Americans are facing a new type of crime wave that got its start in the mad liberal laboratory, where the utopian notion that going soft on criminals is going terribly awry. While threatening the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience with extinction, and making communities a living hell, the left needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently unwilling to wait for Black Friday discounts, roaming gangs of young men are descending on retail outlets and pharmacies in flash mobs, clearing out the store shelves in a matter of seconds as clerks look on helplessly.

$100k in handbags stolen at a Louis Vuitton store near Chicago! pic.twitter.com/jaElFgbkWO

— Asian Crime Report (@activeasian) November 19, 2021

In one pre-Thanksgiving raid, about 90 individuals stormed a Nordstrom outlet in Walnut Creek, situated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Members of the masked mob pepper-sprayed one employee, and assaulted another with a knife before making off with an estimated $100,000 in merchandise. Many of the looters made their getaway in some 25 vehicles parked out front.

Disturbingly, as this sort of mayhem unfolds in major cities across the country, liberals seem more preoccupied with determining how to define the criminal acts.

Lorenzo Boyd, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice & Community Policing at the University of New Haven, and a retired veteran police officer, is just one academic who seems more obsessed with semantics than digging to the root of the problem.

“Looting is a term that we typically use when people of color or urban dwellers are doing something,” Boyd remarked in an interview with ABC7 news channel. “We tend not to use that term for other people when they do the exact same thing.”

And by “other people” it is abundantly clear who Boyd is referencing.

It’s looting. Just like there were riots in Kenosha, not just protests. https://t.co/trvUHxsCHU pic.twitter.com/nmdUTg6IXT

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) November 23, 2021

Martin Reynolds, Co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, invited listeners to compare the current wave of flash mob thefts to the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, when many marginalized New Orleans residents, the majority of them Black, were labeled looters for stealing from local businesses.

“This seems like it’s an organized smash and grab robbery,” Reynold said, speaking about the current phenomenon of flash mobs. “This doesn’t seem like looting. We’re thinking of scenarios where first responders are completely overwhelmed. And folks, often may be on their own,” he said.

While both academics do make some valid points, there is a risk of liberals getting trapped in a game of semantics that eventually leads to social disaster. More on that in a moment. At the same time, the radical progressives wish to ignore the fact that the primary reason for these crimes happening at all is because they went soft on crime.

Back in 2014, the Democrats in California passed ballot initiative Proposition 47, which legislates that theft of less than $950 in merchandise is considered to be a nonviolent misdemeanor. In other words, such cases are rarely prosecuted. The repercussions of such stupidity should not have been hard to predict.

Prop. 47 led to a rise in the larceny theft rate of about 135 per 100,000 residents, an increase of close to 9 percent compared to the 2014 rate, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Police Chief David Swing, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, responded, saying that the PPIC’s conclusions “are consistent with what police chiefs across the state have seen since 2014.”

But for store owners in California and elsewhere, there is no need for special reports. The damage from the shortsighted legislation is abundantly clear.

“Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing just one of the myriad casualties of Prop 47.

Experts caution use of ‘looting’ in describing rash of Bay Area smash and grabs https://t.co/dQfftRG84T

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) November 23, 2021

Compounded with the problem of a legal system that is increasing willing to let criminals walk, a confab of writers, agitators and academics are more inclined to see the ‘poetic justice’ of young marauders clearing out stores in coordinated flash mobs.

Last year, during the street protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer called looting in the Windy City “reparation” for past crimes committed against Black people.

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats,” Ariel Atkins screamed at a rally outside the South Loop police station.

“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.”

But even before George Floyd had become a household name, self-described agitator Vickie Osterweil had penned a book entitled, ‘In Defense of Looting,’ provided an apology for the act of looting before it was cool.

Beginning by explaining that the word comes from the Hindi, lút, which means “goods” or “spoils,” Osterweil (who wrote the book under the name ‘Willie Osterweil,’ apparently at a different stage in life) goes on to argue that the idea of property in the United States is “derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country.”

Funny how many of the oppressed and downtrodden of the world are willing to be consoled by Gucci bags, Samsung televisions and Nike tennis shoes. But I digress.

Osterweil goes off on a massively contradictory spiel, somehow equating the theft of property with liberation from the “White man’s world.”

“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police; it gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected,” she says. “And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

How looting and stealing could help a person “imagine a world that could be” it is difficult to imagine, but the left must do better than merely coddling and apologizing for the criminals in their midst. More than just midterms are at stake.

In most countries, dogs are regarded either as “working” or as companions and they rarely venture into the realm of politics apart from occasionally serving as props to demonstrate that their owners are basically good and caring people. Only Donald Trump did not follow the pattern, being the first president not to have any pet in the White House since Teddy Roosevelt. Trump’s complete lack of empathy and total self-centeredness meant that he had little to share with any living thing and his extreme Germaphobia translated into a ban on any animal coming within range.

As a rather extreme dog lover, it was a personal pleasure post-Trump to see the Bidens take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanied by their two German Shepherds, one of which was a rescue. But that joy did not reckon with the irrational angry politics that have taken hold of the United States of America during the past year. The right-wing media quickly went to work, attacking one of the dogs in particular, Champ, a 12-year old male. The incident took place on February 19^th on Newsmax, where host Greg Kelly had two “guest historians” on his show who serially accused Biden of failing to take good care of his dog. “Did you see the dog?” Kelly asked after putting up a picture of Champ on the screen. “I want to show you something I noticed. Does he look a little rough?”

Kelly went on with “I love dogs, but this dog needs a bath and a comb and all kinds of love and care. I’ve never seen a dog in the White House like this. This dog looks like it’s from—I’m sorry—from the junkyard. And I love that dog, but he looks like he’s not been well cared for… ” The guests agreed that Champ did not look good and observed that he was not “presidential” in appearance.

