Living in the Shadows: Please Support WEJB/NSU!

 
I’m what used to be known as a “New York writer.” In fact, my friend, the Oak Park, IL writer, Jim Bowman (author of Priests at Work), has called me “the Nelson Algren of on-the-ground New Yorkers.”

During the 1990s, I wrote for several New York City newspapers, and even had my own magazine, A Different Drummer, for a few years.

And although due to the lack of any start capital, my magazine folded after three issues, I hung around, though many of my old magazine and newspaper readers must think I either left town or died.

I haven’t had an article published under the byline Nicholas Stix by a New York City-based periodical since 1996. Since then, I’ve published about 1,200 articles, but who’s counting?

During the late 1990s, I published a few dozen articles pseudonymously in New York City newspapers. Back then, I wrote mostly on education, which was my day job. These days, I write mostly on crime, which is not my day—or night—job.

I had to pull my punches some back then, but the divergence between what I wrote for, say, the Daily News, and Chronicles magazine, was not that great, at least not on education. The censorship has since gotten so much worse in this town that one can no longer write an even nearly honest article on crime or education.

And the national MSM are hardly better. Quantitatively speaking, there has never been so much “news” media in this country as there has been over the past few years, even after all the mass firings and closings. And yet, qualitatively speaking, the news business has never been as bad as it is right now. Its “truth quotient” frequently hovers around zero.

One must read between the lines, as it were, or simply guess, in order to decode what a given story is really about. Citizens are increasingly living like Plato’s chained cave dwellers, deciphering events based on distant noises and reflections on a wall.

About a year ago, I sent a pseudonymous letter to a New York City newspaper about the NYC Education Department’s practice of busing racism into my son’s school. Although non-blacks were locked out of the school if they lived literally on the wrong side of the street, blacks who lived miles outside of the district were being bused in, where they caused trouble by doing things like sucker punching white kids on the school playground, and harassing white neighborhood motorists.

The newspaper’s editor e-mailed back that, as written, my letter was “too racist” to publish. He added, “I think I know who you are”—I’m sure he did!—and demanded that I appear in his office and prove my identity, before he would consider publishing even a gutted version of my letter.

Ninety-nine percent of New Yorkers may not know who I am, but the local editors sure do. They read fundraising letters by my good friend, Mark Potok, of the SPLC.

On December 19, we lost the great Ron Smith, may he rest in peace, to pancreatic cancer. Three years ago, Ron honored me by having me on his WBAL radio talk show. It turned out that he was a longtime reader of mine. When we first spoke, prior to the show, Smith praised me fulsomely for a crime report I’d written for Chronicles magazine… in 1996!

Smith, a self-proclaimed auto-didact, was a brilliant man, though he didn’t wear his erudition on his sleeve. He also wrote a column for the Baltimore Sun. My good friend, Mark Potok, tried to get Ron fired from that gig, just for hosting me! The Sun’s letters editor ran a long letter from Mark, denouncing me as “a well-known white nationalist,” and Ron for having me as a guest.

Folks who know me have always gotten a big laugh out of that “well-known white nationalist” label.

I wrote a response, but the Sun’s letters editor refused to run it; he demanded that I write a little bitty note, while I demanded as much space as he had given to Mark.

I once tried to interview Mark Potok for an investigative report, but he didn’t respond to a telephone message I left, and when I later got him on the line, the moment he heard my name, he hung up.

Four years ago, a white man complained, via anonymous fliers, about a New York City elementary school in which he had been racially terrorized by black kids 20 years earlier, and which had remained every bit as violently racist ever since. Ray Kelly’s New York City Police Department responded not by investigating the school, and arresting the racist blacks who were variously committing and aiding and abetting the violence, but by having its Hate Crimes Task Force investigate, and seek to arrest the victim who had engaged in constitutionally protected speech.

In recent years, I’ve attended several conferences on issues of interest to my readers. Every time, one stranger or another has honored me by walking up to me, and revealing himself to be “Joe Schmoe,” the author of fearless, brilliant, and sometimes hilarious reports on immigration, refugee politics, or race in America.

They use pseudonyms, because otherwise someone like my good friend, Mark Potok, will call their boss, and ask him if he knows that he has a Nazi (“a well-known white nationalist”) working under his roof.

The TV news business has long claimed, “If it bleeds, it leads.” And yet, increasingly, the juicier the crime story, the less interested they are in running it. And when they do run crime stories, they deliberately withhold so much information, as to make them worthless.

Heck, based on supply and demand, I ought to be a multimillionaire by now!

I may have trouble getting even pseudonymous letters published in the New York papers, but my hits on this blog alone since January 1, are on a pace to reach 1.2 million, and over the past two months, I’ve been on a pace to reach almost 1.5 million this year. And that’s not counting all the hits I get elsewhere on the Web. That’s pretty good, for a guy living in the shadows.

Of course, I owe it all to you. You’ve read my work, posted links to it, copied and pasted it elsewhere, and e-mailed it to your friends and relations.

And you’ve sent money! Please keep those generous contributions coming!

Thank you for your kind support.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix