According to the University of Delaware, I'm a racist. If you're white, so are you. Don't bother trying to argue otherwise, you're a racist. We're so racist that we invented racism, and no one but us can be racist.
All dorm students are required to attend the brainwashing sessions, and "treatment" is available for those wishing to be further brainwashed, so that they may hate the white race as much as the multiculturalists do.
Apparently Sistah Souljah rides again.
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University to students: 'All whites are racist'
Mandatory program 'treats' politically incorrect attitudes
Posted: October 30, 2007
9:35 p.m. Eastern
By Bob Unruh
©2007 WorldNetDaily.com
A mandatory University of Delaware program requires residence hall students to acknowledge that "all whites are racist" and offers them "treatment" for any incorrect attitudes regarding class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality they might hold upon entering the school, according to a civil rights group.
"Somehow, the University of Delaware seems terrifyingly unaware that a state-sponsored institution of higher education in the United States does not have the legal right to engage in a program of systematic thought reform. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of conscience – the right to keep our innermost thoughts free from governmental intrusion. It also protects the right to be free from compelled speech," said a letter from Samantha Harris, director of legal and public advocacy for The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to university President Patrick Harker.
The organization cited excerpts from the university's Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training documents, including the statement:
"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination….'"
The education program also notes that "reverse racism" is "a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege." And "a non-racist" is called "a non-term," because, the program explains, "The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called 'blaming the victim')."
The "education" regarding racism is just one of the subjects that students are required to adopt as part of their University of Delaware experience, too, FIRE noted.
The "shocking program of ideological reeducation," which the school itself defines as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs, is nothing less than "Orwellian," FIRE said.
The school requires its approximately 7,000 residence hall students "to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy and environmentalism."
"FIRE is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students' rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech," the organization said.
On a foundation blog, a student noted that one residence assistant told students, "Not to scare anyone or anything, but these are MANDATORY!!" And the training program for those who indoctrinate students includes the order: "A researcher must document that the treatment/intervention was faithfully applied (ex: specific lesson plans were delivered to every student, etc.)."
Further, the school requires "a systemic change" as a result of the program, FIRE noted. As one RA told students: "Like it or not, you all are the future Leaders, and the world is Diverse, so learning to Embrace and Appreciate that diversity is ESSENTIAL."
"The University of Delaware's residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students' private beliefs," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional."
According to university materials, RAs are instructed to ask students during one-on-one sessions questions such as: "When did you discover your sexual identity?" "When were you first made aware of your race?" and "Who taught you a lesson in regard to some sort of diversity awarness? What was the lesson?"
"Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA's 'worst' one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having 'diversity shoved down her throat,'" FIRE said.
This particular student responded to the question, "When did you discover your sexual identity?" with the terse: "That is none of your damn business," FIRE said.
Requirements for students include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality," FIRE said.
The foundation said students even are "pressured or even required" to make social statements that meet with the school's approval.
"The fact that the university views its students as patients in need of treatment for some sort of moral sickness betrays a total lack of respect not only for students' basic rights, but for students themselves," Lukianoff said. "The University of Delaware has both a legal and a moral obligation to immediately dismantle this program, and FIRE will not rest until it has."
A spokesman for the school, contacted by WND, said he was not ready to make a statement about the situation right away.
But the foundation's letter to Harker noted, "we have never encountered a more systematic assault upon the individual liberty, dignity, privacy, and autonomy of university students than this program," which "requires students to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues."
"Such utter contempt for the autonomy and free agency of others is the hallmark of totalitarianism and has no place in any free society, let alone at a public university in the state of Delaware," the letter said.
Especially alarming, Harris told WND, is that the school defines learning specifically as "attitudinal or behavioral changes," not acquiring any sort of knowledge and ability.
Such thinking "represents a distorted idea of 'education' that one would more easily associate with a Soviet prison camp than with an American institution of higher education," FIRE said. "As another example, after an investigation showed that males demonstrated 'a higher degree of resistance to educational efforts,' the Rodney complex chose to hire 'strong male RAs.' Each such RA 'combats male residents' concepts of traditional male identity,' in order to 'ensure the delivery of the curriculum at the same level as in the female floors.' This language is disturbingly reminiscent of a pivotal scene from George Orwell's '1984,' in which the protagonist's captors tell him that 'The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.'"
No small danger, FIRE noted, is being presented to the university through such apparent constitutional violations. "Simply put, the residence life education program is a legal minefield," the group said.
One student reacted to the indoctrination with rebellion. On the FIRE blog, he wrote:
"Take the issue of homosexuality, and the rights that should or should not be associated with it. As a Christian, I believe that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong, and is a sin against God. As such, I cannot accept it as a legitimate lifestyle. While I accept homosexuals as people, I do not accept their choice as right, and subsequently I do not think that homosexual couples should be given marital rights. I accept that others do not hold the same views as me. But it is wrong that under the Residence Life curriculum and school mandated curriculum that I should made to feel guilty for my views. … It is not the school's right to try to convince me to embrace the values that Residence Life has chosen. Essentially, if I do not change my views, I will be labeled by my RA as not embracing diversity, and not accepting of certain groups, and thus my RA will try all the harder to change me. This is not the school's job, or right."
Source: WorldNetDaily.com
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Jena Myths Exploded
The Jena 6 boat is sinking fast. The flood of facts is swamping the ship of lies, and it's heading to the bottom to join Tawana Brawley and the Duke Rape Case in the Davey Jones Locker of false accusations, racial fraud, and outright lies against Whites.
The truth makes a powerful torpedo.
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The truth makes a powerful torpedo.
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October 24, 2007 edition
Media myths about the Jena 6
A local journalist tells the story you haven't heard.
By Craig Franklin
Jena, La.
By now, almost everyone in America has heard of Jena, La., because they've all heard the story of the "Jena 6." White students hanging nooses barely punished, a schoolyard fight, excessive punishment for the six black attackers, racist local officials, public outrage and protests – the outside media made sure everyone knew the basics.
There's just one problem: The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.
I should know. I live in Jena. My wife has taught at Jena High School for many years. And most important, I am probably the only reporter who has covered these events from the very beginning.
The reason the Jena cases have been propelled into the world spotlight is two-fold: First, because local officials did not speak publicly early on about the true events of the past year, the media simply formed their stories based on one-side's statements – the Jena 6. Second, the media were downright lazy in their efforts to find the truth. Often, they simply reported what they'd read on blogs, which expressed only one side of the issue.
The real story of Jena and the Jena 6 is quite different from what the national media presented.
It's time to set the record straight.
Myth 1: The Whites-Only Tree. There has never been a "whites-only" tree at Jena High School. Students of all races sat underneath this tree. When a student asked during an assembly at the start of school last year if anyone could sit under the tree, it evoked laughter from everyone present – blacks and whites. As reported by students in the assembly, the question was asked to make a joke and to drag out the assembly and avoid class.
Myth 2: Nooses a Signal to Black Students. An investigation by school officials, police, and an FBI agent revealed the true motivation behind the placing of two nooses in the tree the day after the assembly. According to the expulsion committee, the crudely constructed nooses were not aimed at black students. Instead, they were understood to be a prank by three white students aimed at their fellow white friends, members of the school rodeo team. (The students apparently got the idea from watching episodes of "Lonesome Dove.") The committee further concluded that the three young teens had no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history. When informed of this history by school officials, they became visibly remorseful because they had many black friends. Another myth concerns their punishment, which was not a three-day suspension, but rather nine days at an alternative facility followed by two weeks of in-school suspension, Saturday detentions, attendance at Discipline Court, and evaluation by licensed mental-health professionals. The students who hung the nooses have not publicly come forward to give their version of events.
Myth 3: Nooses Were a Hate Crime. Although many believe the three white students should have been prosecuted for a hate crime for hanging the nooses, the incident did not meet the legal criteria for a federal hate crime. It also did not meet the standard for Louisiana's hate-crime statute, and though widely condemned by all officials, there was no crime to charge the youths with.
Myth 4: DA's Threat to Black Students. When District Attorney Reed Walters spoke to Jena High students at an assembly in September, he did not tell black students that he could make their life miserable with "the stroke of a pen." Instead, according to Walters, "two or three girls, white girls, were chit-chatting on their cellphones or playing with their cellphones right in the middle of my dissertation. I got a little irritated at them and said, 'Pay attention to me. I am right now having to deal with an aggravated rape case where I've got to decide whether the death penalty applies or not.' I said, 'Look, I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make your life miserable so I want you to call me before you do something stupid.'"
Mr. Walters had been called to the assembly by police, who had been at the school earlier that day dealing with some students who were causing disturbances. Teachers and students have confirmed Walters's version of events.
Myth 5: The Fair Barn Party Incident. On Dec. 1, 2006, a private party – not an all-white party as reported – was held at the local community center called the Fair Barn. Robert Bailey Jr., soon to be one of the Jena 6, came to the party with others seeking admittance.
When they were denied entrance by the renter of the facility, a white male named Justin Sloan (not a Jena High student) at the party attacked Bailey and hit him in the face with his fist. This is reported in witness statements to police, including the victim, Robert Bailey, Jr.
Months later, Bailey contended he was hit in the head with a beer bottle and required stitches.
No medical records show this ever occurred. Mr. Sloan was prosecuted for simple battery, which according to Louisiana law, is the proper charge for hitting someone with a fist.
Myth 6: The "Gotta-Go" Grocery Incident. On Dec. 2, 2006, Bailey and two other black Jena High students were involved in an altercation at this local convenience store, stemming from the incident that occurred the night before. The three were accused by police of jumping a white man as he entered the store and stealing a shotgun from him. The two parties gave conflicting statements to police. However, two unrelated eye witnesses of the event gave statements that corresponded with that of the white male.
Myth 7: The Schoolyard Fight. The event on Dec. 4, 2006 was consistently labeled a "schoolyard fight." But witnesses described something much more horrific. Several black students, including those now known as the Jena 6, barricaded an exit to the school's gym as they lay in wait for Justin Barker to exit. (It remains unclear why Mr. Barker was specifically targeted.)
When Barker tried to leave through another exit, court testimony indicates, he was hit from behind by Mychal Bell. Multiple witnesses confirmed that Barker was immediately knocked unconscious and lay on the floor defenseless as several other black students joined together to kick and stomp him, with most of the blows striking his head. Police speculate that the motivation for the attack was related to the racially charged fights that had occurred during the previous weekend.
Myth 8: The Attack Is Linked to the Nooses. Nowhere in any of the evidence, including statements by witnesses and defendants, is there any reference to the noose incident that occurred three months prior. This was confirmed by the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, Donald Washington, on numerous occasions.
Myth 9: Mychal Bell's All-White Jury. While it is true that Mychal Bell was convicted as an adult by an all-white jury in June (a conviction that was later overturned with his case sent to juvenile court), the jury selection process was completely legal and withstood an investigation by the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Court officials insist that several black residents were summoned for jury duty, but did not appear.
Myth 10: Jena 6 as Model Youth. While some members were simply caught up in the moment, others had criminal records. Bell had at least four prior violent-crime arrests before the December attack, and was on probation during most of this year.
Myth 11: Jena Is One of the Most Racist Towns in America. Actually, Jena is a wonderful place to live for both whites and blacks. The media's distortion and outright lies concerning the case have given this rural Louisiana town a label it doesn't deserve.
Myth 12: Two Levels of Justice. Outside protesters were convinced that the prosecution of the Jena 6 was proof of a racially biased system of justice. But the US Justice Department's investigation found no evidence to support such a claim. In fact, the percentage of blacks and whites prosecuted matches the parish's population statistics.
These are just 12 of many myths that are portrayed as fact in the media concerning the Jena cases. (A more thorough review of all events can be found at http://www.thejenatimes.net/ – click on Chronological Order of Events.)
As with the Duke Lacrosse case, the truth about Jena will eventually be known. But the town of Jena isn't expecting any apologies from the media. They will probably never admit their error and have already moved on to the next "big" story. Meanwhile in Jena, residents are getting back to their regular routines, where friends are friends regardless of race. Just as it has been all along.
Craig Franklin is assistant editor of The Jena Times.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Bye Bye Brownback
Shamnesty Sam Brownback has dropped out of the race for the GOP nomination. As I posted on Wednesday (Brownback's Last Gasp), the final nail in his coffin was proposing the US "apologize" for slavery and segregation... I guess he was trying to garner the endorsement of Jackson, Sharpton, and Calypso Louie Farrakhan... I guess it didn't work.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Try to Kill A White Kid...
and get on TV!
That's right, Black Entertainment Television (BET) rewarded two of the infamous Jena 6 for the beatdown they administered to a white teenager by bringing them onstage at the BET Hip Hop Awards last night. How did the audience respond? With a standing ovation, of course!
This would never happen on White Entertainment Television... oh wait, there is no White Entertainment Television. That would be racist to have a network aimed at one particular ethnicity- of couse, that only applies to White folks.
___________________________
Two of 'Jena Six' defendants present BET award
By Abbey Brown
abrown@thetowntalk.com
(318) 487-6387
Two of the teens enmeshed in the nationally known "Jena Six" case helped present the most anticipated award during Black Entertainment Television's Hip Hop Awards show broadcast Thursday night.
Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis were introduced by Katt Williams, a comedian and the awards show's host, as two of the students involved in a case of "systematic racism."
"By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down," Williams said during his introduction of the teens, one of whom is still facing attempted murder charges in connection with the attack on white student Justin Barker. "... But the injustice perpetrated on these young men is straight criminal."
As Jones and Purvis walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday, they were greeted by a standing ovation.
"They don't look so tough, do they?" Williams joked as the teens stepped up to the podium.
Both Jones and Purvis thanked a number of people, including family, friends, the "Hip-Hop Nation" and the thousands who came to their small hometown to rally behind their case.
Purvis said the Sept. 20 rally proved "our generation can unite and rally around a cause."
The teens assisted Williams in presenting the Video of the Year honor to Kanye West for "Stronger." Purvis handed the award to West, who in turn shook hands with both teens.
The rest of the article can be read at TheTownTalk.com.
That's right, Black Entertainment Television (BET) rewarded two of the infamous Jena 6 for the beatdown they administered to a white teenager by bringing them onstage at the BET Hip Hop Awards last night. How did the audience respond? With a standing ovation, of course!
This would never happen on White Entertainment Television... oh wait, there is no White Entertainment Television. That would be racist to have a network aimed at one particular ethnicity- of couse, that only applies to White folks.
___________________________
Two of 'Jena Six' defendants present BET award
By Abbey Brown
abrown@thetowntalk.com
(318) 487-6387
Two of the teens enmeshed in the nationally known "Jena Six" case helped present the most anticipated award during Black Entertainment Television's Hip Hop Awards show broadcast Thursday night.
Carwin Jones and Bryant Purvis were introduced by Katt Williams, a comedian and the awards show's host, as two of the students involved in a case of "systematic racism."
"By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down," Williams said during his introduction of the teens, one of whom is still facing attempted murder charges in connection with the attack on white student Justin Barker. "... But the injustice perpetrated on these young men is straight criminal."
As Jones and Purvis walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday, they were greeted by a standing ovation.
