill the Messenger: The War on Standardized Testing.
As Phelps tells it, Kill the Messenger “is as much about censorship and professional arrogance as it is about testing.” The author contends that the teachers and administrators who control the public education monopoly, and the teacher education professors who monopolize teacher credentialing, oppose standardized testing in order to shield themselves from public scrutiny and accountability. “…it is disturbing, because school administrators and education professors represent a group of public servants who should serve as models to our children. We pay them high salaries and give them very secure jobs. Then, we give them our children. Is just a little bit of external, objective evaluation of what they do with our money and our children really asking so much.”
Influential test-bashers include Walter Haney, Linda McNeil of Rice University, Harvard’s Howard Gardner, University of California president Richard Atkinson, writers Alfie Kohn and Nicholas Lemann, the privately funded organization, Fair Test, and the taxpayer-funded organizations, CRESST at UCLA, and Boston College’s CSTEEP. (CRESST stands for “National Center for Research on Evaluations, Standards, and Student Testing”; CSTEEP stands for “the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy.”)
Phelps argues persuasively that objective, external, standardized, high-stakes testing is the best measure we have of how much students have learned, and how well teachers, curricula, and textbooks have done their respective jobs. The tests give us a tremendous amount of information on children’s academic strengths and weaknesses, so that we may help them improve. “Objective” is in contrast to classroom grades, which are increasingly subjective, politicized, and inflated. “External” means that school officials with a stake in the results do not control examination grading. “Standardized” means that a test “is given in identical form and at the same time to students in more than one school, and all the results are marked in the same way.” And “high stakes” means that test scores have consequences, so that the test serves as a powerful motivational tool. Alternatives such as classroom grades and “portfolios” of work lack the advantages of standardized testing, while being much more vulnerable to manipulation and cheating.
Phelps sets out test-bashers’ strategies and tactics; presents case studies of campaigns against the SAT, the Texas teachers’ literacy test, and the 2000 October Surprise attack on the “Texas Miracle” of educational progress under then-Gov. George W. Bush; media coverage; the “benefits of testing”; legitimate concerns about testing; and “alternatives to standardized testing.” Two appended glossaries translate test-bashers’ Orwellian jargon, and explain testing terms. Richard Phelps drives through the armies of test-bashers like Patton’s Third Army cutting through France in the summer of ‘44. He catalogues and refutes the misrepresentations they have spread.
For instance, test-bashers have for years insisted that American students are tested more than students in any other country, and that high-stakes, standardized testing causes dropout rates to increase, and educators to “teach to the test.” And liberal reporters eat this stuff up!
Phelps scolds the test-bashers for being too lazy to make a couple of calls abroad, to determine that their assumption is false. “Virtually every other industrialized country in the world tests its students more, and with greater consequences riding on the results, than we do.” He shows how education professor Walter Haney inflates dropout figures by stealthily employing a highly irregular definition, whereby he counts anyone who fails to graduate on time with his age group as a “dropout,” and then leaps to the baseless conclusion that the fictional dropouts were caused by standardized testing. Noting that it would be irresponsible not to teach to the test, Phelps responds to that charge, “So, they should instead teach material that the test will not cover? They should ‘teach away from the test’?”
Kill the Messenger could have been called Coloring Education News, since it does for education reporting what William McGowan’s Coloring the News did for journalism in general. Phelps’ analyses of media bias, including statistical breakdowns showing how the media let test-bashers dominate the testing debate, provide a model for media criticism. He also reports on the undisguised hostility some reporters and producers show scholars who fail to tow the party line. (Full disclosure: Phelps praises my education reporting.)
Phelps suggests that the most insidious test-bashers of all are those who claim to support testing ... just not any existing test. For such people, “more research” is always required. “Given all the variety and all the experience, anyone who cannot be satisfied by any current testing program can never be satisfied with any testing program.”
Ultimately, Phelps writes, “Most of the attacks on student testing, indeed, are attacks on measurement ... of any kind ... or, more specifically, any measurement made by groups ‘external’ to the group being measured.” Phelps cautions the reader, however, that any test is only as good as the curriculum and instructional theory it is tied to.