Keith Olbermann, a genuine dog lover and sports journalist, was quick to respond, tweeting “This is a 12-year old German Shepherd – a senior dog. And you’re insulting his APPEARANCE? He’s in better shape than any of you – and smarter than all of you combined.” Another tweet commented that “Champ is 12. He’s in his 80s in human years. Newsmax isn’t doing real journalism. It’s just mean-spirited and creepy” while yet another observed that “500k dead Americans, Texas has no power, global pandemic, food shortage crisis. But these 3 guys have concerns about a dog not getting a haircut.”

But just to demonstrate that idiocy is bipartisan, there was also the coverage of Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s abrupt departure from without-power Houston for a few days in sunny Cancun. Cruz was blasted for abandoning the ship during a time of peril and then lying about his journey but critics soon found that there was also a dog story that could be exploited to make the senator look even worse.

It seems that Cruz abandoned the family poodle “Snowflake” (I will leave it up to readers to speculate on the name) in a house that was without power, heat or water. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to pile on the conservative Republican Senator, tweeting “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog” on Friday after a picture of the small white poodle looking out from the front door window on Cruz’s River Oaks mansion appeared all over the social media. But the story was less than it seemed. As it turned out, there was a full-time security guard at the Cruz house who was taking care of the dog, making sure it had food and water and was able to go outside to relieve itself in the yard.

And there is more. I’ve saved the best story for last. I would bet that most people would not know that many of those apparent good souls who spend their time and money rescuing dogs who are the victims of abandonment or abuse are actually “white supremacists?” A recent book review of self-described gender and sexual studies academic Katja Guenther’s The Life and Death of Shelter Animals has appeared. It is entitled “Critical Race Theory is Coming for the Dogs” and its author is director of The No Kill Advocacy Center, Nathan J. Winograd.

The review has been in turn reviewed at great length with additional supporting material by Canadian journalist Barbara Kay who describes how Guenther claims that many shelter dogs are being killed because of “capitalism, anthroparchy (!), white supremacy and patriarchy,” while also arguing that permitting dogs to sleep inside the home is “a privilege reserved for the white and wealthy.” Guenther also credits “racism, classism and the caste system [as being] at the heart of the broken animal sheltering institution.”

Guenther also argues that dangerous dogs should not be euthanized because they are more likely to be the companion animals of disadvantaged Black and Latino men. If this argument reminds one of the rationale for some of the many excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement, it should. For Guenther, pit bulls are canine versions of young, heedless of consequences men of color.

Guenther characterizes vicious dogs as a legitimate form of “animal resistance,” a genre of “purposeful action.” Dogs that bite often are only displaying “a strategy” to “reject the human domination of animals.” In an earlier article entitled “Taking the ghetto out of the dog” Guenther explained how “…rescuers of pit bulls in the Los Angeles area participate in remaking pit bulls so that the dogs shed their racialized, gendered, and classed identities as companions to black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Pit bull rescuers employ a range of strategies to make the dogs more palatable to the types of adopters rescuers see as desirable, and help reinforce rescuers’ construction of whiteness as morally superior vis-à-vis non-human animals. Even as they work to save individual dogs, rescuers of pit bulls leave intact beliefs that the dogs’ previous guardians were problematic and fail to challenge the social structures that lead the dogs into the shelter.”

The Barbara Kay review also cites some articles by one Harlan Weaver, who has a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Department at U.C. Santa Cruz. They include “Pit Bull Promises: Inhuman Intimacies and Queer Kinships in an Animal Shelter;” “The Tracks of my Tears: Trans* Affects, Resonance, and Pit Bulls and Parolees;” and “Becoming in Kind: Race, Gender, and Nation in Cultures of Dog Fighting and Dog Rescue.” Excuse me, but what does a History of Consciousness Department actually do?

I will leave this discussion there. The Barbara Kay article on the Winograd review of the Guenther book is lengthy and includes sections that only a demon sociologist would understand but it is well worth reading if you have ever harbored thoughts that the “woke” world has gone mad, even from a perspective of dogs. It most definitely has, and it is only getting worse.

In a webinar lecture entitled, “Undoing White Supremacy in the Language Disciplines,” Mary Bucholtz, Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, broke the news to America’s majority white population that white supremacy “is a system that White people have built in order to oppress everyone else.”

“As a White American, I am by definition racist,” Bucholtz says at the opening of her talk, as reported by Campus Reform. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I know there is this sort of rhetoric of White people in the United States rejecting the label of racism but I think we need to acknowledge that, and do better.”

In keeping with the infectious spirit of the times, the professor went on to characterize ‘white supremacy’ in the United States as a “pandemic or… a disease,” yet minutes later in the discussion she contradicted herself, saying “white supremacy is not a disease, it is a choice … a system that White people have built in order to oppress everyone else.”

As par for course when discussing the scourge of “systemic racism” that is allegedly strangling the life out of America, little by way of evidence is required to support the claim. When Bucholtz speaks of white supremacy in the United States as a “pandemic,” she says that she is “not speaking metaphorically,” yet where exactly is the proof? Bucholtz points to “life and death issues, like Covid-19 and the appalling and ongoing acts of police violence and murder” to support this very serious assertion.

With regards to the outbreak of coronavirus across the United States, it is very difficult to look at the death statistics and make the connection that coronavirus is somehow a construct of white supremacy. In every state except Mississippi, the white population has been disproportionately affected by the virus. In California, for example, out of 14, 615 deaths, 29 percent were attributed to whites, 8 percent to the black community, and 47 percent to the Latino; in New York, out of 28,669 deaths, the figures were 31, 22 and 24, respectively.

With regards to the mentioning of “police violence and murder,” this is undoubtedly a source of major concern for the black community, as the recent killing of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis by a white cop attested to. Yet much like Covid, the white population is also suffering death and injury from the excessive use of police force. As of September of this year, out of 721 fatal shootings of civilians by the police, 287 were from the white community, whereas 142 were representative of the black. Even when considering the per capita difference between the black and white populations, it would seem that the total amount of police shootings suggests that something more than “systemic racism” is at play. Why do these liberal professors never discuss the possibility that police violence is symptomatic of poor training and overworked forces?

Meanwhile, if it were indeed true that America was a hotbed of violent and racist xenophobes, as Black Lives Matter would have us believe, one would expect to see evidence of that behavior on the streets as well as in the statistics. But it’s not there. In fact, Black-on-Black violence is the real existential threat for Black Americans. According to the FBI’s latest statistics on the subject, 90.1 percent of black victims of homicide were killed by other blacks (incidentally, 83.5 percent of whites were killed by other whites).

These latest unsubstantiated remarks by a member of academia shows that the college campus, imbued with social justice radicalism, has become the hothouse of wild and extremist ideas, which do not correspond to a place called reality, but rather brought to life – much like unicorns, elves, Sasquatch and other such chimeras – in the fertile imagination of liberal professors.

In closing, Professor Bucholtz’s deeply flawed characterization of American society is an extremely dangerous trend that has infiltrated all levels of academia to such a degree that even the unequivocal statement ‘2 + 2 = 4’ “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy,” to quote Brooklyn College math teacher, Laurie Rubel.

“Mathematics is created by humans and therefore inherently carries human biases”

Thank you @maanow. I guess you’re in? https://t.co/Erp80XjBY3

— Laurie Rubel (@Laurie_Rubel) October 4, 2020

At the same time, not even the custodians of proper English grammar or the composers of classical music have been spared the yellow badge of ‘white supremacy’. While few people would suggest that whites have not committed egregious crimes against humanity at particular periods of its history, does this mean that all of its cultural and social contributions should be tossed into the dumpster? Not only would that discount all of the tremendous strides that whites, together with blacks, have made on the civil liberty front, it also unforgivably neglects the simple fact that the United States – for better or for worse, time will tell – is one of the most multicultural nations in the world. What ultra-liberal professors like Mary Bucholtz fail to explain is how America could have become so intensely diverse if it were inhabited by nothing more than knuckle-dragging, race-hating, white supremacist xenophobes.

I would suggest that the thousands of liberal professors who are now serving the half-baked claim that America is a cauldron of racism take a much-needed sabbatical from their disconnected ivy towers for a reality check. Their unfounded ideas, which are pushing race relations to the breaking point, have become the real disease in American society.

Last week, Republicans were ecstatic as Donald Trump knocked down a major pillar of leftist woke ideology, known as ‘Critical Race Theory’ (CRT), which postulates that white folks, blessed from birth with an inordinate amount of ‘privilege,’ are knuckle-dragging ‘supremacists’ in constant search of some dark minority to oppress.

Under the nose of the executive branch, the Department of the Treasury, for example, was sponsoring seminars where it was taught that “virtually all White people, regardless of how ‘woke’ they are, contribute to racism.”

Down the hall, at the Argonne National Laboratories, taxpayer funded contractors were indoctrinating staff with the noxious and divisive idea that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America.”

Even the esteemed Smithsonian Institution, where 30 million annual visitors are admitted free of charge to its museums in 45 states, was not spared the leftist lecture. Its thousands of employees were informed, among other things, that “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear.”

The days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over. Under the direction of @POTUS we are directing agencies to halt critical race theory trainings immediately.https://t.co/dyMeJka9rt

— Russ Vought (@RussVought45) September 4, 2020

While it was good to see the federal government shorn of these color-based teachings, invasive weeds that had been growing undetected since the Obama years, the move only succeeds at pruning away some gnarled branches instead of going after the primary source of the problem, which is rooted firmly inside of academia. In fact, Trump’s memorandum seems to give universities a pass from the restrictions, even though hundreds of public institutions of ‘hire’ learning depend on government largesse to fund their operations.

Buried near the bottom of the directive, it states that “[N]othing in this order shall be construed to prohibit discussing, as part of a larger course of academic instruction, the divisive concepts listed…in an objective manner and without endorsement.”

That is a troubling oversight since CRT has captured the fervid imagination of a large number of college professors, which should come as no surprise considering that the world of academia is overwhelmingly liberal to the core.

Columbia University, for example, hosted a “deconstructing whiteness” lecture series specifically targeting white students. As Campus Reform reported, the goal was to “engage in exploration of their white identities and build community and accountability around deconstructing whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an antiracist lens.”

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hosted – at its School of Music, no less – a number of weekly online workshops devoted to exploring to “the ways that white supremacy manifests in our lives, our communities, and our work.” Perhaps this music class will examine the latest identified bastion of white supremacy, hidden away between the lines of classical music, at least according to a recent feature in The New Yorker, entitled, ‘Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music’.

Even at West Point, the prestigious military academy, cadets who enroll in the “Behavioral Science and Leadership” seminar are required to read “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.” Its website describes the school’s leadership course as an “introduction to the concepts of race, gender, and sexuality in the American political system” with particular focus on the “inherent inequalities found.”

As I told @TuckerCarlson tonight: I call on President @realDonaldTrump to immediately issue an executive order abolishing critical race theory from the federal government.

There is no place for this toxic, divisive, pseudoscientific ideology in our public institutions. pic.twitter.com/78J0CwNjfh

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) September 2, 2020

The disturbing thing about these college lectures is that they precede from the starting point that ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ are widespread phenomena in the United States. Many commentators rightly question that belief. In fact, they argue just the opposite, noting the great strides that have been made in the pursuit of racial equality through numerous government-sponsored programs, including Affirmative Action and the Welfare State, as well as more grassroots efforts connected to the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the notion of ‘White privilege’ and institutional power structures that supposedly give Whites a free ride does not stand up to scrutiny, least of all in the workplace where hiring quotas makes White males the least attractive choice.

Nobody would confuse America today with the Jim Crow era when racial segregation was the rule of law. Such massive changes in the racial landscape over a relatively short period could not have happened without the participation of large numbers of white people, who, incidentally, still make up over 76 percent of the population.

America’s tremendous strides towards a more just and equal nation notwithstanding, the so-called Cultural Marxists, disciples of the Frankfurt School who arrived in America in the 1930s, have exploited racial differences in the hope of bringing about their dream of a socialist paradise. Now, every time a Black person dies at the hands of a White cop, the tragedy is not blamed on the more likely cause of inadequate police training, for example, but on the unproven disease of ‘systemic racism’.

The academy must take much of the blame for perpetuating the myth of systemic racism in America. Yes, there are racists and bigots, but these are representative of all races, not just among the White population.

In March, Trump, dismayed by the anti-conservative climate that now pervades campuses, signed an executive order requiring universities to protect free speech or risk losing federal research money.

“Even as universities have received billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers, many have become increasingly hostile to free speech and to the first amendment,” Trump said at the signing ceremony. “These universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans.”

Such a stance could also compel US universities to eliminate the teaching of CRT on their campuses, which is just as detrimental to the health of the nation as is the restriction of free speech. The academia can no longer serve as a taxpayer-funded hothouse for growing virulent racist ideology, which poses a direct threat to the livelihood of millions of White Americans.

Yes, European settlers to America were, for example, responsible for killing off a large number of the Native Indian population, as well as participating in the African slave trade. And who could forget the regrettable legacy of colonialism? At this point, I will resist the temptation to construct a scorecard based on the historical crimes of other races, many of whom were guilty of the very same crimes now being attributed to the White people.

This sudden desire among the Liberal Inquisition to settle past historical scores with the White man, who ironically has become his own burden, is already revealing itself in radical new ways. Students at prestigious Yale University, for example, will no longer be able to attend an introductory course to Western Art History due to “student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists,” reported the school’s newspaper.

Perhaps the only thing surprising about Yale’s announcement is that it came so late in the day. After all, the field of mathematics, which one would think is adequately insulated from identity politics, has been accused of being built on a purely racist foundation.

According to the new woke math currently being taught in the Seattle public school system, “Western” mathematics is being foisted upon unsuspecting students as “the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence” in some diabolical plan to “disenfranchise people and communities of color.”

Perhaps the best evidence that there is a concerted effort to cancel the White race from recognition for their achievements can be witnessed by a simple search on Google. Type in ‘White inventors’ and fasten your seat belt. While there is no doubt that minorities have contributed many inventions over the course of the centuries, the Google results make it look like the tinkering White man, where he appears at all, is still struggling to invent the wheel. If the world’s biggest search engine were relying solely on algorithms to provide its ‘answers’ (as opposed to the deliberate meddling of a human hand) then it seems utterly impossible that renowned ‘Caucasian’ inventors, like the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee and Isaac Newton, to name a few, do not feature anywhere near the top of Google search results. This was a deliberate move by the Silicon Valley giant to deny White inventors their rightful place in the historical record.

Commercial break! Watch Gillette’s stomach-churning virtue-signaling video devoted to not removing whiskers from your face but the question of ‘toxic masculinity. Ask yourself what race is portrayed as the guiltiest of displaying undesirable behavior (making advances on females, for example) in society.

Equally shocking was the news that Goldman Sachs, of all companies, was jumping on the virtue signaling bandwagon in an apparent effort to put White executives in their rightful place, which increasingly is not at the top. Indeed, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has a plan to save corporate America from all-male, all-white corporate boards: The investment bank will decline to take a company public unless it has at least one woman or non-white member on board.

The CBS article where this story appeared attempted to justify the move by citing a study that argues more diverse firms make “better investment decisions and scale back on aggressive risk-taking.” Well, if that were true, then Goldman Sachs would be better off asserting its commitment to the ‘free market’ as opposed to the lunatic social justice fringe. The reason is at the core of capitalist theory: those firms that fail to diversify (if it is indeed the best business model) will ultimately falter due to the market’s law of natural selection. Instead, David Solomon would rather align himself with cultural ‘progressives’ by forcefully removing White executives, many of whom are in their positions due to hard work and merit. On top of that, there is the question regarding the very constitutionality of such efforts at ‘affirmative action’ to correct perceived wrongs in the workplace.

Curb your racism, avoid yoga and dog ownership

Now, if all that were not enough, flickering in the background of these stories are vile racist ideas that would never be attributed to other peoples without massive fallout. For example, did you happen to know that White people participating in the seemingly benign discipline of yoga, an increasingly popular group activity for relieving stress and staying fit, are in reality supporting the vile white supremacist belief system?

Shreena Gandhi, a religious studies professor at Michigan State, and Lillie Wolff, a self-described “anti-racist white Jewish organizer, facilitator, and healer,” co-authored an article entitled, ‘Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation.’ In it, the very imaginative authors argue that the “modern-day trend of cultural appropriation of yoga is a continuation of white supremacy and colonialism, maintaining the pattern of white people consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable…”

The madness does not stop there. Not by a long shot.

Now if, by chance, you happen to be White, as well as a yoga enthusiast AND dog owner, you may as well just surrender to your darkest demons and sign up now for the Ku Klux Klan. I am only half joking. See, because in the minds of the social justice thought police, White people who walk their dogs around the neighborhood – pooper scooper in hand – may also signify a not so harmless breed of human. That’s because White folks tend to use dog ownership as a means to achieve “reinforced boundaries” and thus their “White privileges” in their otherwise diverse neighborhoods.

“White residents of multicultural areas tend to overlook inequality in their neighborhoods,” writes Sarah Mayorga-Gallo, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston, who went on to identify the surprising “vehicle of racial segregation,” which just happens to be White man’s best friend, the dog.

The academic relayed the heart-wrenching story of Jerry, a black homeowner in his sixties, who chanced upon a neighborhood bakery in the town of Creekridge Park, North Carolina. He stopped to chat with some dog-owning customers, who were white, in the outdoor seating area, but the staff asked him to leave – a scenario that is played over thousands of times every day at any restaurant that has an outdoor seating area.

As Mayorga-Gallo explains it: “Jerry is a black disabled veteran who was wearing his old army uniform that day. He figures they thought he was begging for money.”

Without providing more information on Jerry of the tattered Army uniform, like, for example, if he was in fact a panhandler, Mayorga-Gallo arrives at the White-trashing conclusion she was certainly looking for: “The dogs didn’t create the interracial boundaries at the bakery, which caters to a primarily white, middle-class clientele. In fact, the dogs presented an avenue to connect black and white neighbors. But they gave bakery staff a reason to intervene, to maintain interracial boundaries.” Now had Mayorga-Gallo taken the time to conduct her own experiment, like how a restaurant staff would react to a White beggar attempting to talk to a group of paying Black customers, I think she may have been surprised at the results. Instead, we must settle for the ‘White dog owners contribute to racial segregation’ verdict.

For some readers, all of this may sound a bit trifling, insignificant and even humorous. That would be a mistake. This steady flow of articles, which attempt to portray White Americans as closet racists, could – at the very least – instill some level of hate aimed at the White population. In fact, that already seems to be happening. Meanwhile, by constantly eliminating the achievements of Whites, based on whatever explanation, or even removing them in the name of ‘diversity,’ this could also result in some sort of unintended backlash.

These non-stop efforts to characterize the U.S. White majority with racism and supremacism do not stand up to scrutiny. After all, the country fought a civil war that was at least partially aimed at ending the slave trade. Later, the country passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the floodgates to people of non-European descent. While there is still room for improvement, the race situation is nowhere near the crisis levels that the media regularly ascribes to it.

All things considered, it seems to be a recipe for disaster for the media to continually – in the tormented spirit of ‘social justice’ – to attribute racist tendencies to White Americans across the board. That is not only incredibly wrong, it is dangerous. It will end in disaster.

Following the trajectory of Hurricane Whitey as it makes landfall and gradually turns the once lush and verdant American landscape a lighter shade of pale, one can only wonder from where this force of noxious white power first arose. Or is it just a figment of the mainstream media’s excitable imagination?

America’s best-known White Supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, saw its heyday in the late 19^th century, before greatly declining in the late 1920s. Today, they have largely been shunned from polite society and are a mere shadow of their former whiteness, with membership estimated by the ADL at less than 3,000 nationwide. Hardly a tour de force. Meanwhile, when performing a Google search on ‘White supremacist groups,’ the very first entry is an article about – yes, you guessed it – US President Donald Trump.

the image at the end of the video Trump tweeted earlier was popular amongst the fascists of Lion Guard and the white supremacists of Vdare in 2016 pic.twitter.com/XBCWoRblvp

— Dusty (@DustinGiebel) August 28, 2019

This makes one question what all of the hype about racism and ‘White supremacy’ is really about. In early August, Fox News host Tucker Carlson called out the hysteria over White supremacy, saying it was “a hoax” thrust upon the American public to “divide the country and keep a hold on power.” The question was appropriate, yet arguably badly timed as it came just after the El Paso shooting, which so saw yet another deranged loner off his meds pen a ‘white power’ manifesto before going on a shooting spree. The media wasted no time finding connections between passages in the killer’s screed, for example, his use of the phrase “Hispanic invasion” in describing the migrants from Latin America ascending on the US border, and Donald Trump’s past warnings regarding the influx of illegals. In that sense, Carlson was right to speak his mind.

“If you were to assemble a list, a hierarchy of concerns, of problems this country faces, where would white supremacy be on the list,” he asked. “Right up there with Russia, probably.”

“This is a hoax. Just like the Russia hoax. It’s a conspiracy theory used to divide the country and keep a hold on power. That’s exactly what’s going on.”

This leads to an interesting aspect about America’s so-called race problem, specifically with regards to ‘White supremacy.’ When it is discussed in the media, the emphasis is not on conspicuous incidences of racial prejudice or violence, apart from the occasional and very horrific cases of mass shootings, but rather on what some activists imagine to be cases of racist behavior. This has opened the door to some very wild interpretations.

For example, did you know that if you practice yoga you are quite possibly a closet White Supremacist? In a report entitled, Yoga and the Roots of Cultural Appropriation, Michigan State University professor Shreena Gandhi, White people are perpetuating “white supremacy and colonialism

“This modern day trend of cultural appropriation of yoga is a continuation of white supremacy and colonialism, maintaining the pattern of white people consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable, while ignoring the well-being and liberation of the Indian people,” Professor Gandhi wrote together with Lillie Wolff, a self-described “white Jewish organizer, facilitator and healer”.

Ironically, Gandi and Wolff fail to mention that millions of newly minted American citizens from foreign lands could be accused, although probably never will be, of the very same charges of “cultural appropriation” and “consuming the stuff of culture that is convenient and portable” by voluntarily deciding to live in the United States, which has welcomed with opened arms people and races of all colors and creeds. Indeed, the fact that so many foreigners continue to flock to America in droves makes all this talk about racism and White supremacists with a weakness for yoga a bit fantastic. But I digress.

Seattle is trying to figure out how to clean poop off their streets but A Democrat Councilman doesn’t like the idea of using a pressure washer hose because it reminds him of hoses used against civil rights activists…

You can’t make this stuff up. Insane.https://t.co/fxqdvmRYa2

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 27, 2019

If yoga isn’t necessarily your cup of tea, then perhaps you are a serial milk drinker. Then you too could be a foaming at the mouth White supremacist, reveling in your lactose tolerance that is sometimes lacking among African Americans. Thus, America’s budding White supremacists are taking great pleasure drinking cow’s milk, using it as some sort of ‘white identity’ message, or so goes the disjointed argument in a New York Times’ article entitled, ‘Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed). After consuming this story the reader would almost think that local bars across the land are serving up cold white milk to patrons instead of beer.

But perhaps you are not a yoga practitioner or a regular consumer of white milk, but just an exceptionally bright white kid. Well, sorry, that ‘privilege’ now also comes with some very heavy strings attached, if delusional New York Mayor Bill De Blasio gets his way, the New York Times reported.

De Blasio envisions getting rid of public school programs for talented children, as they are filled “mostly with white and Asian children,” which of course carries ugly overtones of racism.

“If the mayor adopts the recommendations, elementary and middle schools would no longer be able to admit students based solely or largely on standardized exams or other academic prerequisites, and high schools would have diversity requirements.”

In other words, the incentive for bright kids to do well in school is now threatened with extinction.

Perhaps what White folks should do in order to avoid any criticism or suspicion is to just stay around the neighborhood and walk the dog. Oh wait, sorry, that mundane activity is also suspect to recrimination since White dog owners use their leashed pets to “stake out territory,” you know, like modern day Christopher Columbus’s while fraternizing with other “white owners excluding minorities.”

Soon I suspect it will even be considered unfashionable to have white teeth.

Tucker Carlson: White supremacy is "actually not a real problem in America." Calling white supremacy and issue is "a hoax" and "a conspiracy theory used to divide the country" pic.twitter.com/ydzmJ0L7UI

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 7, 2019

So what is the motivation behind all of this incredible nonsense with regards to racism? Part of it is certainly an effort to bolster the claim that Trump supporters are nothing more than a clan of White supremacists since much of this racist propaganda was unheard of prior to 2016. With the conspiracy theory of ‘Russiagate’ completely debunked, the Liberal mainstream media, with all of its attention on the 2020 presidential election, must conflate Trump with yet another loathsome creature, and who better than the racist?

At the same time, all this fake news about rising racism and milk-drinking White supremacists intent on walking their dogs helps to obfuscate the real problem in America which is the great class divide. As the titans of tech continue to hoard fantastic amounts of wealth, oftentimes, as with the case of Amazon and others, without paying any tax on the loot, average Americas are struggling under a mountain of inescapable debt on their homes, cars and most especially college tuition loans, which largely funded impressionable students – with heavy interest rates – to subscribe to the myth of racism in America.

The Liberal social justice warriors, intent on characterizing every White person as a racist or supremacist, are acting in accordance to the designs of the establishment elite, who rely on these misguided activists to focus the narrative far away from the most critical topic in the United States, which is not racism, but rather the great class divide.

The remarkable story of Robin Cloud’s family gets to the heart of one of the deepest wounds in American society: racism. Cloud, a comedian, author and film director who recently spoke with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer on his podcast “Scheer Intelligence,” comes from a sizable black family with roots in South Carolina dating back to the age of American slavery. She can trace her ancestors to both slaves and slave owners, a history known and shared by the many members of the Ragin-Watson family, which comes together once a year for a family reunion.

But for years, a branch of Cloud’s family, known as to them as the “Nebraska cousins,” was missing from the photos of their annual get-together. What Cloud comes to uncover about her family is the subject of her 6-part documentary, “Passing: A Family in Black & White.” The film (you can watch the first episode at the link above, the link below, or on Topic.com), follows the comedian’s reencounters with family members who descended from a cousin and her husband, both of whom were black, who decided to pass as white when they moved to Nebraska.

Their decision to pass was similar to decisions made by many others past and present: access to better jobs, better housing and a existence exempt from the often deadly racism that pervades every aspect of American life. Their dozens of kids and grandkids grew up believing they were white, despite sometimes being questioned by others about certain features and wondering whether they had other roots.

The film, which gives an honest, often uncomfortable look into Cloud’s reacquaintance with her family, paints a less-than-idyllic picture of reunion. In fact, it shows how stubbornly some people hold on to white privilege despite clear evidence of their ancestry.

The denial is one that can be seen in American society at large, and, as Scheer points out, can be traced to our political troubles to this very day.

“Your film really deals with an up-to-the-minute issue,” he tells Cloud on the podcast. “This is not ancient history. And the reason it’s not ancient history is that racism survives precisely because it’s good for demagogues. And it’s a way of explaining away other contradictions in the society.

“I love this quote from you: ‘Culture almost outweighs blood,’ ” Scheer continues. “And what it’s really saying is—an illusion outweighs reality.”

The inability or lack of desire to examine the contradictions our own blood can carry is illustrated in a poignant moment between Cloud and some of her young cousins in Omaha. When the film director asks two relatives if this knowledge will change their relationship to or their views of black people, they shake their heads. One answers that he essentially doesn’t see race. Cloud highlights her discomfort in the narration as well as to her cousins, telling them that in “this political climate” it’s impossible for her to ignore race and racism.

Listen to the full discussion between Cloud and Scheer as the two talk about the film and how it relates to both the painful history and current events that many Americans refuse to face. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player and find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

— Introduction by Natasha Hakimi Zapata

ROBERT SCHEER: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence,” where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it’s Robin Cloud, comedian, writer, and director. Well-known as a comedian, there are lots of clips on YouTube and elsewhere that you can watch. And as a writer, has written for major publications and what have you. But it’s in your role as a director that I really want to talk to you about, because I got to watch your six-part documentary, “Passing: A Family in Black & White.” And I actually was blown away by it. I just thought–first of all, it fits into the theme of this series; I’ve done about 170 of these, and I aim at what I call American originals. And this is a film that could–I’m sure there are counterparts, I’ll get to that later, in other cultures–but it’s a uniquely American film. And it concerns, first of all, basically a black family from South Carolina, which then moves on to the rest of the country, but experienced slavery, experienced deep segregation and what have you. And most of these people end up living the life of black people in a more northern environment. You spent much of your time in Connecticut, New York; you went to Howard University, a prestigious black legacy school, and so forth. You now are in Los Angeles, which is, I think, the center of the world, but that’s another issue. [Laughter] And but one branch of your family, which was a regular part of your family, they went off, and Willa Mae Lane ended up in Omaha, Nebraska. And they lived the lives of white people. So hence the title, “Passing: A Family in Black & White.” How do people get to watch this?

ROBIN CLOUD: Well, first, thank you for having me. “Passing: A Family in Black & White” is on Topic, so you can watch it at topic.com/passing. It’s also on YouTube, and then there are also clips on Facebook.

RS: OK. And what is–I want you to lay out the film, but what I found really interesting about it, it was a reminder of the significance of skin color, obviously, in the American experience–something we’re always debating now, we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about a historic legacy. But you had an interesting comment in the sixth part, I believe, where you said, “Culture almost outweighs blood.” And then you even said, “it’s more important.”

Tell me what you meant about that, because after watching your documentary, I thought you know, that might be the big takeaway from this. That one branch of this family went off into a different culture; you couldn’t imagine a more different culture than Nebraska. I don’t know if they had–you know, they had Native Americans, I don’t know if they had any people who were then called “Negro,” or more derogatory terms. But let’s start with that: “Culture almost outweighs blood.”

RC: Yes. Ah, I think when I was thinking about that, that came from my experience of really wanting or hoping that my Nebraska relatives, and also the ones that live in Chicago, would be interested in embracing African American culture, to some degree. And what I found when I posed that question to them–

RS: These are the people who lived as white.

RC: Yes, who lived as white for, you know, up until I told them that they were not really white. That they felt–specifically my cousin Jeannene, you know, said to me that “I’m culturally white, and I don’t know how to be black.” You know, “I don’t know the music, I don’t know the food, I don’t know”–you know, black people talk to each other in a different way that we sometimes talk to white people. And she doesn’t know those things, and she didn’t want to try to be something that she isn’t.

RS: Well, because we’re doing radio, we can’t hold up this picture. But the folks in Nebraska, a few of them clearly look like they–

RC: Yeah, like light-skinned black people with, you know, Afros, and you know, black features.

RS: But others are blonde, blue-eyed, white and so forth. And you have kind of–and then a few of them come back to a family reunion.

RC: Yes, that’s right.

RS: I mean, people also forget, you know, we’re not talking about caricatures of human beings. We’re talking about real families, real people. And your family has a long history, and they have reunions all the time, they have–

RC: Every year, every year, yeah.

RS: Local ones every year, and then every five years they have a bigger one and so forth. And so why don’t you–because that’s sort of really the big takeaway from this film, is how interesting everybody is, how complex, how history impacts them, how culture impacts them. You know, none of us are stereotypes, none of us are simple. We come from someplace. And I think your movie is a powerful reminder of that, you know. There’s one guy who I loved, my favorite guy in the movie, I don’t remember his name. But he’s back in South Carolina–

RC: Oh, David, my cousin David, yeah. [Laughs]

RS: Yeah, and he’s doing what I like to do–in fact, what I did yesterday. I didn’t actually fish, but I was on my little electric boat out in the Marina. And I just loved this guy, because he seemed at peace with the homeland.

RC: Yeah, he made that choice. I mean, he spent summers down there as a kid, and then when he was in junior high, he decided he didn’t want to stay in Philly anymore because he liked being in the country. I mean, he’s a country boy at heart. He’s also an amazing wildlife photographer, and so he goes on trips and takes these amazing photographs. Yeah.

RS: And he brought you in touch with your own origins in that area, in that he showed you the land that the slaveowner had given back to the family, and you know, where you were fishing. And then you went to try to find your aunt’s home, or your grandmother’s home. Why don’t you put us there? Because I want to give the film its due. There’s an experience you have watching this documentary, again, that you’re reminded that none of us are cardboard figures. That we have this history, whether we’re rural, whether we’re black, whether we’re white, there’s a history. There’s a connection with nature, there’s a connection with family. And your family–just take us to the beginning.

RC: Well, I would say, this is my mother’s side of the family. We have a very large family from Summerton, South Carolina, which is just an hour northwest of Charleston. And it’s a small town; it’s really like a stereotypical Southern town, where there’s like literally one stoplight. It’s very segregated. You know, there’s like a white high school and a black high school still to this day. I mean, I think technically they’re, they can be integrated, but everyone sort of sticks to their own.

There are also white Ragins and white Watsons that are still in the family, which I’m assuming that we’re related to. Yeah, and our roots originally, you know, come from these Irish brothers that came over from Ireland and were slaveowners in the area. And obviously, I don’t know the circumstance, but I can imagine that it was not good, that they had relations with an African woman, and that’s where our family began. And the first son out of that relationship was the one that was freed by his own father and given the land that we still own today.

RS: And it’s beautiful land there. But even–

RC: Yeah.

RS: –even so, the–what’s his name who does the fishing?

RC: David.

RS: David made a point that somebody came up to him once and said, “You have too good a boat.”

RC: Oh, yeah. I mean, the racism is–is real. Like, even going down for the weekend, you know, it’s possible to go through and just have a nice family reunion. But if you go to any of the integrated places, you know, people still look at you. And they wonder why you’re there, and you know, they’ll give you that–it’s just that feeling, sort of. That as a northerner, growing up in Connecticut, I’m very sensitive to it. And I feel it immediately.

RS: So as I suggest, the movie is not a benign view of family life in any way. I mean, obviously, these people went through great turmoil and so forth. The gift of this land only came after civil war and everything else, and probably the owners had no choice at that point–

RC: No, it was actually early. It was in the 1700s.

RS: Oh, really?

RC: Yeah.

RS: And so why did, how did that happen?

RC: I don’t know. This was a white Irish man with some sort of conscience, I guess? [Laughs] Which is amazing.

RS: Oh, really? That’s interesting.

RC: Yeah, I mean, I would love to dive more into who this person was, because I don’t really know much about him besides this part of the story.

RS: OK. So you’re the inconvenient relative who’s bothered to trace family history.

RC: Yes.

RS: You got the scrapbook, and so forth, right? How long did this take you, by the way? Most of your life?

RC: I started–it–god, I started in 2008.

RS: But you must have been curious much earlier, right?

RC: I am a big history buff. I love history. I actually have a master’s in historic preservation; in addition to all the other creative things I do, I love restoring old buildings. So that’s something I’ve been interested in. And I worked as the director of preservation at the Weeksville Heritage Center, which is an African American historic site in Brooklyn. And we held genealogy classes for the community, and that was my first real introduction to genealogy and research. And I learned how to do it, and it just really inspired me to start diving in deeper into this story.