"They don't look so tough, do they?" Williams joked as the teens stepped up to the podium.
Both Jones and Purvis thanked a number of people, including family, friends, the "Hip-Hop Nation" and the thousands who came to their small hometown to rally behind their case.
Purvis said the Sept. 20 rally proved "our generation can unite and rally around a cause."
The teens assisted Williams in presenting the Video of the Year honor to Kanye West for "Stronger." Purvis handed the award to West, who in turn shook hands with both teens.
The rest of the article can be read at TheTownTalk.com.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
A Scintilla of Hope for Higher Education
The following, from The Daily at the University of Washington, gives me some hope that all is not completely lost in our system of higher education- there are still at least some students who havent't drank the koolaid of the Left.
_______________________________________________________________
Mexican claims to U.S. soil historically unfounded
October 8, 2007
By James Foxcurran
College campuses most often use the negative terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” to describe European and American history. Meanwhile, in 21st century North America, our southern neighbor is being granted moral legitimacy for the same behavior.
Mexican immigrants are now present in the Southwestern United States with a population percentage they have never enjoyed at any other time in history.
While defendants are saying it’s just the natural process of the Mexicans moving back onto land that really belongs to them and that the Hollywood demonstrations should be a source of conventional wisdom, history is being overlooked.
Mexico had barely colonized most of the Southwestern United States when it became U.S. territory in 1848. Spain, then Mexico, merely held imperial sway over Indian territories.
In 1835, Texas had about 3,500 Spanish-speaking residents, compared with almost 30,000 Anglo-American settlers, according to Ray Allen Billington, in his book The Far Western Frontier: 1830-1860.
In California, there were about 4,000 to 7,000 Spanish-speaking residents in the 1840s. The vast majority of the population was still Indian. Scattered missions, pueblos and presidios represented most of the Mexican presence in the area, which is why it was so easy for the United States to seize the area during the Mexican-American war, according to “History of French America” by Gilles Harvard and Cecile Vidal.
Meanwhile, in 1803, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, there were 40,000 to 50,000 French-speaking residents west of the Mississippi River between Missouri and Washington state.
This number tripled to quadrupled by 1850. However, there is no modern political constituency for this group, therefore the story is apparently not worth telling.
The only state that has always had a majority Spanish-speaking population is New Mexico, with 44,000 Spanish-speaking residents in 1830. Since the Spanish were the first to explore the Southwest, their geographic terms are on the map every place they stopped to relieve themselves.
These vestiges are often used to justify the massive Mexican colonization currently unfolding, in spite of the fact that it is actually the first wave of Mexican colonization, not the second.
History is often revised to reflect the current situation rather than the facts. This is exactly what is happening with the American Southwest and the inflation of Mexican claims to the land there.
This historical revisionism clearly has a political motivation to justify and legitimize the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants and to discredit efforts to respect our border and immigration laws.
As former Rep. J.D. (R-Ariz.) Hayworth said in the film Border Wars, “The Left sees cheap votes, and the Right sees cheap labor, so you have the perfect storm.”
While one certainly can’t stereotype all persons of Mexican immigrants, there is a distinction between Mexican-American families who have citizenship and roots in the United States, and an illegal alien of a foreign nation who is violating and evading federal laws.
While illegal immigration is unacceptable, it is important to have sympathy for the migrants.
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, working with the border patrol is serving a heroic function that is saving Mexican and American lives in large quantities. I don’t see any Leftists sweating in the Arizona desert, saving illegal Mexican migrants from dying of dehydration and starvation.
The only people that have decisively responded to this human rights tragedy are the groups that Leftists despise and routinely slander.
Mexicans are gaining considerable political power and forcing politicians of both parties to shy away from defending the border and enforcing immigration laws.
A Zogby’s poll found that 58 percent of Mexicans agree with the statement, “The territory of the United States’ Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico.”
This was on display last year with the massive marches of Mexican citizens waving Mexican flags in American cities. If this isn’t blatant colonization, with ulterior imperialist motives, I don’t know what is.
[Reach contributing writer James Foxcurran at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]
_______________________________________________________________
Mexican claims to U.S. soil historically unfounded
October 8, 2007
By James Foxcurran
College campuses most often use the negative terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” to describe European and American history. Meanwhile, in 21st century North America, our southern neighbor is being granted moral legitimacy for the same behavior.
Mexican immigrants are now present in the Southwestern United States with a population percentage they have never enjoyed at any other time in history.
While defendants are saying it’s just the natural process of the Mexicans moving back onto land that really belongs to them and that the Hollywood demonstrations should be a source of conventional wisdom, history is being overlooked.
Mexico had barely colonized most of the Southwestern United States when it became U.S. territory in 1848. Spain, then Mexico, merely held imperial sway over Indian territories.
In 1835, Texas had about 3,500 Spanish-speaking residents, compared with almost 30,000 Anglo-American settlers, according to Ray Allen Billington, in his book The Far Western Frontier: 1830-1860.
In California, there were about 4,000 to 7,000 Spanish-speaking residents in the 1840s. The vast majority of the population was still Indian. Scattered missions, pueblos and presidios represented most of the Mexican presence in the area, which is why it was so easy for the United States to seize the area during the Mexican-American war, according to “History of French America” by Gilles Harvard and Cecile Vidal.
Meanwhile, in 1803, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, there were 40,000 to 50,000 French-speaking residents west of the Mississippi River between Missouri and Washington state.
This number tripled to quadrupled by 1850. However, there is no modern political constituency for this group, therefore the story is apparently not worth telling.
The only state that has always had a majority Spanish-speaking population is New Mexico, with 44,000 Spanish-speaking residents in 1830. Since the Spanish were the first to explore the Southwest, their geographic terms are on the map every place they stopped to relieve themselves.
These vestiges are often used to justify the massive Mexican colonization currently unfolding, in spite of the fact that it is actually the first wave of Mexican colonization, not the second.
History is often revised to reflect the current situation rather than the facts. This is exactly what is happening with the American Southwest and the inflation of Mexican claims to the land there.
This historical revisionism clearly has a political motivation to justify and legitimize the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants and to discredit efforts to respect our border and immigration laws.
As former Rep. J.D. (R-Ariz.) Hayworth said in the film Border Wars, “The Left sees cheap votes, and the Right sees cheap labor, so you have the perfect storm.”
While one certainly can’t stereotype all persons of Mexican immigrants, there is a distinction between Mexican-American families who have citizenship and roots in the United States, and an illegal alien of a foreign nation who is violating and evading federal laws.
While illegal immigration is unacceptable, it is important to have sympathy for the migrants.
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, working with the border patrol is serving a heroic function that is saving Mexican and American lives in large quantities. I don’t see any Leftists sweating in the Arizona desert, saving illegal Mexican migrants from dying of dehydration and starvation.
The only people that have decisively responded to this human rights tragedy are the groups that Leftists despise and routinely slander.
Mexicans are gaining considerable political power and forcing politicians of both parties to shy away from defending the border and enforcing immigration laws.
A Zogby’s poll found that 58 percent of Mexicans agree with the statement, “The territory of the United States’ Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico.”
This was on display last year with the massive marches of Mexican citizens waving Mexican flags in American cities. If this isn’t blatant colonization, with ulterior imperialist motives, I don’t know what is.
[Reach contributing writer James Foxcurran at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]
Now What Do You Think Could Be Their Reasoning?
Seems that officials at Columbia University are being less than cooperative with law enforcement officers looking into the hanging of a noose on a black professor's door. One would think this bastion of left-wing lunacy would want to help law enforcement find the perpetrators, since they consider this a "hate crime," and one would also think Jesse and Al would be putting all kinds of pressure on them to turn the tapes over so the white racists could be arrested.
Or perhaps (and I'm of course only speculating here) that's the whole point- maybe the perpetrators aren't white after all. I posted a story on here a few days ago about a black man burning a cross in his own yard and blaming it on whites to stir up the racial pot... perhaps the same thing happened here. Again, I'm just speculating, but maybe this is a "false flag" opeartion, employed by agitators to enrage minority students at Columbia. If this were the case, then it would make perfect sense for the Columbia adminstation to not turn over the security tapes- if it showed a black person hanging the noose, then the whole thing would be shown to be as big a fraud as the uproar in Jena, and their leftist anti-white agenda would once again be exposed.
But of course I'm only speculating. The liberal elite have far too much integrity to pull a scam like this, right?
You can read the story here.
Or perhaps (and I'm of course only speculating here) that's the whole point- maybe the perpetrators aren't white after all. I posted a story on here a few days ago about a black man burning a cross in his own yard and blaming it on whites to stir up the racial pot... perhaps the same thing happened here. Again, I'm just speculating, but maybe this is a "false flag" opeartion, employed by agitators to enrage minority students at Columbia. If this were the case, then it would make perfect sense for the Columbia adminstation to not turn over the security tapes- if it showed a black person hanging the noose, then the whole thing would be shown to be as big a fraud as the uproar in Jena, and their leftist anti-white agenda would once again be exposed.
But of course I'm only speculating. The liberal elite have far too much integrity to pull a scam like this, right?
You can read the story here.
The Political Cesspool Hits Back
I received the following via email from The Political Cesspool this morning. It's their response to the hatchet-job done on them by Morris Dees and his sheep from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hat's off to the Cesspool for standing up to Dees and exposing the darkness of the $PLC to the light of truth.
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Montgomery Skunks in Alabama; A Den of Charlatans Remains
(From the Files of Winston Smith / October 2007)
The $outhern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) just can’t get enough of The Political Cesspool, and especially of our main man, James Edwards. The latest edition of that rancid organization’s main publication, the hilariously titled Intelligence Report, did another feature-length hit piece on James. And the report says far more about Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potok than it says about James. The piece also says much about the $PLC’s deluded supporters, as they seem to be content with seeing the same old tired buzz-words and worn-out demagogue phrases that the $PLC has deployed against us since March of 2006, when they did us the great service of adding our radio show to their laughable “Hate Watch List.” Back then, $PLC she-reptile Heidi Beirich coronated The Political Cesspool “[t]he radio nexus of the hate movement,” a phrase the $PLC used again this year, saying, “[The Political Cesspool] has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America.” In their so-called coverage of our work over the past couple of years, $PLC writers have treated their supporters to a dazzling display of descriptive desolation by falling back on canned phrases like “raging anti-Semite” twice, ““Who’s Who” of the radical right” at least four times (twice in the same issue of Intelligence Report), five references to Holocaust™ denial, six references to White supremacism, six references to David Duke, ten references to the Ku Klux Klan and Klansmen, eleven references to neo-Nazis, and several other examples of intellectual infertility. It also gives us a valuable clue as to the $PLC’s financial machinations. Follow me on this: Everything the $PLC says, writes, and does is for one purpose only – to get donations and line their own pockets. The $PLC would never mention James Edwards and The Political Cesspool if it didn’t result in an extra dollar in Morri$’s or Mark’s bank accounts. But the fact that James is featured prominently in $PLC publications for Winter, Summer, and Fall of 2007 means that he’s pure money for the $PLC, which in turn means that James and The Political Cesspool have long and bright futures. With all the money Morri$ and Mark apparently make off James, the last thing they would want is for him to go away and The Cesspool to go off the air. Heck, they’d probably hire a security company to make certain nothing happened to James.
Among charitable organizations, the $PLC is well known and widely known as the dregs, carrying the shameful stature of being among the worst of the worst. Throughout the 1990’s and into this century, newspapers, magazines, other charitable organizations, and charity watchdog groups investigating the $PLC have registered assessments like:
“Rather than being legitimate crusaders against alleged right-wing “hate” groups, SPLC and Dees have been shameless exploiters of the misfortunes of people they do almost nothing to help. . .”
“a wealthy civil rights organization essentially controlled by one man: Morris Dees,”
“Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support” because “the SPLC is already the wealthiest ‘civil rights’ group in America,”
“. . .the SPLC is little more than a direct mail outfit that has raised heaps of money hyping hate crimes—real and imagined—while doing virtually nothing for the victims.”
“the center [has] one of the worst ratings of any group [monitored by the American Institute of Philanthropy], estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning ‘people like you’.”
“What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing…? Mostly making money…In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million–$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments…On the subject of ‘hate groups’ …No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center’s millionaire huckster, Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, ‘Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.”…With…a salary close to $300,000 putting him among the top 2 percent of Americans. . .”
“[Dees] is a fraud who has milked a lot of very wonderful well-intentioned people. If it’s got headlines, Morris is there. . .”
Secretive as Swiss bankers, the $PLC bristles at the notion of accountability to donors. Recently, the $PLC refused to participate in the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance’s evaluation, a non-partisan process that would have given donors, present and potential, a good idea of how Morri$ and Mark use the money sent them. The Alliance reads the $PLC’s refusal as “a lack of commitment to transparency.” (Look for the Better Business Bureau to be placed on the “Hate Watch List”.) But then, one need only look at the $PLC’s lavish and imposing multi-multi-million dollar donor-financed castle-fortress in Montgomery to get an idea of how welcome the $PLC might welcome donor inquiries.
Very few windows, lots of reinforced concrete, reinforced steel garage doors, one narrow walkway leading to just one entrance. . .it doesn’t sound very inviting, does it? And the good people of Montgomery hate it, because it brutally reflects the sun and blinds them. Good neighbors the SPLC, eh?
(By the way, if you want to know how we at The Political Cesspool use the donations with which you good folks entrust us, I’ll tell you right now: every cent we receive goes directly to projects and to mission statement fulfillment. Not one penny goes for salary, overhead, facilities, or perks. No one on The Political Cesspool staff has an expense account; none of us receive so much as a penny for what we do here. Unlike Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potock, we easily retain our honor and dignity, because we’re never at the pay window. And yet, even with a quarterly budget that probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for Morri$’s and Mark’s monthly dinner bills, we still command attention sufficient for the $PLC to devote a considerable amount time and ink to us.)
With its well-established reputation for chicanery, hucksterism, and nefarity, one can’t help but marvel at the $PLC’s hypocrisy in assuming the moral authority to judge anyone. And lest anyone think the $PLC’s depravity is merely organizational and can’t be helped, I invite you to read the divorce decree against Morri$ Dee$. Then you decide if the $PLC’s venality is most likely an extension of his own abominable and congenital perversions. All of this explains why you never hear or read of any politician praising the $PLC. This also explains why the $PLC never hosts meetings, conventions, or conferences – no one who cared for their reputation would accept an invitation to participate in an $PLC event, because they would never want to be associated with Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potok. No governor, mayor, senator, representative (with the possible exception of Barney Frank), or any elected official with aspirations to higher office would want to be seen walking through the door of an $PLC-sponsored event, nor would they want the existence of pictures or video tape of themselves standing next to Morri$ and Mark to be the albatross around their neck or the scarlet “$PLC” on their chest. Even today’s bought-and-sold amoral politicians have some standards.
So, for us at the Political Cesspool, being the subject of any criticism by the $PLC is like being sprayed by a skunk. The stench comes from them, and we can easily wash it off and be rid of it that day. But tomorrow, the $PLC will still be skunks, stinking, reeking, and repulsive, able to keep company only with other skunks.
Winston Smith is a staff member of The Political Cesspool Radio Program. He can be e-mailed here: winstonsmith_99@yahoo.com
__________________________________________
Montgomery Skunks in Alabama; A Den of Charlatans Remains
(From the Files of Winston Smith / October 2007)
The $outhern Poverty Law Center ($PLC) just can’t get enough of The Political Cesspool, and especially of our main man, James Edwards. The latest edition of that rancid organization’s main publication, the hilariously titled Intelligence Report, did another feature-length hit piece on James. And the report says far more about Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potok than it says about James. The piece also says much about the $PLC’s deluded supporters, as they seem to be content with seeing the same old tired buzz-words and worn-out demagogue phrases that the $PLC has deployed against us since March of 2006, when they did us the great service of adding our radio show to their laughable “Hate Watch List.” Back then, $PLC she-reptile Heidi Beirich coronated The Political Cesspool “[t]he radio nexus of the hate movement,” a phrase the $PLC used again this year, saying, “[The Political Cesspool] has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America.” In their so-called coverage of our work over the past couple of years, $PLC writers have treated their supporters to a dazzling display of descriptive desolation by falling back on canned phrases like “raging anti-Semite” twice, ““Who’s Who” of the radical right” at least four times (twice in the same issue of Intelligence Report), five references to Holocaust™ denial, six references to White supremacism, six references to David Duke, ten references to the Ku Klux Klan and Klansmen, eleven references to neo-Nazis, and several other examples of intellectual infertility. It also gives us a valuable clue as to the $PLC’s financial machinations. Follow me on this: Everything the $PLC says, writes, and does is for one purpose only – to get donations and line their own pockets. The $PLC would never mention James Edwards and The Political Cesspool if it didn’t result in an extra dollar in Morri$’s or Mark’s bank accounts. But the fact that James is featured prominently in $PLC publications for Winter, Summer, and Fall of 2007 means that he’s pure money for the $PLC, which in turn means that James and The Political Cesspool have long and bright futures. With all the money Morri$ and Mark apparently make off James, the last thing they would want is for him to go away and The Cesspool to go off the air. Heck, they’d probably hire a security company to make certain nothing happened to James.
Among charitable organizations, the $PLC is well known and widely known as the dregs, carrying the shameful stature of being among the worst of the worst. Throughout the 1990’s and into this century, newspapers, magazines, other charitable organizations, and charity watchdog groups investigating the $PLC have registered assessments like:
“Rather than being legitimate crusaders against alleged right-wing “hate” groups, SPLC and Dees have been shameless exploiters of the misfortunes of people they do almost nothing to help. . .”
“a wealthy civil rights organization essentially controlled by one man: Morris Dees,”
“Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support” because “the SPLC is already the wealthiest ‘civil rights’ group in America,”
“. . .the SPLC is little more than a direct mail outfit that has raised heaps of money hyping hate crimes—real and imagined—while doing virtually nothing for the victims.”
“the center [has] one of the worst ratings of any group [monitored by the American Institute of Philanthropy], estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning ‘people like you’.”
“What is the Southern Poverty Law Center doing…? Mostly making money…In 1999 it spent $2.4 million on litigation and $5.7 million on fundraising, meanwhile taking in more than $44 million–$27 million from fundraising, the rest from investments…On the subject of ‘hate groups’ …No one has been more assiduous in inflating the profile of such groups than the center’s millionaire huckster, Morris Dees, who in 1999 began a begging letter, ‘Dear Friend, The danger presented by the Klan is greater now than at any time in the past ten years.”…With…a salary close to $300,000 putting him among the top 2 percent of Americans. . .”
“[Dees] is a fraud who has milked a lot of very wonderful well-intentioned people. If it’s got headlines, Morris is there. . .”
Secretive as Swiss bankers, the $PLC bristles at the notion of accountability to donors. Recently, the $PLC refused to participate in the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance’s evaluation, a non-partisan process that would have given donors, present and potential, a good idea of how Morri$ and Mark use the money sent them. The Alliance reads the $PLC’s refusal as “a lack of commitment to transparency.” (Look for the Better Business Bureau to be placed on the “Hate Watch List”.) But then, one need only look at the $PLC’s lavish and imposing multi-multi-million dollar donor-financed castle-fortress in Montgomery to get an idea of how welcome the $PLC might welcome donor inquiries.
Very few windows, lots of reinforced concrete, reinforced steel garage doors, one narrow walkway leading to just one entrance. . .it doesn’t sound very inviting, does it? And the good people of Montgomery hate it, because it brutally reflects the sun and blinds them. Good neighbors the SPLC, eh?
(By the way, if you want to know how we at The Political Cesspool use the donations with which you good folks entrust us, I’ll tell you right now: every cent we receive goes directly to projects and to mission statement fulfillment. Not one penny goes for salary, overhead, facilities, or perks. No one on The Political Cesspool staff has an expense account; none of us receive so much as a penny for what we do here. Unlike Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potock, we easily retain our honor and dignity, because we’re never at the pay window. And yet, even with a quarterly budget that probably wouldn’t be enough to pay for Morri$’s and Mark’s monthly dinner bills, we still command attention sufficient for the $PLC to devote a considerable amount time and ink to us.)
With its well-established reputation for chicanery, hucksterism, and nefarity, one can’t help but marvel at the $PLC’s hypocrisy in assuming the moral authority to judge anyone. And lest anyone think the $PLC’s depravity is merely organizational and can’t be helped, I invite you to read the divorce decree against Morri$ Dee$. Then you decide if the $PLC’s venality is most likely an extension of his own abominable and congenital perversions. All of this explains why you never hear or read of any politician praising the $PLC. This also explains why the $PLC never hosts meetings, conventions, or conferences – no one who cared for their reputation would accept an invitation to participate in an $PLC event, because they would never want to be associated with Morri$ Dee$ and Mark “The Pocket” Potok. No governor, mayor, senator, representative (with the possible exception of Barney Frank), or any elected official with aspirations to higher office would want to be seen walking through the door of an $PLC-sponsored event, nor would they want the existence of pictures or video tape of themselves standing next to Morri$ and Mark to be the albatross around their neck or the scarlet “$PLC” on their chest. Even today’s bought-and-sold amoral politicians have some standards.
So, for us at the Political Cesspool, being the subject of any criticism by the $PLC is like being sprayed by a skunk. The stench comes from them, and we can easily wash it off and be rid of it that day. But tomorrow, the $PLC will still be skunks, stinking, reeking, and repulsive, able to keep company only with other skunks.
Winston Smith is a staff member of The Political Cesspool Radio Program. He can be e-mailed here: winstonsmith_99@yahoo.com
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Jena 6 Thugs- The Saga Continues
If you do a news search on Yahoo, Google, or just about any other search engine, you'll find story after story of protests supporting the alleged attempted-murderers are breaking out all over the Country. They descended on the Justice Department, walked out of high school and college classes, wrote songs, and invoked the spirit of the 60s to anyone who would listen.
As much as I know all of this is a crock, the last thing I want to do is put a stop to it. I want them to keep protesting, keep marching, keep walking out of class, and by all means, please keep talking.
Why do I say that? Simple, really. The truth about what really happened in Jena is starting to come out- even black journalists are blowing the whistle (read my previous posting of an article by Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star). The truth is out there and available- we'll see how long Jackson, Sharpton, and the protesters refuse to accept it. We'll see how long Jackson, Sharpton, and their ignorant sheep followers keep up the unrest in spite of the truth. Their true colors are showing, so to speak- they aren't interested in the truth, only in those things which will get them on TV and line their pockets.
As much as I know all of this is a crock, the last thing I want to do is put a stop to it. I want them to keep protesting, keep marching, keep walking out of class, and by all means, please keep talking.
Why do I say that? Simple, really. The truth about what really happened in Jena is starting to come out- even black journalists are blowing the whistle (read my previous posting of an article by Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star). The truth is out there and available- we'll see how long Jackson, Sharpton, and the protesters refuse to accept it. We'll see how long Jackson, Sharpton, and their ignorant sheep followers keep up the unrest in spite of the truth. Their true colors are showing, so to speak- they aren't interested in the truth, only in those things which will get them on TV and line their pockets.
SPLC Launches Yet Another Attack on "The Political Cesspool"
Once again, Morris Dees and his cult of political correctness (aka the Southern Poverty Law Center) are launching an assault against freedom of speech. The SPLC has again slandered The Political Cesspool in a lengthy "expose," calling it a "shamelessly white nationalist talk show." The SPLC can't win arguments on merit, so they resort to name calling and false accusations against anyone who doesn't fall in line with their warped view of "tolerance." If you say anything against blacks (of for whites), you're a white supremacist and a racist; if you say anything against gays, you're a homophobe; say anything bad against any group (other than whites) and you're intolerant.
For more information on Dees and his cult following, read "The Church of Morris Dees" on American Patrol Report website.
Here's the revolting report from SPLC, which I received via email from The Political Cesspool...
____________________________________________________________________
Friends:
Today, the radically leftist Southern Poverty Law Center issued (another) attack on our award-winning radio program. This three-page "expose" is the SPLC's most detailed assault to date. As with any SPLC hit-piece it is littered with inaccuracies, but I felt as though the listeners of this program would appreciate being made aware of what it said. I encourage you to read it for yourself and then reply to this e-mail with your comments. Now, more than ever, we need the fans of our groundbreaking show to stand with me and the rest of the staff. At the conclusion of the article you can click on a link that will enable you to help us fight back!
On To Victory,
James Edwards
Founding Host, The Political Cesspool Radio Program
www.thepoliticalcesspool.org
Memphis Sewage
In Tennessee, a Racist Radio Host Thrives
by David Holthouse
When the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) held its annual national conference June 1 and 2 at a Holiday Inn in Greenville, S.C., James Edwards was the golden boy of the hate group's proceedings.
Tennessee radio host James Edwards has worked assiduously to provide neo-Nazis, Klan associates and Holocaust deniers with a path to mainstream respectability.
Edwards, 27, is the host of "The Political Cesspool," a shamelessly white nationalist radio talk show that's broadcast for two hours every weeknight from a studio near Memphis, Tenn., where Edwards grew up and still lives.
"The Political Cesspool" in the past two years has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America. Its sponsors include the CCC and the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial organization. Its guest roster for 2007 reads like a "Who's Who" of the radical racist right. CCC leader Gordon Lee Baum, Holocaust denier Mark Weber, Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm, American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, neo-Nazi activist April Gaede, anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald, Stormfront webmaster Jaime Kelso and League of the South president Michael Hill have all been favorably interviewed on the "Political Cesspool" this year, along with former Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke, the show's most frequent celebrity racist guest, who has logged three appearances.
"I have known Dr. Duke for a number of years and have found him to be a Christian man above reproach," Edwards says on the "Cesspool" website. "Time and again, he has gone out of his way to help me, asking for nothing in return."
Edwards is quite a bit younger than the majority of CCC members who attended the South Carolina conference. Many of those members' involvement in the white supremacist movement dates back to the White Citizens Councils that were formed to oppose school desegregation and the civil rights movement and were later reincarnated as the CCC. Edwards sat with his wife at a table near the back of the conference hall, engaging in conversation with a nearly constant stream of admirers who looked twice his age or more. They slapped his back and shook his hand and congratulated him not only on the success of "Political Cesspool" — which is tailored for a southern, neo-Confederate, white nationalist audience — but also his recent triumphs in smoothly injecting white nationalist ideology into national mainstream media discussions of race relations and crime in America.
Edwards arrived at the hate group conference just three days after his third primetime appearance on CNN in the previous two months. "Crime and violence follow African-Americans wherever they go," he said in his April 4 CNN debut, a panel debate on "self-segregation" hosted by Paula Zahn. "And if you think that is racist, then spend some time on the mean streets of south Memphis."
Zahn, who initially identified Edwards to CNN viewers as merely a "radio talk show host" from Memphis, invited him back on May 21 for a "Paula Zahn Now" episode titled "The Changing Face of America."
"Why not celebrate the diversity?" Zahn asked him in one exchange.
"My primary interest is to protect and safeguard my family," Edwards replied. "Whites are in for the fight of their lives. America is becoming balkanized. We are being robbed of having a future in the very nation our ancestors carved from the wilderness."
David Duke, who calls Edwards his "favorite radio patriot," gave the "Cesspool" host's CNN appearances a glowing online review: "He delivered a powerful performance, stuck to his guns and didn't back down as he articulated an unapologetically conservative viewpoint regarding race relations."
'Heathen Savages'
Edwards began garnering similar accolades from his elders on the radical right last year as the "Cesspool" gained a larger and larger audience. (Although the show is broadcast only regionally on the airwaves, anyone can listen to it on the Internet.) "James is a bundle of energy and dedication who is deeply concerned about the genocide against European-Americans," white nationalist Bob Whitaker stated online after appearing on the show. "He is also wiser than many of the older members of our movement. … He sticks with legitimate complaints that gentiles have and our fear of the genocide of immigration and intermarriage that respectable conservatives all advocate. The Political Cesspool is one of the first major steps toward making our perfectly legitimate and generally felt concerns — the ones that are presently denounced as heresy, racism and hate — the mainstream."
The "Cesspool" host is a rising star of the white nationalist movement because he's articulate, charming and equally at ease in a television studio, behind a radio microphone and standing in front of a crowd. He was a specially invited guest speaker at the CCC conference. His topic: "Creating Your Own Media." CCC National Field Coordinator Bill Lord told a "Martin Luther Coon" joke in his introduction of Edwards. Lord and other longtime CCC members casually dropped racial epithets at the conference, but Edwards carefully avoided using such crudely derogatory language, as he always does when speaking in public, on the airwaves or to the media. Edwards allies himself with hate group leaders who call black people "niggers," but he doesn't drop the N-bomb himself. Instead he speaks in the more or less polished code of a suit-and-tie racist, calling blacks "heathen savages," "subhumans," and "black animals," exclusively in the context of discussing violent black-on-white crime.
His audience of about 150 at the CCC conference included Jared Taylor, whose magazine specializes in race "studies," and Don Black, the former Alabama grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of Stormfront, the largest racist forum on the Internet.
Edwards began by quoting Mississippi civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer, telling the crowd that he is "sick and tired of being sick and tired" when it comes to reverse discrimination against white people. He described "Political Cesspool" as "unabashedly pro-white" and detailed the show's early success in rallying Memphis whites to "defend" the gravesite of Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first national leader of the original KKK. The gravesite was the subject of a protest in August 2005 led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, at which about 200 whites squared off against a few dozen black Sharpton supporters.
"Sharpton denigrated the general's gravesite with that kind of rabble there," Edwards said. He then boasted of the lavish all-expenses-paid treatment afforded him by CNN, including, he said, fine hotels and limousine rides. Edwards finished by announcing that "as a result of listener demand, support from station ownership and a surge of interest from the recent CNN exposure," beginning the following week "Political Cesspool" would expand from one hour per weeknight to two.
He received a standing ovation.
Biased and Controlled
The radio station that carries "Political Cesspool" — WLRM-AM — is a Christian station (WLRM stands for "We Love Radio Ministries," according to its website). Most of its programming consists of standard nationally syndicated conservative Christian "news and views" content that is often homophobic but generally non-racist, including a two-hour weekday show by the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a well-known anti-gay minister who is African-American.
WLRM is not audited by Arbitron, the radio industry's equivalent of the Nielsen Ratings system, so there's no reliable estimate of the number of "Political Cesspool" listeners. Advertising on the show is cheap: $100 a week for a regular plug. Edwards describes "Cesspool" as primarily "listener-supported," and the show's website claims it has received nearly $15,000 in donations this year.
The WLRM station manager did not return three phone calls seeking comment for this story. Edwards politely refused to comment as well. "I appreciate your request for an interview as much as I do the SPLC's continued interest in our conservative radio program," he wrote in response to an E-mail from the Intelligence Report. "I must, however, respectfully decline your offer."
Proper manners were instilled in Edwards early in life both at home, he writes on his website, and when he attended Briarcrest Christian School, an expensive private school in Memphis — tuition is now $10,000 a year — where "conservative Christian values and morals are taught and practiced in every aspect of school life," according to the Briarcrest mission statement.
Paul Fromm, a well-known Canadian white supremacist, has appeared on "The Political Cesspool" this year.
When Edwards reached the ninth grade he transferred into a "Christian nationalist" home schooling program. "It was that decision that ultimately led me down the road of political activism," Edwards says on his site. "I could no longer be aware of the problems that are plaguing this Republic without trying to be part of the solution."
He began reading the works of white nationalist politician and commentator Pat Buchanan, who appeared on "Cesspool" last year. "Buchanan was one of the first commentators that I noticed who really seemed to be speaking my language," Edwards told the Mid-South Patriot, a monthly Memphis newspaper, in a February interview. "I felt as though he was articulating a message that resonated within me."
When Buchanan ran for president in 2000, Edwards worked on his campaign. "Politics was in my blood at that point and there was no turning back," he said. Edwards ran for the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2002 on a pro-life, pro-school vouchers platform. His campaign website featured endorsements from his pastor and the fathers of several children on a bowling team that Edwards coached. He lost. But during his campaign, Edwards befriended fellow Memphis-area conservative activist Austin Farley.
The two of them together launched "The Political Cesspool" in October 2004. Farley left the show in 2006 to run for the Tennessee House in District 97, the same district Edwards had targeted four years earlier. Farley also lost.
The "Cesspool" founders won a remarkable token of mainstream political acceptance in 2005, when Memphis City Councilman E.C. Jones, who has been interviewed on "Political Cesspool" several times, presented Edwards and Farley with a certificate "in appreciation of outstanding contributions to the community," and named them honorary city councilmen.
League of the South leader Michael Hill has been on "The Political Cesspool" this year.
When Jones came under fire from the Memphis media for honoring the "Cesspool," he told the The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, "It pisses me off when people want to make a big damn deal out of nothing. … Just because they have a different political view, am I supposed to exclude those people?"
When the Mid-South Patriot asked Edwards in February about the accusations that he's a racist he replied: "The horrible defamations we must endure are little compared to the physical battles of blood and bone that so many of our ancestors had to endure so that we could be here now." He also said that David Duke, his favorite "Cesspool" guest, is unfairly maligned. "Most of his detractors come to their conclusions about him based upon what they hear parroted from a biased and controlled global media."
Idolizing Duke
The Feb. 20 "Political Cesspool" broadcast featured a phone interview with David Duke, speaking from the Ukraine. Edwards made it abundantly clear during their conversation that he, like Duke, believes Jews control the media, among many other things. "We have a very small minority that has incredible power in the American media, the American government, in academia, and in the economy," Edwards told the infamous author of Jewish Supremacism. "I find it amazing that no movement has been too big or too small that these people have not had their hands in. … You look at all the destructive movements of the 20th century. We're talking about women's rights, the civil rights movement, and today the newly protected minority status for homosexuals."
Duke said in response: "Well, the way they have been able to do that, James, and everybody listening, is through organization. They have an agenda. They make a united front. When I was a university student at LSU [Louisiana State University] on campus, the very leftist, liberal anti-Vietnam war movement was absolutely led by radical Jews." Duke failed to mention another aspect of his LSU years: In 1970, while still a student, he was photographed dressed in neo-Nazi regalia, including a swastika armband, to protest the appearance of left-wing Jewish attorney William Kunstler at nearby Tulane University. That photograph, along with hundreds of others of Duke in his Ku Klux Klan robes, have haunted Duke over the decades and hampered his attempts to win mainstream political office.
Radio host James Edwards has been compared to former Klan leader David Duke, who has run for numerous political offices. But unlike Duke, who was photographed as a young man with neo-Nazi and white supremacist symbols, Edwards has avoided the most compromising situations and language.
Edwards idolizes Duke. At the CCC conference, he repeatedly quoted "Dr. Duke" in conversation. But as much as he admires Duke, Edwards has also clearly learned from his mentor's early mistakes. He does not appear at any hate group events where he knows swastikas and other white supremacist symbols will be photographed or filmed.
A frequent topic on "Political Cesspool" all of this year has been the gruesome murders of a young white couple in Knoxville who were allegedly carjacked, raped and murdered by four black men. "Hate crime laws were made for one reason and one reason only — to protect these black animals," Edwards said during his May 28 "Cesspool" broadcast. "If these two souls [the victims] had been more aware of the racial realities of our time, perhaps they would still be alive today."
Two days before that broadcast, neo-Nazi leader Alex Linder organized a protest against "black crime" in Knoxville. Edwards was nowhere to be seen. When he appeared on CNN May 29, the network rolled footage of the protest showing demonstrators wearing swastika T-shirts and displaying other white supremacist symbols. CNN host Kiran Chetry asked Edwards, "Why has this [murder] case become a rallying cry among the white supremacists?"
Edwards disingenuously dodged the question: "Well, I can't necessarily speak for people that I don't have any association with. But I will promise you this: Had the roles been reversed, and had the victims been black and the murderers white, this would have been the biggest news story in America."
The next day on his blog, Edwards posted this message to his fans: "With regards to those who showed up in Knoxville (who were labeled 'Klansmen' and 'Nazis' etc.), conservative activists often get maligned with nefarious descriptions because they dare stand up and speak out. I don't know the hearts and minds of those who attended the Knoxville rally because I wasn't there. However, with regards to their demonstration, they were doing the right thing by bringing attention to the despicable double standard this case has received. God bless them for that."
It's not exactly a stretch to "label" a man wearing a swastika T-shirt and shouting "Heil Hitler" a Nazi. Edwards knows that, but he's a master of carefully parsing his language so that he walks the razor's edge between conservative commentary and outright neo-Nazi rhetoric. This balancing act allows him to continue building his core audience of white nationalists without doing irrevocable damage to his mainstream political aspirations As this article went to press, Edwards was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at a Sept. 15 meeting of the Missouri chapter of the League of the South, a racist, neo-secessionist organization based in Alabama. He also had recently announced that he was in negotiations with a Michigan-based media company to start broadcasting "Political Cesspool" nationwide.
His stated mission is "[f]ighting to advance a nationalist agenda based upon the Christian world view" and turning back the clock in America to the pre-civil rights era, "back when America had a strong moral compass," as he put it during his May 17 show. "You had cultural and racial integrity in those days. …What's been taken away from us, we can take back."
Edwards works hard to maintain a professional appearance and demeanor. He wears suits, not Klan robes. But he's doing more than anyone else in the white nationalist movement at this point to promote the views of neo-Nazis, Klan sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, academic racists and anti-Semites. Helped along by cable news television and the occasional sympathetic elected official, he's beginning to look a lot like the next David Duke — and he'd almost certainly consider that a compliment.
Emily Brown and Janet Smith contributed to this report.
Intelligence Report
Fall 2007
Direct Link: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=817
For more information on Dees and his cult following, read "The Church of Morris Dees" on American Patrol Report website.
Here's the revolting report from SPLC, which I received via email from The Political Cesspool...
____________________________________________________________________
Friends:
Today, the radically leftist Southern Poverty Law Center issued (another) attack on our award-winning radio program. This three-page "expose" is the SPLC's most detailed assault to date. As with any SPLC hit-piece it is littered with inaccuracies, but I felt as though the listeners of this program would appreciate being made aware of what it said. I encourage you to read it for yourself and then reply to this e-mail with your comments. Now, more than ever, we need the fans of our groundbreaking show to stand with me and the rest of the staff. At the conclusion of the article you can click on a link that will enable you to help us fight back!
On To Victory,
James Edwards
Founding Host, The Political Cesspool Radio Program
www.thepoliticalcesspool.org
In Tennessee, a Racist Radio Host Thrives
by David Holthouse
When the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) held its annual national conference June 1 and 2 at a Holiday Inn in Greenville, S.C., James Edwards was the golden boy of the hate group's proceedings.
Tennessee radio host James Edwards has worked assiduously to provide neo-Nazis, Klan associates and Holocaust deniers with a path to mainstream respectability.
Edwards, 27, is the host of "The Political Cesspool," a shamelessly white nationalist radio talk show that's broadcast for two hours every weeknight from a studio near Memphis, Tenn., where Edwards grew up and still lives.
"The Political Cesspool" in the past two years has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America. Its sponsors include the CCC and the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial organization. Its guest roster for 2007 reads like a "Who's Who" of the radical racist right. CCC leader Gordon Lee Baum, Holocaust denier Mark Weber, Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm, American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, neo-Nazi activist April Gaede, anti-Semitic professor Kevin MacDonald, Stormfront webmaster Jaime Kelso and League of the South president Michael Hill have all been favorably interviewed on the "Political Cesspool" this year, along with former Klan leader and neo-Nazi David Duke, the show's most frequent celebrity racist guest, who has logged three appearances.
"I have known Dr. Duke for a number of years and have found him to be a Christian man above reproach," Edwards says on the "Cesspool" website. "Time and again, he has gone out of his way to help me, asking for nothing in return."
Edwards is quite a bit younger than the majority of CCC members who attended the South Carolina conference. Many of those members' involvement in the white supremacist movement dates back to the White Citizens Councils that were formed to oppose school desegregation and the civil rights movement and were later reincarnated as the CCC. Edwards sat with his wife at a table near the back of the conference hall, engaging in conversation with a nearly constant stream of admirers who looked twice his age or more. They slapped his back and shook his hand and congratulated him not only on the success of "Political Cesspool" — which is tailored for a southern, neo-Confederate, white nationalist audience — but also his recent triumphs in smoothly injecting white nationalist ideology into national mainstream media discussions of race relations and crime in America.
Edwards arrived at the hate group conference just three days after his third primetime appearance on CNN in the previous two months. "Crime and violence follow African-Americans wherever they go," he said in his April 4 CNN debut, a panel debate on "self-segregation" hosted by Paula Zahn. "And if you think that is racist, then spend some time on the mean streets of south Memphis."
Zahn, who initially identified Edwards to CNN viewers as merely a "radio talk show host" from Memphis, invited him back on May 21 for a "Paula Zahn Now" episode titled "The Changing Face of America."
"Why not celebrate the diversity?" Zahn asked him in one exchange.
"My primary interest is to protect and safeguard my family," Edwards replied. "Whites are in for the fight of their lives. America is becoming balkanized. We are being robbed of having a future in the very nation our ancestors carved from the wilderness."
David Duke, who calls Edwards his "favorite radio patriot," gave the "Cesspool" host's CNN appearances a glowing online review: "He delivered a powerful performance, stuck to his guns and didn't back down as he articulated an unapologetically conservative viewpoint regarding race relations."
'Heathen Savages'
Edwards began garnering similar accolades from his elders on the radical right last year as the "Cesspool" gained a larger and larger audience. (Although the show is broadcast only regionally on the airwaves, anyone can listen to it on the Internet.) "James is a bundle of energy and dedication who is deeply concerned about the genocide against European-Americans," white nationalist Bob Whitaker stated online after appearing on the show. "He is also wiser than many of the older members of our movement. … He sticks with legitimate complaints that gentiles have and our fear of the genocide of immigration and intermarriage that respectable conservatives all advocate. The Political Cesspool is one of the first major steps toward making our perfectly legitimate and generally felt concerns — the ones that are presently denounced as heresy, racism and hate — the mainstream."
The "Cesspool" host is a rising star of the white nationalist movement because he's articulate, charming and equally at ease in a television studio, behind a radio microphone and standing in front of a crowd. He was a specially invited guest speaker at the CCC conference. His topic: "Creating Your Own Media." CCC National Field Coordinator Bill Lord told a "Martin Luther Coon" joke in his introduction of Edwards. Lord and other longtime CCC members casually dropped racial epithets at the conference, but Edwards carefully avoided using such crudely derogatory language, as he always does when speaking in public, on the airwaves or to the media. Edwards allies himself with hate group leaders who call black people "niggers," but he doesn't drop the N-bomb himself. Instead he speaks in the more or less polished code of a suit-and-tie racist, calling blacks "heathen savages," "subhumans," and "black animals," exclusively in the context of discussing violent black-on-white crime.
His audience of about 150 at the CCC conference included Jared Taylor, whose magazine specializes in race "studies," and Don Black, the former Alabama grand dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and founder of Stormfront, the largest racist forum on the Internet.
Edwards began by quoting Mississippi civil rights activist Fanny Lou Hamer, telling the crowd that he is "sick and tired of being sick and tired" when it comes to reverse discrimination against white people. He described "Political Cesspool" as "unabashedly pro-white" and detailed the show's early success in rallying Memphis whites to "defend" the gravesite of Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first national leader of the original KKK. The gravesite was the subject of a protest in August 2005 led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, at which about 200 whites squared off against a few dozen black Sharpton supporters.
"Sharpton denigrated the general's gravesite with that kind of rabble there," Edwards said. He then boasted of the lavish all-expenses-paid treatment afforded him by CNN, including, he said, fine hotels and limousine rides. Edwards finished by announcing that "as a result of listener demand, support from station ownership and a surge of interest from the recent CNN exposure," beginning the following week "Political Cesspool" would expand from one hour per weeknight to two.
He received a standing ovation.
Biased and Controlled
The radio station that carries "Political Cesspool" — WLRM-AM — is a Christian station (WLRM stands for "We Love Radio Ministries," according to its website). Most of its programming consists of standard nationally syndicated conservative Christian "news and views" content that is often homophobic but generally non-racist, including a two-hour weekday show by the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a well-known anti-gay minister who is African-American.
WLRM is not audited by Arbitron, the radio industry's equivalent of the Nielsen Ratings system, so there's no reliable estimate of the number of "Political Cesspool" listeners. Advertising on the show is cheap: $100 a week for a regular plug. Edwards describes "Cesspool" as primarily "listener-supported," and the show's website claims it has received nearly $15,000 in donations this year.
The WLRM station manager did not return three phone calls seeking comment for this story. Edwards politely refused to comment as well. "I appreciate your request for an interview as much as I do the SPLC's continued interest in our conservative radio program," he wrote in response to an E-mail from the Intelligence Report. "I must, however, respectfully decline your offer."
Proper manners were instilled in Edwards early in life both at home, he writes on his website, and when he attended Briarcrest Christian School, an expensive private school in Memphis — tuition is now $10,000 a year — where "conservative Christian values and morals are taught and practiced in every aspect of school life," according to the Briarcrest mission statement.
Paul Fromm, a well-known Canadian white supremacist, has appeared on "The Political Cesspool" this year.
When Edwards reached the ninth grade he transferred into a "Christian nationalist" home schooling program. "It was that decision that ultimately led me down the road of political activism," Edwards says on his site. "I could no longer be aware of the problems that are plaguing this Republic without trying to be part of the solution."
He began reading the works of white nationalist politician and commentator Pat Buchanan, who appeared on "Cesspool" last year. "Buchanan was one of the first commentators that I noticed who really seemed to be speaking my language," Edwards told the Mid-South Patriot, a monthly Memphis newspaper, in a February interview. "I felt as though he was articulating a message that resonated within me."
When Buchanan ran for president in 2000, Edwards worked on his campaign. "Politics was in my blood at that point and there was no turning back," he said. Edwards ran for the Tennessee House of Representatives in 2002 on a pro-life, pro-school vouchers platform. His campaign website featured endorsements from his pastor and the fathers of several children on a bowling team that Edwards coached. He lost. But during his campaign, Edwards befriended fellow Memphis-area conservative activist Austin Farley.
The two of them together launched "The Political Cesspool" in October 2004. Farley left the show in 2006 to run for the Tennessee House in District 97, the same district Edwards had targeted four years earlier. Farley also lost.
The "Cesspool" founders won a remarkable token of mainstream political acceptance in 2005, when Memphis City Councilman E.C. Jones, who has been interviewed on "Political Cesspool" several times, presented Edwards and Farley with a certificate "in appreciation of outstanding contributions to the community," and named them honorary city councilmen.
League of the South leader Michael Hill has been on "The Political Cesspool" this year.
When Jones came under fire from the Memphis media for honoring the "Cesspool," he told the The [Memphis] Commercial Appeal, "It pisses me off when people want to make a big damn deal out of nothing. … Just because they have a different political view, am I supposed to exclude those people?"
When the Mid-South Patriot asked Edwards in February about the accusations that he's a racist he replied: "The horrible defamations we must endure are little compared to the physical battles of blood and bone that so many of our ancestors had to endure so that we could be here now." He also said that David Duke, his favorite "Cesspool" guest, is unfairly maligned. "Most of his detractors come to their conclusions about him based upon what they hear parroted from a biased and controlled global media."
Idolizing Duke
The Feb. 20 "Political Cesspool" broadcast featured a phone interview with David Duke, speaking from the Ukraine. Edwards made it abundantly clear during their conversation that he, like Duke, believes Jews control the media, among many other things. "We have a very small minority that has incredible power in the American media, the American government, in academia, and in the economy," Edwards told the infamous author of Jewish Supremacism. "I find it amazing that no movement has been too big or too small that these people have not had their hands in. … You look at all the destructive movements of the 20th century. We're talking about women's rights, the civil rights movement, and today the newly protected minority status for homosexuals."
Duke said in response: "Well, the way they have been able to do that, James, and everybody listening, is through organization. They have an agenda. They make a united front. When I was a university student at LSU [Louisiana State University] on campus, the very leftist, liberal anti-Vietnam war movement was absolutely led by radical Jews." Duke failed to mention another aspect of his LSU years: In 1970, while still a student, he was photographed dressed in neo-Nazi regalia, including a swastika armband, to protest the appearance of left-wing Jewish attorney William Kunstler at nearby Tulane University. That photograph, along with hundreds of others of Duke in his Ku Klux Klan robes, have haunted Duke over the decades and hampered his attempts to win mainstream political office.
Radio host James Edwards has been compared to former Klan leader David Duke, who has run for numerous political offices. But unlike Duke, who was photographed as a young man with neo-Nazi and white supremacist symbols, Edwards has avoided the most compromising situations and language.
Edwards idolizes Duke. At the CCC conference, he repeatedly quoted "Dr. Duke" in conversation. But as much as he admires Duke, Edwards has also clearly learned from his mentor's early mistakes. He does not appear at any hate group events where he knows swastikas and other white supremacist symbols will be photographed or filmed.
A frequent topic on "Political Cesspool" all of this year has been the gruesome murders of a young white couple in Knoxville who were allegedly carjacked, raped and murdered by four black men. "Hate crime laws were made for one reason and one reason only — to protect these black animals," Edwards said during his May 28 "Cesspool" broadcast. "If these two souls [the victims] had been more aware of the racial realities of our time, perhaps they would still be alive today."
Two days before that broadcast, neo-Nazi leader Alex Linder organized a protest against "black crime" in Knoxville. Edwards was nowhere to be seen. When he appeared on CNN May 29, the network rolled footage of the protest showing demonstrators wearing swastika T-shirts and displaying other white supremacist symbols. CNN host Kiran Chetry asked Edwards, "Why has this [murder] case become a rallying cry among the white supremacists?"
Edwards disingenuously dodged the question: "Well, I can't necessarily speak for people that I don't have any association with. But I will promise you this: Had the roles been reversed, and had the victims been black and the murderers white, this would have been the biggest news story in America."
The next day on his blog, Edwards posted this message to his fans: "With regards to those who showed up in Knoxville (who were labeled 'Klansmen' and 'Nazis' etc.), conservative activists often get maligned with nefarious descriptions because they dare stand up and speak out. I don't know the hearts and minds of those who attended the Knoxville rally because I wasn't there. However, with regards to their demonstration, they were doing the right thing by bringing attention to the despicable double standard this case has received. God bless them for that."
It's not exactly a stretch to "label" a man wearing a swastika T-shirt and shouting "Heil Hitler" a Nazi. Edwards knows that, but he's a master of carefully parsing his language so that he walks the razor's edge between conservative commentary and outright neo-Nazi rhetoric. This balancing act allows him to continue building his core audience of white nationalists without doing irrevocable damage to his mainstream political aspirations As this article went to press, Edwards was scheduled to deliver the keynote address at a Sept. 15 meeting of the Missouri chapter of the League of the South, a racist, neo-secessionist organization based in Alabama. He also had recently announced that he was in negotiations with a Michigan-based media company to start broadcasting "Political Cesspool" nationwide.
His stated mission is "[f]ighting to advance a nationalist agenda based upon the Christian world view" and turning back the clock in America to the pre-civil rights era, "back when America had a strong moral compass," as he put it during his May 17 show. "You had cultural and racial integrity in those days. …What's been taken away from us, we can take back."
Edwards works hard to maintain a professional appearance and demeanor. He wears suits, not Klan robes. But he's doing more than anyone else in the white nationalist movement at this point to promote the views of neo-Nazis, Klan sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, academic racists and anti-Semites. Helped along by cable news television and the occasional sympathetic elected official, he's beginning to look a lot like the next David Duke — and he'd almost certainly consider that a compliment.
Emily Brown and Janet Smith contributed to this report.
Intelligence Report
Fall 2007
Direct Link: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=817
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Proof the Jena 6 Saga is Bogus
A black reporter from Kansas City blows the lid off the widespread deception and fabrications concerning the Jena 6 thugs. It's about time the mainstream media figured out what some of us knew from the start- it was hogwash.
_________________________________________________________
Jena 6 case caught up in whirlwind of distortion, opportunism
By JASON WHITLOCK
Source: Kansas City Star
JENA, La. | Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and talk-show hosts certainly feasted on the racial unrest in this tiny central Louisiana town.
But it would be unfair to claim they threw the match that ignited the Jena Six case into a global blaze of hostility and misinformation.
That distinction belongs to Alan Bean, a 54-year-old white, self-proclaimed Baptist minister from Tulia, Texas.
“Do I know him?” was LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters’ sarcastic and dismissive response when I asked about Bean during a 45-minute interview.
“People are reluctant to say it,” said Craig Franklin, editor of the Jena Times, “but there is no doubt that Alan Bean created all of this.”
This is different things to different people. To some, this is a long overdue civil-rights reawakening, which points out pervasive racism in the South and in our justice system. To others, this is a horrific public-relations crime against the white people of Jena and irreparable damage to race relations in the poor oil town. And to some dispassionate observers, this is an unfortunate situation being exploited by white and black racial extremists.
On Sept. 20, when Jackson, Sharpton and Jena Six family members led competing rallies in support of six black youths accused of brutally attacking a white classmate, this — more than 20,000 marchers — was something no one in Jena could ever imagine.
But Alan Bean could.
Bean — the creator of Friends of Justice, an organization primarily dedicated to helping poor minorities victimized by our justice system — had warned prominent members of the Jena community as early as January that the town would be painted as racist by the national media if Walters didn’t back down.
“I told them I was going to bring media attention to this situation, and it was likely the same thing would happen to them that happened to my little hometown,” Bean said by phone on Friday. “Tulia got a bad rap, a rap it probably didn’t deserve. But the media doesn’t do its job. It’s in the entertainment business.”
“Tulia” refers to the case that made Bean and Friends of Justice a player in the world of American criminal justice. In the late 1990s, Bean exposed a corrupt cop in his hometown. More than a dozen drug convictions against minorities were overturned because of Bean’s work. Tulia was labeled as racist, and Bean became the person to call if you thought the police and/or a prosecutor were exploiting you.
A lawyer in New Orleans put Bean and parents of the Jena Six in contact with each other in December. Within three months, Bean had researched Jena and the events surrounding the assault, and published a 5,400-word narrative titled “The Making of a Myth in Jena, Louisiana” and a 2,400-word, media-friendly narrative titled “Responding to the Crisis in Jena, Louisiana.”
These two pro-defense narratives form the outline for most of the world’s understanding of the case. Bean connected the December assault on Justin Barker to the September noose hangings, to Reed Walters’ infamous “I can ruin your life with the stroke of a pen” statement at a hastily called school assembly, and to separate off-campus confrontations between Robert Bailey and white men on the Friday and Saturday before the attack on Barker.
Walters said Wednesday he’d never heard that the attack on Barker had anything to do with the noose hangings until the defense filed motions in the spring to recuse him from the case.
Bean said he first spoon-fed his narratives to Tom Mangold of the BBC because Mangold had worked with Bean on the Tulia drug cases. The BBC filmed a documentary on the Jena Six titled “Race Hate in Louisiana.” Bean said he then gave the Jena Six story to newspaper reporter Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune, which published a similar story on May 20.
“I put it in the hands of people I knew would do a good job with the story,” Bean said.
Bean also gave his story to a blogger, Jordan Flaherty, and a law professor, Bill Quigley. From all of these sources the story mushroomed and became fact.
The Jena Six beat up Justin Barker because they were still angry about the lack of sufficient punishment given to white kids who hung nooses on a whites-only shade tree, and the six were railroaded by an overzealous district attorney who failed to properly prosecute white men who viciously assaulted Robert Bailey and later pulled a shotgun on Bailey and two others at a convenience store.
Walters, police investigators, school officials and some Jena residents say Bean’s story is hogwash. There is at least some legitimacy to those claims. Bean’s story and subsequent posts on his Web site contain factual errors.
The three kids responsible for hanging the nooses were given more punishment than just a “few days of in-school suspension.” They went to an alternative school for nine days and received two weeks of in-school suspension, LaSalle Parish school superintendent Roy Breithaupt said.
But more than the factual errors, Bean’s story is framed — by his own admission — as an indictment of the criminal justice system and the people in power in Jena and, therefore, the story is unfairly biased. Bean never examined the other forces at work that contributed to the Jena Six assault and Walters’ heavy-handed approach to justice as it relates to the alleged perpetrators.
“I didn’t know,” Bean said when asked whether he knew of defendant Mychal Bell’s violent juvenile history when he was crafting his narratives. “I never talked to Mychal’s family, and I never talked to Mychal. He was in jail. I knew he had a history for getting into trouble. I knew he was a kid at a crossroads.”
Bean also didn’t know that in fall 2006, Bell, who 16 at the time, was living with his then-18-year-old best friend John McPherson and McPherson’s then-16-year-old wife, Ashley, in a three-bedroom trailer. The McPhersons are white. Bell is the godfather to their 18-month-old daughter.
Bean has a very idealistic view of the Jena defendants.
“These are fun-loving, impetuous, athletically gifted black males that don’t drink and don’t smoke, and they go to church as well,” he told me.
The church-going contention flies in the face of what Rev. Jimmy Ray Young, pastor at L&A Baptist Church, said Wednesday.
“None of these boys have been in church except when Al Sharpton was in town,” Young complained. “I’ve told the ministers we need to get these boys back in church.”
Walters claims that Bean and the media have distorted other key elements in the case.
Bean reported that Walters directed his “stroke of the pen” remark at black students when the school called an assembly to quell protests of the noose hangings. Some pro-Jena Six chain e-mails create the impression that Walters met privately with black students and threatened them. Not true, Walters and police say.
Paul Smith, Jena’s chief of police, says he and sheriff’s investigator Jimmy Arbogast called Walters to the school after a student took a swing at Smith when he was breaking up a fight between students.
“Tensions were high. Everybody was upset,” Arbogast said. “We wanted Reed to explain to them that, ‘Hey, look, you have to think for a minute. Look what age you are. Y’all are in high school.’ ”
Flanked by Arbogast and Smith, Walters addressed the entire student body. He said he began by telling the students about an aggravated rape case (possible death penalty) that he was considering.
Walters recalls saying: “ ‘I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make life miserable on you or ruin your life. So I want you to call me before you do something stupid.’ That last part doesn’t get reported. It doesn’t make good press.”
Bean also wrote that three days before the Jena Six assault a white man, Matt Windham, pulled a shotgun on Bailey and two others. He wrote that they wrestled the gun away from the man and ran off, and that Walters charged them with a crime rather than the white man.
The police contend that Windham — not the boys — called the police, claimed the boys threatened him, chased him back to his vehicle and wrestled his gun away. The police also say that two uninvolved female witnesses backed Windham, and that’s why the boys were charged.
Bean also mischaracterized the simple battery that Bailey suffered at the Fair Barn party four days before the attack on Barker, according to Walters, police, several witnesses and Bailey’s statements to police.
“Robert Bailey Jr. was attacked by a savage white mob at a local dance,” Bean wrote. “True, he wasn’t knocked unconscious — but that is just a matter of aim and good fortune. He was punched, he was kicked, and he was smacked over the head with a beer bottle (and he’s got the scars to prove it).”
Walters, who prosecuted Bailey’s lone attacker (Justin Sloan), said there was no mob attack. It was simply a dispute at the door of a mixed-race, invitation-only party that Bailey was denied access to.
“It wasn’t a fight,” Walters said. “Robert Bailey didn’t swing. He didn’t do anything. The kid hit him, knocked him down. No beer bottle, no anything. There was no statement of the victim at that time indicating any weapon was used. … The defendant (Sloan) was arrested on a simple battery. He was prosecuted on a simple battery. He pled guilty to a simple battery.
“It was only after the fact that I learned that a beer bottle was involved, that stitches were involved,” Walters continued. “And I checked after the fact with my local hospital: Did this happen? The information (about a beer bottle) came up in a motion to recuse me from the current charges. That’s the first time I’d heard about that.”