Written largely in a conversational style, notwithstanding its staggering scholarship, Kill the Messenger casts much needed light on a public policy issue that affects us all, but which those holding the public’s trust have kept shrouded in darkness. As Phelps argues, “the debate on testing ... is part of a war for the control of our country’s schools ... The booty is our children’s futures. The stakes are enormous.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Ebonics: The Language of Hate
By Nicholas Stix
May, 2000
Which language do you speak -- "Ebonics" or the "Language of Wider Communication"? Of which nation are you a citizen -- "Amerika" or "Afrika"?
Prior to 1997, most Americans would have been baffled by my opening. But in December, 1996, the board of California's Oakland Unified School District changed all that. Through a press release, the board announced to the world that black American students were "African people," who according to "numerous validated scholarly studies" spoke "West and Niger-Congo African Languages," and that these tongues were "genetically based and not a dialect of English."
Well.
To borrow from Mary McCarthy, every word in the Oakland Ebonics Resolution was a lie, including "and" and "the."
The story of ebonics is the story of racist hatred, scholarly fraud, and of cowardice on the part of those who know better, but who do and say nothing against the hatred and the fraud. Telling the story requires that we go back in time to the Great Depression.
Ebonics' Heart of Darkness
The support for so-called ebonics is inseparable from black nationalism. According to sociologist C. Eric Lincoln's classic work, The Black Muslims in America, during the early 1930s in Detroit, Wallace Fard (?-?) proclaimed that Negroes were "not Americans, and that they owed no allegiance to the American flag." In anticipation of racial Armageddon, Fard founded the Black Muslims, now known as the Nation of Islam and led by Minister Louis Farrakhan (born Louis Eugene Walcott).
During World War II, the Black Muslims' leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole; 1897-1975), refused to serve his country in the armed forces, and spoke out in support of our Japanese enemy. Muhammad spent 1942-1946 in federal prison for sedition, conspiracy, and draft evasion.
Fard/Muhammad-like notions of non-allegiance to America and of racial Armageddon were incorporated into the 1960s' Black Power movement, which under the banner of "community control" reintroduced racial segregation in urban public schools.
Various academics, most notably white linguistics professor J.L. Dillard, sought to serve this movement. In his 1972 book, Black English, Dillard conjured up an immaculate pseudo-linguistics emphasizing a direct, unbroken development from West African languages to American black vernacular English.
If one cuts through the bombast of James Baldwin's celebrated, widely anthologized, 1979 New York Times essay, "If Black English isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?," one realizes that Baldwin was indifferent to linguistic issues. His argument was simply a demand for re-segregating the nation's schools, with only blacks permitted to teach black children. So much for Baldwin's vaunted commitment to civil rights.
"It is not the black child's language that is despised. It is his experience.... A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way."
To virtually all whites and blacks alike, the term "ebonics" ("ebony" + "phonics" = "black sounds") is a euphemism for urban street slang. The ebonics hoax has been perpetrated by a tiny number of well-to-do, influential, mostly black university professors and racist public school teachers and administrators. The hoaxers have broken the first law of lying: plausibility.
Get Your Lies Straight
Having reported on the ebonics hoax since early 1995 -- i.e., pre-Oakland -- I feel a bit like "Det. Andy Sipowicz" (Dennis Franz) on the ABC-TV show, NYPD Blue. Sipowicz has been known to inform a criminal whose partner he already has in custody, "Your lies better match up with his lies.
At least two types of lies, er, arguments, are used to defend ebonics today, each based on the expediency of the audience of the moment.
One position, expressed in the Linguistics Society of America's (LSA) 1997 "Resolution on Ebonics," claims that so-called ebonics is a fully functioning "language system." "The variety known as 'Ebonics, African-American vernacular English' "(AAVE)," and 'Vernacular Black English,' and by other names is systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties. In fact, all human linguistic systems -- spoken, signed, and written -- are fundamentally regular." The LSA resolution also claimed that the language-dialect distinction could not hold. In other words, the notion that ebonics is a black dialect is untenable, because we can't say that anything is a "language" or that it is a "dialect."
Can one then do physics and philosophy in ebonics? Please! And if all "human linguistic systems ... are fundamentally regular," we can dispense with English teachers, because there is no correct or incorrect usage.
The other argument, made by the Oakland school board in its original, December 1996 resolution, contends that ebonics is an "African language," genetically passed down among American blacks, all of whom speak it, since Africa. However, in seeking federal, bilingual education funds, the board contradicted itself, in arguing that black Oakland teachers could not understand their own black students, and thus required special training at higher pay.
The resolution thus violated the second and third laws of lying, respectively: consistency and economy.
The most influential ebonics supporter among professors of linguistics, Stanford University's Guyanese-born Prof. John Rickford, has similarly made mutually contradictory statements to different audiences. As the unsigned author of the 1997 "LSA Resolution," Rickford insisted to fellow linguistics professors and the general public that the language-dialect distinction did not hold, thus making moot the question of whether ebonics was a dialect or a language. And yet, on his web postings, Rickford has insisted that ebonics is a "language." However, in the 1998 anthology, The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, he defined ebonics for an interviewer as a "dialect."
The Oakland Ebonics Resolution speaks vaguely of unnamed "research" as "demonstrating" the existence of so-called ebonics, its African roots, and its value as a teaching tool. No such research exists, and there is no connection to Africa. As a black student of mine at the City University of New York's (CUNY) Baruch College, Karen Thompson, has pointed out, "There is no ebonics! It's bad English!"
Afrocentrists such as Prof. Keith Gilyard, director of Syracuse University's Writing Program, insist that research carried out by Stanford University Profs. John and Angela Rickford showed that children taught via ebonics dialect readers more readily learned English than those using standard English (SE) readers. In fact, the Rickford's own, unpublicized research (which, however, Gilyard had access to) showed that black children always did better when they learned from SE readers, even when they had only half as much reading time as peers using ebonics dialect readers.
"The Real Ebonics Debate"
The Real Ebonics Debate consists of 26, exclusively Afrocentric pieces. So much for debate.
Consider the token white contributor, Wayne O'Neill. Ebonics' most influential white supporter, O'Neill is the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. O'Neill has done no research on black vernaculars, yet he presents himself as an authority on the matter. In his article, O'Neill misrepresented the media coverage of the debate as having been "ill-informed," attacking black columnist William Raspberry's "uninformed characterization of [ebonics]: 'no right or wrong expressions, no consistent spellings or pronunciations and no discernible rules.'"
But Raspberry had hit the nail on the head!
While insisting that "ebonics is not street slang," as Wayne O'Neill repeatedly has, ebonics enthusiasts usually refuse to give examples of "ebonics" phrases, and then damn any examples their critics give as inauthentic. But as my students, black, Hispanic, and otherwise point out, ebonics is slang, and nothing else.
As some of my American-born, Hispanic students have pointed out, and as I have observed of American-born Chinese students, non-blacks also speak ebonics. Meanwhile, many of my black college students have asserted that the dialect called ebonics is not distinctively racial, but generational. They maintain that urban youngsters, black and non-black alike, constantly invent new slang, so that their parents will not understand them.
When John and Angela Rickford undertook an experiment using ebonics basal readers (most children learn how to read through basal readers) for school children -- black and non-black alike -- in East Palo Alto, California -- many black children said their parents were opposed to the dialect, which they identified as "gang talk." The Rickfords' article, "Dialect Readers Revisited," provides a rare example of "ebonics," the text of which follows in its entirety.
"This here little Sister name Mae was most definitely untogether. I mean, like she didn't act together. She didn't look together. She was just an untogether Sister.
"Her teacher was always sounding on her 'bout day dreaming in class. I mean, like, just 'bout every day the teacher would be getting on her case. But it didn't seem to bother her none. She just kept on keeping on. Like, I guess daydreaming was her groove. And you know what they say: 'don't knock your Sister's groove.' But a whole lotta people did knock it. But like I say, she just kept on keeping on.
"One day Mae was taking [sic] to herself in the lunch room. She was having this righteous old conversation with herself. She say, 'I wanna be a princess with long golden hair.' Now can you get ready for that? Long golden hair!
"Well, anyway, Mae say, 'If I can't be a princess I'll settle for some long golden hair. If I could just have me some long golden hair, everything would be all right with me. Lord, if I could just have me some long golden hair."