Ironically, Bean is now growing frustrated with the way the case has turned, particularly since Jackson and Sharpton got involved. He said they wouldn’t return his calls. He indicated there was a riff between the Bailey (Bean camp) and Bell (Sharpton camp) families.
People in Jena say the feud is over money. The families are handling the donations to the Jena Six defense fund. Robert Bailey recently posted and took down MySpace photos of himself and another Jena Six defendant with wads of $100 bills stuffed in their mouths and splashed across their bodies.
“I can tell you there is no misappropriation of the funds,” said Bean, adding he was not being paid for his services. “I’ve been there and seen them handling the checks. Where Robert got his hands on that money, I don’t know. He’s a kid. It was a stupid thing to do.”
As for Bean’s thoughts on Jackson and Sharpton?
“I’m not at all comfortable with the way this has been handled by the Jackson and Sharpton folks,” Bean said. “What’s wrong is that Jesse and Al have tried to turn this into an old civil-rights story in which Mychal Bell emerges like Rosa Parks, and that’s not right. These guys (Jackson and Sharpton) have lost their gravitas, lost their credibility. People are really tired of the same old 1960s shtick.”
Based on the crowds in Jena on Sept. 20, I’m not so sure.
_________________________________________________________
Jena 6 case caught up in whirlwind of distortion, opportunism
By JASON WHITLOCK
Source: Kansas City Star
JENA, La. | Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and talk-show hosts certainly feasted on the racial unrest in this tiny central Louisiana town.
But it would be unfair to claim they threw the match that ignited the Jena Six case into a global blaze of hostility and misinformation.
That distinction belongs to Alan Bean, a 54-year-old white, self-proclaimed Baptist minister from Tulia, Texas.
“Do I know him?” was LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters’ sarcastic and dismissive response when I asked about Bean during a 45-minute interview.
“People are reluctant to say it,” said Craig Franklin, editor of the Jena Times, “but there is no doubt that Alan Bean created all of this.”
This is different things to different people. To some, this is a long overdue civil-rights reawakening, which points out pervasive racism in the South and in our justice system. To others, this is a horrific public-relations crime against the white people of Jena and irreparable damage to race relations in the poor oil town. And to some dispassionate observers, this is an unfortunate situation being exploited by white and black racial extremists.
On Sept. 20, when Jackson, Sharpton and Jena Six family members led competing rallies in support of six black youths accused of brutally attacking a white classmate, this — more than 20,000 marchers — was something no one in Jena could ever imagine.
But Alan Bean could.
Bean — the creator of Friends of Justice, an organization primarily dedicated to helping poor minorities victimized by our justice system — had warned prominent members of the Jena community as early as January that the town would be painted as racist by the national media if Walters didn’t back down.
“I told them I was going to bring media attention to this situation, and it was likely the same thing would happen to them that happened to my little hometown,” Bean said by phone on Friday. “Tulia got a bad rap, a rap it probably didn’t deserve. But the media doesn’t do its job. It’s in the entertainment business.”
“Tulia” refers to the case that made Bean and Friends of Justice a player in the world of American criminal justice. In the late 1990s, Bean exposed a corrupt cop in his hometown. More than a dozen drug convictions against minorities were overturned because of Bean’s work. Tulia was labeled as racist, and Bean became the person to call if you thought the police and/or a prosecutor were exploiting you.
A lawyer in New Orleans put Bean and parents of the Jena Six in contact with each other in December. Within three months, Bean had researched Jena and the events surrounding the assault, and published a 5,400-word narrative titled “The Making of a Myth in Jena, Louisiana” and a 2,400-word, media-friendly narrative titled “Responding to the Crisis in Jena, Louisiana.”
These two pro-defense narratives form the outline for most of the world’s understanding of the case. Bean connected the December assault on Justin Barker to the September noose hangings, to Reed Walters’ infamous “I can ruin your life with the stroke of a pen” statement at a hastily called school assembly, and to separate off-campus confrontations between Robert Bailey and white men on the Friday and Saturday before the attack on Barker.
Walters said Wednesday he’d never heard that the attack on Barker had anything to do with the noose hangings until the defense filed motions in the spring to recuse him from the case.
Bean said he first spoon-fed his narratives to Tom Mangold of the BBC because Mangold had worked with Bean on the Tulia drug cases. The BBC filmed a documentary on the Jena Six titled “Race Hate in Louisiana.” Bean said he then gave the Jena Six story to newspaper reporter Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune, which published a similar story on May 20.
“I put it in the hands of people I knew would do a good job with the story,” Bean said.
Bean also gave his story to a blogger, Jordan Flaherty, and a law professor, Bill Quigley. From all of these sources the story mushroomed and became fact.
The Jena Six beat up Justin Barker because they were still angry about the lack of sufficient punishment given to white kids who hung nooses on a whites-only shade tree, and the six were railroaded by an overzealous district attorney who failed to properly prosecute white men who viciously assaulted Robert Bailey and later pulled a shotgun on Bailey and two others at a convenience store.
Walters, police investigators, school officials and some Jena residents say Bean’s story is hogwash. There is at least some legitimacy to those claims. Bean’s story and subsequent posts on his Web site contain factual errors.
The three kids responsible for hanging the nooses were given more punishment than just a “few days of in-school suspension.” They went to an alternative school for nine days and received two weeks of in-school suspension, LaSalle Parish school superintendent Roy Breithaupt said.
But more than the factual errors, Bean’s story is framed — by his own admission — as an indictment of the criminal justice system and the people in power in Jena and, therefore, the story is unfairly biased. Bean never examined the other forces at work that contributed to the Jena Six assault and Walters’ heavy-handed approach to justice as it relates to the alleged perpetrators.
“I didn’t know,” Bean said when asked whether he knew of defendant Mychal Bell’s violent juvenile history when he was crafting his narratives. “I never talked to Mychal’s family, and I never talked to Mychal. He was in jail. I knew he had a history for getting into trouble. I knew he was a kid at a crossroads.”
Bean also didn’t know that in fall 2006, Bell, who 16 at the time, was living with his then-18-year-old best friend John McPherson and McPherson’s then-16-year-old wife, Ashley, in a three-bedroom trailer. The McPhersons are white. Bell is the godfather to their 18-month-old daughter.
Bean has a very idealistic view of the Jena defendants.
“These are fun-loving, impetuous, athletically gifted black males that don’t drink and don’t smoke, and they go to church as well,” he told me.
The church-going contention flies in the face of what Rev. Jimmy Ray Young, pastor at L&A Baptist Church, said Wednesday.
“None of these boys have been in church except when Al Sharpton was in town,” Young complained. “I’ve told the ministers we need to get these boys back in church.”
Walters claims that Bean and the media have distorted other key elements in the case.
Bean reported that Walters directed his “stroke of the pen” remark at black students when the school called an assembly to quell protests of the noose hangings. Some pro-Jena Six chain e-mails create the impression that Walters met privately with black students and threatened them. Not true, Walters and police say.
Paul Smith, Jena’s chief of police, says he and sheriff’s investigator Jimmy Arbogast called Walters to the school after a student took a swing at Smith when he was breaking up a fight between students.
“Tensions were high. Everybody was upset,” Arbogast said. “We wanted Reed to explain to them that, ‘Hey, look, you have to think for a minute. Look what age you are. Y’all are in high school.’ ”
Flanked by Arbogast and Smith, Walters addressed the entire student body. He said he began by telling the students about an aggravated rape case (possible death penalty) that he was considering.
Walters recalls saying: “ ‘I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make life miserable on you or ruin your life. So I want you to call me before you do something stupid.’ That last part doesn’t get reported. It doesn’t make good press.”
Bean also wrote that three days before the Jena Six assault a white man, Matt Windham, pulled a shotgun on Bailey and two others. He wrote that they wrestled the gun away from the man and ran off, and that Walters charged them with a crime rather than the white man.
The police contend that Windham — not the boys — called the police, claimed the boys threatened him, chased him back to his vehicle and wrestled his gun away. The police also say that two uninvolved female witnesses backed Windham, and that’s why the boys were charged.
Bean also mischaracterized the simple battery that Bailey suffered at the Fair Barn party four days before the attack on Barker, according to Walters, police, several witnesses and Bailey’s statements to police.
“Robert Bailey Jr. was attacked by a savage white mob at a local dance,” Bean wrote. “True, he wasn’t knocked unconscious — but that is just a matter of aim and good fortune. He was punched, he was kicked, and he was smacked over the head with a beer bottle (and he’s got the scars to prove it).”
Walters, who prosecuted Bailey’s lone attacker (Justin Sloan), said there was no mob attack. It was simply a dispute at the door of a mixed-race, invitation-only party that Bailey was denied access to.
“It wasn’t a fight,” Walters said. “Robert Bailey didn’t swing. He didn’t do anything. The kid hit him, knocked him down. No beer bottle, no anything. There was no statement of the victim at that time indicating any weapon was used. … The defendant (Sloan) was arrested on a simple battery. He was prosecuted on a simple battery. He pled guilty to a simple battery.
“It was only after the fact that I learned that a beer bottle was involved, that stitches were involved,” Walters continued. “And I checked after the fact with my local hospital: Did this happen? The information (about a beer bottle) came up in a motion to recuse me from the current charges. That’s the first time I’d heard about that.”
Ironically, Bean is now growing frustrated with the way the case has turned, particularly since Jackson and Sharpton got involved. He said they wouldn’t return his calls. He indicated there was a riff between the Bailey (Bean camp) and Bell (Sharpton camp) families.
People in Jena say the feud is over money. The families are handling the donations to the Jena Six defense fund. Robert Bailey recently posted and took down MySpace photos of himself and another Jena Six defendant with wads of $100 bills stuffed in their mouths and splashed across their bodies.
“I can tell you there is no misappropriation of the funds,” said Bean, adding he was not being paid for his services. “I’ve been there and seen them handling the checks. Where Robert got his hands on that money, I don’t know. He’s a kid. It was a stupid thing to do.”
As for Bean’s thoughts on Jackson and Sharpton?
“I’m not at all comfortable with the way this has been handled by the Jackson and Sharpton folks,” Bean said. “What’s wrong is that Jesse and Al have tried to turn this into an old civil-rights story in which Mychal Bell emerges like Rosa Parks, and that’s not right. These guys (Jackson and Sharpton) have lost their gravitas, lost their credibility. People are really tired of the same old 1960s shtick.”
Based on the crowds in Jena on Sept. 20, I’m not so sure.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Man charged with crime of burning cross into his own yard
I wonder if either the State or the Feds have the guts to tack on charges for falsely reporting a hate crime, since this action was intended to enflame anger against Whites in his community.
--------------------------------------------------------
From KTSP.com:
ANOKA, Minn. (AP) - De'Andre June told police he woke up Wednesday morning to find the charred outline of a cross burned in the lawn of his home. June now is accused of burning the cross in the lawn himself.
The 47-year-old Anoka man was charged Friday with falsely reporting a crime. He also is charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process stemming from an altercation when police arrested him Thursday afternoon on a felony warrant from Hennepin County in connection with a financial fraud case.
According to the criminal complaint, inmates at the Anoka County jail told authorities that June was planning such a ruse.
"Inmates from the Anoka County Jail saw the news story on TV and recognized Mr. June," said Capt. Phil Johanson of the Anoka Police Department. "(They) said that when he was in jail with them last week, he had made comments that he was going to do something like this to get sympathy from the community and the church for financial gains and otherwise."
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
--------------------------------------------------------
From KTSP.com:
ANOKA, Minn. (AP) - De'Andre June told police he woke up Wednesday morning to find the charred outline of a cross burned in the lawn of his home. June now is accused of burning the cross in the lawn himself.
The 47-year-old Anoka man was charged Friday with falsely reporting a crime. He also is charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing the legal process stemming from an altercation when police arrested him Thursday afternoon on a felony warrant from Hennepin County in connection with a financial fraud case.
According to the criminal complaint, inmates at the Anoka County jail told authorities that June was planning such a ruse.
"Inmates from the Anoka County Jail saw the news story on TV and recognized Mr. June," said Capt. Phil Johanson of the Anoka Police Department. "(They) said that when he was in jail with them last week, he had made comments that he was going to do something like this to get sympathy from the community and the church for financial gains and otherwise."
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Get ready for a Jena repeat
4 Black students in NC try to beat up a white Assistant Principle. The racist cracker, how dare he tell one of them to "go to class." Just who does he think he is?
I wonder if Al and Je$$e are on their way to Fayetteville yet. I also wonder if the Fayetteville DA will have the testicular fortitude to charges these thugs with a "hate crime." How silly of me, I forgot that law is only used against white folks.
(Since of course the mainstream media won't come out and say that the Assistant Principle is a white man, here's a link to his picture on the school website.)
_______________________________________________________
Charges filed in Pine Forest High brawl
By Nomee Landis
Staff writer
Four Pine Forest High School students were charged with inciting a riot Tuesday after reportedly fighting with coaches and an assistant principal in a school hallway.
One of the students, 17-year-old Luis Angel DeJesus, also is charged with assault on a school employee.
The incident happened early in the school day.
According to arrest reports and a statement from Debbie Tanna, a spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, it began when Vernon Aldridge, one of the school’s four assistant principals and the school’s athletic director, repeatedly asked DeJesus to get to class. Tanna said DeJesus allegedly spit in Aldridge’s face.
An arrest report said DeJesus spit at Aldridge twice.
The fight broke out as Aldridge was taking DeJesus to the principal’s office for counseling, Tanna said. Three students identified as friends of DeJesus — Davon Demtrice Nowell and Anthony Dranell Dickerson, who are both 16, and 17-year-old Michael Pinkney Draper — had seen what happened and reportedly began to threaten Aldridge.
Four coaches at the school tried to bring the students under control, Tanna said. She said they were injured in the fight and all received medical treatment afterward. None of their names were available Tuesday.
Punched, scratched
In an arrest record narrative, school resource officer Marc Dedeaux wrote that he was called to a back hallway of the school because a fight had broken out. When he arrived, he saw several students fighting with several school employees.
The students were cursing and several school officials were bleeding because they had been punched or scratched by the students.
All four of the students were charged with resisting arrest and misdemeanor inciting a riot. Tanna said no other students at the school were involved, but because more than one student was fighting, it is considered to be a riot.
Draper lives on the 200 block of Village Drive in Fayetteville.
DeJesus, Nowell and Dickerson all live in the Deerfield Home, a group home owned by Lighthouse Group & Associates that is in the 200 block of Wapiti Drive in Spring Lake.
Charles Davenport is the director of the home. He said he received a call from the school at 9:05 a.m. By late afternoon, he said, he had contacted the boys’ parents or guardians.
Some of the children who live in group homes are in the custody of the Department of Social Services, Davenport said.
The Deerfield Home is for high school boys who have had troubled home lives, Davenport said. He said four boys live at the home right now. The home has been open since 2001.
“Some of the children graduate and go to college and to the military,” Davenport said, “but the success rate is not very high.”
Wanda McPhaul, spokeswoman for the Cumberland County schools, said the principal of Pine Forest High School, Cindy McCormic, is investigating to determine the students’ punishment from the schools.
Article Source with pictures of the thug students: Fayetteville Observer
I wonder if Al and Je$$e are on their way to Fayetteville yet. I also wonder if the Fayetteville DA will have the testicular fortitude to charges these thugs with a "hate crime." How silly of me, I forgot that law is only used against white folks.
(Since of course the mainstream media won't come out and say that the Assistant Principle is a white man, here's a link to his picture on the school website.)
_______________________________________________________
Charges filed in Pine Forest High brawl
By Nomee Landis
Staff writer
Four Pine Forest High School students were charged with inciting a riot Tuesday after reportedly fighting with coaches and an assistant principal in a school hallway.
One of the students, 17-year-old Luis Angel DeJesus, also is charged with assault on a school employee.
The incident happened early in the school day.
According to arrest reports and a statement from Debbie Tanna, a spokeswoman for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, it began when Vernon Aldridge, one of the school’s four assistant principals and the school’s athletic director, repeatedly asked DeJesus to get to class. Tanna said DeJesus allegedly spit in Aldridge’s face.
An arrest report said DeJesus spit at Aldridge twice.
The fight broke out as Aldridge was taking DeJesus to the principal’s office for counseling, Tanna said. Three students identified as friends of DeJesus — Davon Demtrice Nowell and Anthony Dranell Dickerson, who are both 16, and 17-year-old Michael Pinkney Draper — had seen what happened and reportedly began to threaten Aldridge.
Four coaches at the school tried to bring the students under control, Tanna said. She said they were injured in the fight and all received medical treatment afterward. None of their names were available Tuesday.
Punched, scratched
In an arrest record narrative, school resource officer Marc Dedeaux wrote that he was called to a back hallway of the school because a fight had broken out. When he arrived, he saw several students fighting with several school employees.
The students were cursing and several school officials were bleeding because they had been punched or scratched by the students.
All four of the students were charged with resisting arrest and misdemeanor inciting a riot. Tanna said no other students at the school were involved, but because more than one student was fighting, it is considered to be a riot.
Draper lives on the 200 block of Village Drive in Fayetteville.
DeJesus, Nowell and Dickerson all live in the Deerfield Home, a group home owned by Lighthouse Group & Associates that is in the 200 block of Wapiti Drive in Spring Lake.
Charles Davenport is the director of the home. He said he received a call from the school at 9:05 a.m. By late afternoon, he said, he had contacted the boys’ parents or guardians.
Some of the children who live in group homes are in the custody of the Department of Social Services, Davenport said.
The Deerfield Home is for high school boys who have had troubled home lives, Davenport said. He said four boys live at the home right now. The home has been open since 2001.
“Some of the children graduate and go to college and to the military,” Davenport said, “but the success rate is not very high.”
Wanda McPhaul, spokeswoman for the Cumberland County schools, said the principal of Pine Forest High School, Cindy McCormic, is investigating to determine the students’ punishment from the schools.
Article Source with pictures of the thug students: Fayetteville Observer
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
More Indictments for Vick
I'll get to the story momentarily, but first I am compelled to comment on the disgusting behavior I observed this evening when I stumbled upon the "Michael Vick Town Hall" meeting on ESPN. What struck me was, first, how ignorant some of the audience was- it seemed about half the audience was comprised of people who stopped in on their way home from demonstrating in Jena. They seemed convinced that Vick is being persecuted solely for the reason that he is a famous black man. Any time a member of the panel mentioned that Vick broke Federal laws, they were shouted down (wisely, ESPN placed the mics where you couldn't here what invectives were being hurled).
They really moronic thing was the attempt to compare the heinous actions of Vick to those of Bill Bellichek, the coach of the New England Patriots. Don't get me wrong- my favorite NFL team is whoever happens to be playing the Patriots at the time, and I cannot stand the hoodie-wearing Bellichek. He was basically caught cheating, and assessed what amounts to a symbolic fine by the League. Do I think the action taken by the NFL was sufficient? No way! I would have suspended his sorry butt for a couple of games at least. But to compare the two incident is the height of idiocy. In the Patriots case, no laws were broken- only the rules of a sports league. In Vick's case, Federal laws were broken. The Jets losing to the Patriots doesn't compare to Vick torturing and mutilating dogs. I have a dog, and if anyone tried to harm my animal, I'd be the one facing charges.
All in all, it was a despicable, disturbing spectacle.
Now on to the story. Vick is now facing additional State charges in Virginia connected to his subhuman dog fighting enterprise. If convicted, Vick can add some State prison time to the anticipated Federal time he's going to receive. It'll be a happy day for me and other dog lovers when they throw his sorry butt in a cell and slam the door behind him. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Vick Hit With Local Indictments
Published 09/25/2007 - 11:31 p.m.
(AP) By HANK KURZ Jr.
AP Sports Writer
Michael Vick, already looking at a federal prison term for bankrolling a dogfighting operation in rural Virginia, now faces two state charges that could get him more prison time if he's convicted.
After a Surry County grand jury indicted the Atlanta Falcons quarterback and three co-defendants Tuesday, Vick's lawyers indicated they will fight the state charges on the grounds that he can't be convicted twice of the same crime.
The NFL star, scheduled for sentencing Dec. 10 after pleading guilty to federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, faces state charges of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and engaging in or promoting dogfighting. Each felony is punishable by up to five years in prison. Arraignments are set for Oct. 3.
The grand jury declined to indict the 27-year-old Vick and two co-defendants on eight additional counts of killing or causing to be killed a companion animal, felonies that would have exposed them to as many as 40 years in prison if convicted.
Vick defense attorney Billy Martin said in a statement that the state counts concern 'the same conduct covered by the federal indictment for which Mr. Vick has already accepted full responsibility.'
Martin said he will 'aggressively protect his rights to ensure that he is not held accountable for the same conduct twice.'
Vick was convicted of a federal conspiracy count while the state indictment deals with the act of dog fighting, said Steven Benjamin, a Richmond defense lawyer who is not involved in the case. The prosecution will argue that's enough of a difference to allow the charges to proceed, he said.
Surry County Commonwealth's Attorney Gerald G. Poindexter had told The Associated Press on Monday night that he would seek indictments on different crimes than the ones Vick admitted to in federal court. He did not elaborate to reporters outside court Tuesday.
The charges are the first leveled against Vick in the county where he built a home that became the base of the dogfighting operation, where local investigators first uncovered evidence of the enterprise.
None of the defendants nor their lawyers were at the Sussex County courthouse, where the grand jury met because the courthouse in neighboring Surry County is closed for renovations.
Poindexter told reporters he was not disappointed the grand jury passed on the eight additional dog killing counts.
'I'm just glad to get this to the position where it is now and, one day in the not too distant future, we will be rid of these cases,' he said.
In a written statement, Poindexter and Sheriff Harold Brown attempted to diffuse in advance any suggestion that race influenced the grand jury. Brown, Poindexter and the four defendants are black, as are four of the six grand jurors.
'These are serious charges, and we can assure you that this grand jury was not driven by racial prejudice, their affection or lack of affection for professional athletes, or the influence of animal rights activists and the attendant publicity,' the statement said.
In pleading guilty to the federal charges last month, Vick admitted helping kill six to eight dogs, among other things. He faces up to five years in prison.
Vick's co-defendants had pleaded guilty earlier and detailed Vick's role in the grisly enterprise.
In the state case, co-defendant Purnell Peace was indicted on one count of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting. Quanis Phillips was indicted on one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting.
Tony Taylor, who left the enterprise several years ago and was the first to plead guilty, faces the most serious state charges _ three counts of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting.
Falcons spokesman Reggie Roberts said the team had no comments on the new charges.
The case began in late April when authorities conducting a drug investigation of Vick's cousin raided the former Virginia Tech star's property and seized dozens of dogs, most of them pit bulls, and equipment commonly associated with dogfighting.
Six weeks later, with the local investigation perceived to be dragging and a local search warrant allowed to expire, federal agents arrived with their own search warrants and started digging up dog carcasses buried days before the first raid.
Poindexter, widely criticized for the pace of the investigation, reacted angrily when the feds moved in, suggesting that Vick's celebrity was a draw, or that their pursuit of the case could have racial overtones. He later eased off those comments, saying the sides would simply be pursuing parallel investigations.
Vick has been indefinitely suspended without pay by the NFL and been dropped by all his major sponsors, including Nike.
From USADaily.com.
They really moronic thing was the attempt to compare the heinous actions of Vick to those of Bill Bellichek, the coach of the New England Patriots. Don't get me wrong- my favorite NFL team is whoever happens to be playing the Patriots at the time, and I cannot stand the hoodie-wearing Bellichek. He was basically caught cheating, and assessed what amounts to a symbolic fine by the League. Do I think the action taken by the NFL was sufficient? No way! I would have suspended his sorry butt for a couple of games at least. But to compare the two incident is the height of idiocy. In the Patriots case, no laws were broken- only the rules of a sports league. In Vick's case, Federal laws were broken. The Jets losing to the Patriots doesn't compare to Vick torturing and mutilating dogs. I have a dog, and if anyone tried to harm my animal, I'd be the one facing charges.
All in all, it was a despicable, disturbing spectacle.
Now on to the story. Vick is now facing additional State charges in Virginia connected to his subhuman dog fighting enterprise. If convicted, Vick can add some State prison time to the anticipated Federal time he's going to receive. It'll be a happy day for me and other dog lovers when they throw his sorry butt in a cell and slam the door behind him. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Vick Hit With Local Indictments
Published 09/25/2007 - 11:31 p.m.
(AP) By HANK KURZ Jr.
AP Sports Writer
Michael Vick, already looking at a federal prison term for bankrolling a dogfighting operation in rural Virginia, now faces two state charges that could get him more prison time if he's convicted.
After a Surry County grand jury indicted the Atlanta Falcons quarterback and three co-defendants Tuesday, Vick's lawyers indicated they will fight the state charges on the grounds that he can't be convicted twice of the same crime.
The NFL star, scheduled for sentencing Dec. 10 after pleading guilty to federal dogfighting conspiracy charges, faces state charges of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and engaging in or promoting dogfighting. Each felony is punishable by up to five years in prison. Arraignments are set for Oct. 3.
The grand jury declined to indict the 27-year-old Vick and two co-defendants on eight additional counts of killing or causing to be killed a companion animal, felonies that would have exposed them to as many as 40 years in prison if convicted.
Vick defense attorney Billy Martin said in a statement that the state counts concern 'the same conduct covered by the federal indictment for which Mr. Vick has already accepted full responsibility.'
Martin said he will 'aggressively protect his rights to ensure that he is not held accountable for the same conduct twice.'
Vick was convicted of a federal conspiracy count while the state indictment deals with the act of dog fighting, said Steven Benjamin, a Richmond defense lawyer who is not involved in the case. The prosecution will argue that's enough of a difference to allow the charges to proceed, he said.
Surry County Commonwealth's Attorney Gerald G. Poindexter had told The Associated Press on Monday night that he would seek indictments on different crimes than the ones Vick admitted to in federal court. He did not elaborate to reporters outside court Tuesday.
The charges are the first leveled against Vick in the county where he built a home that became the base of the dogfighting operation, where local investigators first uncovered evidence of the enterprise.
None of the defendants nor their lawyers were at the Sussex County courthouse, where the grand jury met because the courthouse in neighboring Surry County is closed for renovations.
Poindexter told reporters he was not disappointed the grand jury passed on the eight additional dog killing counts.
'I'm just glad to get this to the position where it is now and, one day in the not too distant future, we will be rid of these cases,' he said.
In a written statement, Poindexter and Sheriff Harold Brown attempted to diffuse in advance any suggestion that race influenced the grand jury. Brown, Poindexter and the four defendants are black, as are four of the six grand jurors.
'These are serious charges, and we can assure you that this grand jury was not driven by racial prejudice, their affection or lack of affection for professional athletes, or the influence of animal rights activists and the attendant publicity,' the statement said.
In pleading guilty to the federal charges last month, Vick admitted helping kill six to eight dogs, among other things. He faces up to five years in prison.
Vick's co-defendants had pleaded guilty earlier and detailed Vick's role in the grisly enterprise.
In the state case, co-defendant Purnell Peace was indicted on one count of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting. Quanis Phillips was indicted on one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting.
Tony Taylor, who left the enterprise several years ago and was the first to plead guilty, faces the most serious state charges _ three counts of beating or killing or causing dogs to fight other dogs and one count of engaging in or promoting dogfighting.
Falcons spokesman Reggie Roberts said the team had no comments on the new charges.
The case began in late April when authorities conducting a drug investigation of Vick's cousin raided the former Virginia Tech star's property and seized dozens of dogs, most of them pit bulls, and equipment commonly associated with dogfighting.
Six weeks later, with the local investigation perceived to be dragging and a local search warrant allowed to expire, federal agents arrived with their own search warrants and started digging up dog carcasses buried days before the first raid.
Poindexter, widely criticized for the pace of the investigation, reacted angrily when the feds moved in, suggesting that Vick's celebrity was a draw, or that their pursuit of the case could have racial overtones. He later eased off those comments, saying the sides would simply be pursuing parallel investigations.
Vick has been indefinitely suspended without pay by the NFL and been dropped by all his major sponsors, including Nike.
From USADaily.com.
The Jena Dodge
by Heather McDonald
Source: Suppressed News
The Jena Dodge
Demonstrators and the media avoid the stubborn truths of black social breakdown.
24 September 2007
Let’s assume the worst about Jena, Louisiana, and the charges of attempted murder brought against five black youths for beating a white student unconscious last December: that the district attorney’s indictments were motivated by rank racism, and that the racial tensions in this town of 3,000 are exclusively the product of white animus against blacks. Does it follow that this latest object of frenzy on the media’s racism beat is emblematic of America’s judicial system or the state of race relations today?
That is certainly what the ever-expanding army of racial victimologists and their media enablers would have you believe. Since the Jena story became international news last week, the media, the advocates, and pandering politicians have erupted in an outpouring of seeming joy at the alleged proof—after so much diligent trolling for evidence—that America remains a racist country. Senator Hillary Clinton told the NAACP: “This case reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African Americans.” Senator Christopher Dodd declared that Jena reveals that “de facto segregation”—in the spirit of Jim Crow—“is still very real” in many parts of America. Britain’s Observer announced that Jena shows “how lightly sleep the demons of racial prejudice in America’s deep south.” The New York Times has designated Jena “a high profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system”—a debate that perhaps not everyone was aware that we were having. J. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said: “I think a lot of people recognize that the criminal justice system grinds down people of color every day. Oftentimes, it’s nameless, it’s faceless. . . . People see Jena as the tip of the iceberg and ask: What lies beneath?” Needless to say, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have vowed with Biblical thunder to avenge the Jena innocents and force America to own up to its mistreatment of blacks.
Unquestionably, the attempted murder charges (which were later dropped for four of the defendants, while a sixth assailant was booked as a juvenile) merit scrutiny. If the indictment in fact resulted from discrimination, then the prosecutor would deserve the strongest punishment—debarment at the very least and harsh federal penalties for civil rights violations. And the incident that seems to have led to the group assault on the white student—three students’ hanging of nooses from a school tree where white teens congregated—was a despicable provocation. If adults in Jena condoned such incendiary behavior, then these grown-up enablers truly are throwbacks to a vicious American past, and all citizens should revile them. There is evidence, however, that such adolescent cruelty is not official policy. The school principal told a black student who had inquired about the segregated tree that he could sit there or anywhere else he pleased.