Note that the preceding text, which would be unacceptable material for students of any age, was meant for seventh graders!
Although the Oakland Ebonics Resolution was withdrawn, in The Real Ebonics Debate, some Oakland teachers bragged of their continuing, routine use of "ebonics" -- substandard English -- in the classroom, and of imposing it on black and non-black students alike.
The Real Source of Ebonics
The coining of the term "ebonics" is generally credited to Washington University psychology professor, Robert Williams, in 1972. Twenty-five years later, at a pro-ebonics rally at CUNY's Afrocentric, Medgar Evers College, Williams complained of the "disrespect" involved in white teachers publicly correcting the grammar of black children.
That was odd. A teacher gets paid to correct his students' mistakes. And to refuse to correct students of a particular race is to engage in blatant racism. Oddest of all, was the attack on white teachers. The apartheid movement that began in the 1960s, when it was known variously as "Black Power" and "community control," has run white teachers out of most ghetto schools, and replaced them with incompetent blacks.
What is today called "ebonics" is the direct result of such tactics. Subjected to teachers who are incompetent, hateful, and often functionally illiterate, poor children grow into illiterate, hateful adults. Many of them go to college, and themselves become teachers. Meanwhile, with white racism fading away, black parents who care about their children's future have fled such areas, or scrimped and saved, and pulled their children out of the public schools. In New York City, over 90 percent of black parents support school vouchers.
In New York, one may teach without having passed the state teacher certification exam. The exam is not rocket science. And yet, one-third of all active New York City public school teachers have flunked the certification exam at least three times, which is grounds for automatic dismissal. But in 1998, when the city Board of Education sought to fire the incompetents, they cried "racism!" and the Board backed down.
As a result of race politics, since the 1960s, the language stock in black urban neighborhoods has been in free fall. "Ebonics" is merely the name we give to this particular form of barbarism.
Middle and upper-middle-class ebonics hustlers see in poor black youth a standing army of riot and revolution, which they can exploit, in order to wring additional wealth, power, and privilege for themselves from craven, white elites. Meanwhile, the ebonics hustlers can enjoy the spectacle of murder and mayhem that they feel sure will never touch them.
May, 2000
Which language do you speak -- "Ebonics" or the "Language of Wider Communication"? Of which nation are you a citizen -- "Amerika" or "Afrika"?
Prior to 1997, most Americans would have been baffled by my opening. But in December, 1996, the board of California's Oakland Unified School District changed all that. Through a press release, the board announced to the world that black American students were "African people," who according to "numerous validated scholarly studies" spoke "West and Niger-Congo African Languages," and that these tongues were "genetically based and not a dialect of English."
Well.
To borrow from Mary McCarthy, every word in the Oakland Ebonics Resolution was a lie, including "and" and "the."
The story of ebonics is the story of racist hatred, scholarly fraud, and of cowardice on the part of those who know better, but who do and say nothing against the hatred and the fraud. Telling the story requires that we go back in time to the Great Depression.
Ebonics' Heart of Darkness
The support for so-called ebonics is inseparable from black nationalism. According to sociologist C. Eric Lincoln's classic work, The Black Muslims in America, during the early 1930s in Detroit, Wallace Fard (?-?) proclaimed that Negroes were "not Americans, and that they owed no allegiance to the American flag." In anticipation of racial Armageddon, Fard founded the Black Muslims, now known as the Nation of Islam and led by Minister Louis Farrakhan (born Louis Eugene Walcott).
During World War II, the Black Muslims' leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Poole; 1897-1975), refused to serve his country in the armed forces, and spoke out in support of our Japanese enemy. Muhammad spent 1942-1946 in federal prison for sedition, conspiracy, and draft evasion.
Fard/Muhammad-like notions of non-allegiance to America and of racial Armageddon were incorporated into the 1960s' Black Power movement, which under the banner of "community control" reintroduced racial segregation in urban public schools.
Various academics, most notably white linguistics professor J.L. Dillard, sought to serve this movement. In his 1972 book, Black English, Dillard conjured up an immaculate pseudo-linguistics emphasizing a direct, unbroken development from West African languages to American black vernacular English.
If one cuts through the bombast of James Baldwin's celebrated, widely anthologized, 1979 New York Times essay, "If Black English isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?," one realizes that Baldwin was indifferent to linguistic issues. His argument was simply a demand for re-segregating the nation's schools, with only blacks permitted to teach black children. So much for Baldwin's vaunted commitment to civil rights.
"It is not the black child's language that is despised. It is his experience.... A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way."
To virtually all whites and blacks alike, the term "ebonics" ("ebony" + "phonics" = "black sounds") is a euphemism for urban street slang. The ebonics hoax has been perpetrated by a tiny number of well-to-do, influential, mostly black university professors and racist public school teachers and administrators. The hoaxers have broken the first law of lying: plausibility.
Get Your Lies Straight
Having reported on the ebonics hoax since early 1995 -- i.e., pre-Oakland -- I feel a bit like "Det. Andy Sipowicz" (Dennis Franz) on the ABC-TV show, NYPD Blue. Sipowicz has been known to inform a criminal whose partner he already has in custody, "Your lies better match up with his lies.
At least two types of lies, er, arguments, are used to defend ebonics today, each based on the expediency of the audience of the moment.
One position, expressed in the Linguistics Society of America's (LSA) 1997 "Resolution on Ebonics," claims that so-called ebonics is a fully functioning "language system." "The variety known as 'Ebonics, African-American vernacular English' "(AAVE)," and 'Vernacular Black English,' and by other names is systematic and rule-governed like all natural speech varieties. In fact, all human linguistic systems -- spoken, signed, and written -- are fundamentally regular." The LSA resolution also claimed that the language-dialect distinction could not hold. In other words, the notion that ebonics is a black dialect is untenable, because we can't say that anything is a "language" or that it is a "dialect."
Can one then do physics and philosophy in ebonics? Please! And if all "human linguistic systems ... are fundamentally regular," we can dispense with English teachers, because there is no correct or incorrect usage.
The other argument, made by the Oakland school board in its original, December 1996 resolution, contends that ebonics is an "African language," genetically passed down among American blacks, all of whom speak it, since Africa. However, in seeking federal, bilingual education funds, the board contradicted itself, in arguing that black Oakland teachers could not understand their own black students, and thus required special training at higher pay.
The resolution thus violated the second and third laws of lying, respectively: consistency and economy.
The most influential ebonics supporter among professors of linguistics, Stanford University's Guyanese-born Prof. John Rickford, has similarly made mutually contradictory statements to different audiences. As the unsigned author of the 1997 "LSA Resolution," Rickford insisted to fellow linguistics professors and the general public that the language-dialect distinction did not hold, thus making moot the question of whether ebonics was a dialect or a language. And yet, on his web postings, Rickford has insisted that ebonics is a "language." However, in the 1998 anthology, The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children, he defined ebonics for an interviewer as a "dialect."
The Oakland Ebonics Resolution speaks vaguely of unnamed "research" as "demonstrating" the existence of so-called ebonics, its African roots, and its value as a teaching tool. No such research exists, and there is no connection to Africa. As a black student of mine at the City University of New York's (CUNY) Baruch College, Karen Thompson, has pointed out, "There is no ebonics! It's bad English!"
Afrocentrists such as Prof. Keith Gilyard, director of Syracuse University's Writing Program, insist that research carried out by Stanford University Profs. John and Angela Rickford showed that children taught via ebonics dialect readers more readily learned English than those using standard English (SE) readers. In fact, the Rickford's own, unpublicized research (which, however, Gilyard had access to) showed that black children always did better when they learned from SE readers, even when they had only half as much reading time as peers using ebonics dialect readers.
"The Real Ebonics Debate"
The Real Ebonics Debate consists of 26, exclusively Afrocentric pieces. So much for debate.
Consider the token white contributor, Wayne O'Neill. Ebonics' most influential white supporter, O'Neill is the chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. O'Neill has done no research on black vernaculars, yet he presents himself as an authority on the matter. In his article, O'Neill misrepresented the media coverage of the debate as having been "ill-informed," attacking black columnist William Raspberry's "uninformed characterization of [ebonics]: 'no right or wrong expressions, no consistent spellings or pronunciations and no discernible rules.'"