But even if the worst possible interpretation of these events is merited, the massive international attention to this tiny town would seem vastly disproportionate to the cause, unless Jena stands for a more widespread problem. The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.
This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered, Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible statement notwithstanding. The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine. But that colorblind sentencing regimen, which dates from 1986, was a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them. Black liberals such as Congressman Charles Rangel were loudest in sounding the alarm about the effects of crack in the black ghetto. Not even the most deluded racial apologists have ever explicitly suggested that racial bias motivated Congress’s efforts to combat a drug that results in much higher rates of violence among dealers and users, quicker and more onerous addiction, and more emergency room visits than its powdered cousin.
The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. Nationally, blacks commit murder at about eight times the frequency of whites. In New York, any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to have been committed by a black person than by a white person, according to the reports of victims and witnesses. Though they are only 24 percent of the city’s population, blacks committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in New York last year. Whites, who make up 34.5 percent of New Yorkers, committed only 5.3 percent of violent crimes. These ratios are similar across the country. In Los Angeles, blacks committed 41 percent of all robberies in 2001, according to victims’ descriptions, though they constitute only 11 percent of the city’s population. Robbery victims identified whites, who make up 30 percent of the Los Angeles population, just 4 percent of the time.
When attacking the justice system, racial agitators work mightily to change the subject from violence to drugs, using their flimsy argument that crack cocaine penalties are too high. But the vast preponderance of prisoners are in the pen for violence and property crime. In 2003, 52 percent of inmates in state prisons were serving time for violent offenses, 21 percent for property offenses, and only 20 percent for drug offenses. To be sure, black incarceration rates are off the charts. Black men were 41 percent of the more than 2 million men in federal, state, and local prisons at midyear 2006. At the end of 2005, there were 3,145 prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared with 1,244 inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 471 inmates per 100,000 white males. Is that because violent and property crime is overpenalized, as race advocates sometimes argue? No. Despite the advocates’ constant complaints about three-strikes laws, the criminal justice system actually underpenalizes crime because of inadequate prison space. Prosecutors cut deals to lessen sentences; sheriffs overseeing local jails regularly devise new schemes for dumping offenders back on the street to make room for the next batch. And in any case, even if penalties for particular offenses were too draconian, the punishments affect all offenders the same.
No one in the Jena stampede dares whisper a word about black crime, because it undercuts the portrait of a victimized race. You can listen to every protest across the country glorifying the “Jena Six” and you will never hear an acknowledgement of the massive social breakdown that is the black crime rate: no mention of the violence in inner-city schools that black students commit overwhelmingly; no mention of the rising homicides in midsize cities that young black males commit when they feel “disrespected.” It is not racism that is putting black men in jail; it’s their own behavior.
What about the broader significance of Jena? Again, assuming for the sake of argument that this minuscule Louisiana town seethes with the crudest bigotry, held uniquely by whites against integration-seeking blacks, is Jena’s supposed state of affairs a microcosm of America? To the contrary: there is not a single elite institution in the country that is not twisting itself into knots in favor of African-Americans. Every minimally selective college is desperately seeking to enroll more black students. Boosting black enrollment requires drastically lowering a college’s admissions criteria to overcome the intractable 200-point SAT gap between black and white high school students, but every college institutes such double standards for the sake of “diversity.” Any black student who graduates from high school with decent grades and respectable SATs will leapfrog over thousands of more qualified white and Asian students right into the Ivy League. Blacks are also the hottest commodity for exclusive private schools that serve as training grounds for the Ivies. Andover, Exeter, Choate, and every other fancy prep and day school practice the same double standards in their eagerness to admit African-American students. After college, law schools, business schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and others accept black students whose test scores would disqualify them if they were white or Asian.
The preferences continue into the professions. Wall Street law firms annually flagellate themselves over their lack of proportional representation of black associates and partners, even though the number of blacks who graduate from law school with grades and bar-exam scores comparable with the firms’ white hires is negligible. The lack of comparably qualified black candidates does not stop the law partnerships from hiring black associates, though. Corporations have saddled themselves with massive “diversity” bureaucracies whose only function is to justify hiring and promoting less qualified African-Americans and Hispanics. Newspapers, TV stations, and advertisers put enormous pressure on themselves to have blacks on their staffs and to show black faces to the world.
In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.
The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it. But when boys are raised without any expectations that they will have to support their children and marry the mother of those children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson about responsibility. They also are freed from the civilizing force of the marriage requirement, which pressures young men to become attractive mates. With enough support, individuals can overcome the moral perils of the illegitimacy culture, but given the prevalence of black crime and disaffiliation from the working world, it’s clear that not enough young men are finding ways to do so.
The race industry will try to keep Jena in the media and political spotlight for as long as possible, and to reinforce the notion that this episode exemplifies blacks’ situation in America. But if there were many other instances of (arguable) overcharging for black crime, we would have heard about them by now. The orgy of Jena coverage will not just fail to improve the lagging performance of blacks; it will impede such improvement by strengthening the victim mentality. Both whites and blacks are complicit in this sabotage. These ecstatic festivals of racism-bashing are a crippling ritual in the codependency between absolution-seeking whites and angry blacks, a phenomenon that Shelby Steele has powerfully analyzed. The demonstrators exhibit a palpable desire for the moral clarity of the civil rights era, as do the reporters, who have covered their every utterance. “This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” one student told the New York Times. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”
He’s right; there has been nothing like Selma or Montgomery for the current generation, because much of America has accomplished almost an about-face on race since the 1950s. The current martyrs to American bigotry are a far cry from Rosa Parks. Like the “Jena Six,” they tend to have committed acts of violence or other crimes for which they are allegedly being excessively punished. Think of the six high school hooligans from Decatur, Illinois, whom Jesse Jackson tried to beatify in 1999 when their schools expelled them for a violent stadium fight; their backgrounds included robbery, trespassing, truancy, and failing whole school years. We are only belatedly learning that Mychal Bell, the sole member of the “Jena Six” to have been prosecuted for knocking out and kicking Justin Barker, has a previous arrest record that includes battery and property damage. Barker’s injuries led to $14,000 in medical bills, according to a lawyer.
The Jena situation is undoubtedly a bit more complex than the tale that the press has woven of hate-filled whites and peace-loving blacks. But even if it were not, the catharsis that this morality play has offered to its participants is spurious. The real tragedy is the dysfunctional culture that holds back too many blacks from seizing the many opportunities open to them.
Source: Suppressed News
The Jena Dodge
Demonstrators and the media avoid the stubborn truths of black social breakdown.
24 September 2007
Let’s assume the worst about Jena, Louisiana, and the charges of attempted murder brought against five black youths for beating a white student unconscious last December: that the district attorney’s indictments were motivated by rank racism, and that the racial tensions in this town of 3,000 are exclusively the product of white animus against blacks. Does it follow that this latest object of frenzy on the media’s racism beat is emblematic of America’s judicial system or the state of race relations today?
That is certainly what the ever-expanding army of racial victimologists and their media enablers would have you believe. Since the Jena story became international news last week, the media, the advocates, and pandering politicians have erupted in an outpouring of seeming joy at the alleged proof—after so much diligent trolling for evidence—that America remains a racist country. Senator Hillary Clinton told the NAACP: “This case reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African Americans.” Senator Christopher Dodd declared that Jena reveals that “de facto segregation”—in the spirit of Jim Crow—“is still very real” in many parts of America. Britain’s Observer announced that Jena shows “how lightly sleep the demons of racial prejudice in America’s deep south.” The New York Times has designated Jena “a high profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system”—a debate that perhaps not everyone was aware that we were having. J. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said: “I think a lot of people recognize that the criminal justice system grinds down people of color every day. Oftentimes, it’s nameless, it’s faceless. . . . People see Jena as the tip of the iceberg and ask: What lies beneath?” Needless to say, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have vowed with Biblical thunder to avenge the Jena innocents and force America to own up to its mistreatment of blacks.
Unquestionably, the attempted murder charges (which were later dropped for four of the defendants, while a sixth assailant was booked as a juvenile) merit scrutiny. If the indictment in fact resulted from discrimination, then the prosecutor would deserve the strongest punishment—debarment at the very least and harsh federal penalties for civil rights violations. And the incident that seems to have led to the group assault on the white student—three students’ hanging of nooses from a school tree where white teens congregated—was a despicable provocation. If adults in Jena condoned such incendiary behavior, then these grown-up enablers truly are throwbacks to a vicious American past, and all citizens should revile them. There is evidence, however, that such adolescent cruelty is not official policy. The school principal told a black student who had inquired about the segregated tree that he could sit there or anywhere else he pleased.
But even if the worst possible interpretation of these events is merited, the massive international attention to this tiny town would seem vastly disproportionate to the cause, unless Jena stands for a more widespread problem. The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.
This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered, Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible statement notwithstanding. The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine. But that colorblind sentencing regimen, which dates from 1986, was a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them. Black liberals such as Congressman Charles Rangel were loudest in sounding the alarm about the effects of crack in the black ghetto. Not even the most deluded racial apologists have ever explicitly suggested that racial bias motivated Congress’s efforts to combat a drug that results in much higher rates of violence among dealers and users, quicker and more onerous addiction, and more emergency room visits than its powdered cousin.
The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. Nationally, blacks commit murder at about eight times the frequency of whites. In New York, any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to have been committed by a black person than by a white person, according to the reports of victims and witnesses. Though they are only 24 percent of the city’s population, blacks committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in New York last year. Whites, who make up 34.5 percent of New Yorkers, committed only 5.3 percent of violent crimes. These ratios are similar across the country. In Los Angeles, blacks committed 41 percent of all robberies in 2001, according to victims’ descriptions, though they constitute only 11 percent of the city’s population. Robbery victims identified whites, who make up 30 percent of the Los Angeles population, just 4 percent of the time.
When attacking the justice system, racial agitators work mightily to change the subject from violence to drugs, using their flimsy argument that crack cocaine penalties are too high. But the vast preponderance of prisoners are in the pen for violence and property crime. In 2003, 52 percent of inmates in state prisons were serving time for violent offenses, 21 percent for property offenses, and only 20 percent for drug offenses. To be sure, black incarceration rates are off the charts. Black men were 41 percent of the more than 2 million men in federal, state, and local prisons at midyear 2006. At the end of 2005, there were 3,145 prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared with 1,244 inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 471 inmates per 100,000 white males. Is that because violent and property crime is overpenalized, as race advocates sometimes argue? No. Despite the advocates’ constant complaints about three-strikes laws, the criminal justice system actually underpenalizes crime because of inadequate prison space. Prosecutors cut deals to lessen sentences; sheriffs overseeing local jails regularly devise new schemes for dumping offenders back on the street to make room for the next batch. And in any case, even if penalties for particular offenses were too draconian, the punishments affect all offenders the same.
No one in the Jena stampede dares whisper a word about black crime, because it undercuts the portrait of a victimized race. You can listen to every protest across the country glorifying the “Jena Six” and you will never hear an acknowledgement of the massive social breakdown that is the black crime rate: no mention of the violence in inner-city schools that black students commit overwhelmingly; no mention of the rising homicides in midsize cities that young black males commit when they feel “disrespected.” It is not racism that is putting black men in jail; it’s their own behavior.
What about the broader significance of Jena? Again, assuming for the sake of argument that this minuscule Louisiana town seethes with the crudest bigotry, held uniquely by whites against integration-seeking blacks, is Jena’s supposed state of affairs a microcosm of America? To the contrary: there is not a single elite institution in the country that is not twisting itself into knots in favor of African-Americans. Every minimally selective college is desperately seeking to enroll more black students. Boosting black enrollment requires drastically lowering a college’s admissions criteria to overcome the intractable 200-point SAT gap between black and white high school students, but every college institutes such double standards for the sake of “diversity.” Any black student who graduates from high school with decent grades and respectable SATs will leapfrog over thousands of more qualified white and Asian students right into the Ivy League. Blacks are also the hottest commodity for exclusive private schools that serve as training grounds for the Ivies. Andover, Exeter, Choate, and every other fancy prep and day school practice the same double standards in their eagerness to admit African-American students. After college, law schools, business schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and others accept black students whose test scores would disqualify them if they were white or Asian.
The preferences continue into the professions. Wall Street law firms annually flagellate themselves over their lack of proportional representation of black associates and partners, even though the number of blacks who graduate from law school with grades and bar-exam scores comparable with the firms’ white hires is negligible. The lack of comparably qualified black candidates does not stop the law partnerships from hiring black associates, though. Corporations have saddled themselves with massive “diversity” bureaucracies whose only function is to justify hiring and promoting less qualified African-Americans and Hispanics. Newspapers, TV stations, and advertisers put enormous pressure on themselves to have blacks on their staffs and to show black faces to the world.
In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.
The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it. But when boys are raised without any expectations that they will have to support their children and marry the mother of those children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson about responsibility. They also are freed from the civilizing force of the marriage requirement, which pressures young men to become attractive mates. With enough support, individuals can overcome the moral perils of the illegitimacy culture, but given the prevalence of black crime and disaffiliation from the working world, it’s clear that not enough young men are finding ways to do so.
The race industry will try to keep Jena in the media and political spotlight for as long as possible, and to reinforce the notion that this episode exemplifies blacks’ situation in America. But if there were many other instances of (arguable) overcharging for black crime, we would have heard about them by now. The orgy of Jena coverage will not just fail to improve the lagging performance of blacks; it will impede such improvement by strengthening the victim mentality. Both whites and blacks are complicit in this sabotage. These ecstatic festivals of racism-bashing are a crippling ritual in the codependency between absolution-seeking whites and angry blacks, a phenomenon that Shelby Steele has powerfully analyzed. The demonstrators exhibit a palpable desire for the moral clarity of the civil rights era, as do the reporters, who have covered their every utterance. “This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” one student told the New York Times. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”
He’s right; there has been nothing like Selma or Montgomery for the current generation, because much of America has accomplished almost an about-face on race since the 1950s. The current martyrs to American bigotry are a far cry from Rosa Parks. Like the “Jena Six,” they tend to have committed acts of violence or other crimes for which they are allegedly being excessively punished. Think of the six high school hooligans from Decatur, Illinois, whom Jesse Jackson tried to beatify in 1999 when their schools expelled them for a violent stadium fight; their backgrounds included robbery, trespassing, truancy, and failing whole school years. We are only belatedly learning that Mychal Bell, the sole member of the “Jena Six” to have been prosecuted for knocking out and kicking Justin Barker, has a previous arrest record that includes battery and property damage. Barker’s injuries led to $14,000 in medical bills, according to a lawyer.
The Jena situation is undoubtedly a bit more complex than the tale that the press has woven of hate-filled whites and peace-loving blacks. But even if it were not, the catharsis that this morality play has offered to its participants is spurious. The real tragedy is the dysfunctional culture that holds back too many blacks from seizing the many opportunities open to them.
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