But Raspberry had hit the nail on the head!
While insisting that "ebonics is not street slang," as Wayne O'Neill repeatedly has, ebonics enthusiasts usually refuse to give examples of "ebonics" phrases, and then damn any examples their critics give as inauthentic. But as my students, black, Hispanic, and otherwise point out, ebonics is slang, and nothing else.
As some of my American-born, Hispanic students have pointed out, and as I have observed of American-born Chinese students, non-blacks also speak ebonics. Meanwhile, many of my black college students have asserted that the dialect called ebonics is not distinctively racial, but generational. They maintain that urban youngsters, black and non-black alike, constantly invent new slang, so that their parents will not understand them.
When John and Angela Rickford undertook an experiment using ebonics basal readers (most children learn how to read through basal readers) for school children -- black and non-black alike -- in East Palo Alto, California -- many black children said their parents were opposed to the dialect, which they identified as "gang talk." The Rickfords' article, "Dialect Readers Revisited," provides a rare example of "ebonics," the text of which follows in its entirety.
"This here little Sister name Mae was most definitely untogether. I mean, like she didn't act together. She didn't look together. She was just an untogether Sister.
"Her teacher was always sounding on her 'bout day dreaming in class. I mean, like, just 'bout every day the teacher would be getting on her case. But it didn't seem to bother her none. She just kept on keeping on. Like, I guess daydreaming was her groove. And you know what they say: 'don't knock your Sister's groove.' But a whole lotta people did knock it. But like I say, she just kept on keeping on.
"One day Mae was taking [sic] to herself in the lunch room. She was having this righteous old conversation with herself. She say, 'I wanna be a princess with long golden hair.' Now can you get ready for that? Long golden hair!
"Well, anyway, Mae say, 'If I can't be a princess I'll settle for some long golden hair. If I could just have me some long golden hair, everything would be all right with me. Lord, if I could just have me some long golden hair."
Note that the preceding text, which would be unacceptable material for students of any age, was meant for seventh graders!
Although the Oakland Ebonics Resolution was withdrawn, in The Real Ebonics Debate, some Oakland teachers bragged of their continuing, routine use of "ebonics" -- substandard English -- in the classroom, and of imposing it on black and non-black students alike.
The Real Source of Ebonics
The coining of the term "ebonics" is generally credited to Washington University psychology professor, Robert Williams, in 1972. Twenty-five years later, at a pro-ebonics rally at CUNY's Afrocentric, Medgar Evers College, Williams complained of the "disrespect" involved in white teachers publicly correcting the grammar of black children.
That was odd. A teacher gets paid to correct his students' mistakes. And to refuse to correct students of a particular race is to engage in blatant racism. Oddest of all, was the attack on white teachers. The apartheid movement that began in the 1960s, when it was known variously as "Black Power" and "community control," has run white teachers out of most ghetto schools, and replaced them with incompetent blacks.
What is today called "ebonics" is the direct result of such tactics. Subjected to teachers who are incompetent, hateful, and often functionally illiterate, poor children grow into illiterate, hateful adults. Many of them go to college, and themselves become teachers. Meanwhile, with white racism fading away, black parents who care about their children's future have fled such areas, or scrimped and saved, and pulled their children out of the public schools. In New York City, over 90 percent of black parents support school vouchers.
In New York, one may teach without having passed the state teacher certification exam. The exam is not rocket science. And yet, one-third of all active New York City public school teachers have flunked the certification exam at least three times, which is grounds for automatic dismissal. But in 1998, when the city Board of Education sought to fire the incompetents, they cried "racism!" and the Board backed down.
As a result of race politics, since the 1960s, the language stock in black urban neighborhoods has been in free fall. "Ebonics" is merely the name we give to this particular form of barbarism.
Middle and upper-middle-class ebonics hustlers see in poor black youth a standing army of riot and revolution, which they can exploit, in order to wring additional wealth, power, and privilege for themselves from craven, white elites. Meanwhile, the ebonics hustlers can enjoy the spectacle of murder and mayhem that they feel sure will never touch them.