RS: Into your story, your family’s story.

RC: Into my family’s story, yes.

RS: And when was your first recognition that you had a white branch of the family that was in the closet, so to speak?

RC: I knew that, I would say, my whole life. You know, it was sort of growing up, at family reunions, listening to my grandmother and her sisters talk about it. As a child, it was always something that I would hear, you know, in passing. Ha, ha. But, ah–[Laughs] yeah, definitely, it was just something that the grown folks talked about.

RS: And it was all about Willa Mae and–what was his name?

RC: Johnny, her husband Johnny.

RS: Yeah, you say Johnny Boy Watson?

RC: His nickname was Johnny Boy.

RS: Yeah, Johnny Boy Watson. They were both, clearly, back north, and in the east–

RC: Yes, in New York, in Harlem.

RS: They were “Negroes.”

RC: Yes, for sure.

RS: Yes. And then what happened? They just decided to get out of town?

RC: From what I’ve heard, Johnny was an engineer, college educated. And at that time, they were not hiring black men to do–

RS: Do you know where he went to college?

RC: I don’t. That’s something that I have to–

RS: I wonder if it was City College. [Laughs] My alma mater–

RC: Yeah, I’m not sure. Wouldn’t that be amazing, I need another, I need a genealogist to help me to, like, dig even deeper. Ah, so–

RS: So they went out to–why Nebraska?

RC: Well, this is the story. And you know, that he was, one, he was looking for a job. And then two, their eldest son had asthma, and they were told by the doctor that they should probably leave New York and move west. And so they were actually on their way to Arizona, but somehow stopped in Nebraska, and he ended up getting this job there, and they just stayed.

RS: And he was quite successful there, right?

RC: Yes, he was.

RS: He was a commissioner or something? Tell us about that.

RC: That’s something that Josh has said. I haven’t been able to verify–

RS: Oh. Josh is his–

RC: Josh is his grandson.

RS: Grandson, yeah. And it’s really interesting, because when you meet these people, actually this grandson Josh, who’s been raised as a white person in Omaha, Nebraska–he has an earring, he seems to–what did you say? He’s a mixture of a hippie and a–?

RC: Oh yeah, he calls himself a–gosh. A hippie and a hillbilly. Yeah, yeah.

RS: OK. So actually, you go out there; you’ve met a few members of the family before, who came back for a reunion. But now you go out to Nebraska to meet your white relatives. You actually seem to instantly bond, because in the film they show the meeting–you show, you’re the director–your meeting with him. And you guys share a lot. You’re both sort of–I don’t want to–

RC: Yeah, we’re like, both sort of like artsy fartsy, crunchy, like–we love junk and trash, and making stuff. He loves, he like makes these amazing like glass pipes, and glass balls, and all of this stuff. And he’s like a little artisan. So, yeah, we really got along.

RS: OK. So is this where your slogan came from, “Culture almost outweighs blood?” That you and Josh actually turned out to share, what, more of a culture?

RC: Ah, no, I think that actually comes from–I mean, Josh and I did connect on those things, for sure. But I felt that it was really hard for them–it would be hard for them to embrace black culture when they’ve been raised in white culture. And making that shift is what I was saying is almost impossible.

RS: Because the culture holds.

RC: Because the culture is deeper and stronger, and that’s what your foundation is.

RS: Yeah. So let’s cut to the chase here. Were you an embarrassment when you showed up in Nebraska? Are they kind of irritated that you did this?

RC: There are a few of the older generation who are not happy about the film. I think they feel that this is old news, if their parents didn’t tell them why do we need to talk about it.

RS: Do they claim they knew?

RC: No, they don’t. They definitely did not know.

RS: Let’s just be very precise here. You’re talking to people who are the offspring of Willa Mae Lane and Johnny Boy Watson, right?

RC: Ah–no, John Lane.

RS: John Lane.

RC: Yeah, yeah. Willa Mae, her maiden name was Watson.

RS: Oh, OK. And they are out there, and they decide that they’re going to pass as white.

RC: Yes.

RS: And they’d gone through a few before; they’d been mulatto, they called–

RC: Yes, they were–depending on the census, and where they were. So like in South Carolina, in our town, they were mulatto. As a lot of my relatives were listed as mulatto, because they were very light-skinned black people. Then they moved to Philly, where they were like, OK, you’re black. And then, you know, when Willa Mae moved to New York, then she was black. And then to Nebraska, and she was white.

RS: White. And they just fit in with the white community.

RC: Yeah, for the most part. I mean, there were questions, I think, from the white people. Because they were like, well–you know, you’re not sort of blonde and blue-eyed, like the rest–I mean, Nebraska, back then in the forties and fifties, was mostly, I would say, Scandinavian, German, Polish immigrants, or descendants of those people. And so they did, they looked really different, and they stood out.

RS: But they were successful.

RC: But they were successful, because they were very determined in keeping the lie going.

RS: And taxpayers, and he’s an engineer.

RC: Yeah, and working, and part of society.

RS: And he had an official position.

RC: Yes.

RS: Right. So then, and what’s so powerful–we can’t show it, obviously, on radio; people should watch the documentary–when you see the family photo of the Nebraska people, it’s a picture of apple-pie America. You know, this is America, OK. And so suddenly you show up. And you know, you’re an artist. You’re a controversial figure. [Laughter] You perform comedy routines in nightclubs, and so forth, and you’re provocative and so forth. And you’re also a gay person–

RC: Yes.

RS: –and you don’t conceal it, right.

RC: No.

RS: Was that an issue at all?

RC: Ah, Becky Jo and I and Jeannene never really talked about that. Jeannene has a daughter that’s gay, so I think she’s–

RS: These are the Nebraska people.

RC: Yes, but Jeannene lives on the East Coast now. Well, she grew up in Chicago. But yeah, I mean, Becky Jo definitely is a Trump supporter; she’s a devout Catholic, so she’s pro-life, and would probably say she was anti-gay, but never said that directly to me.

RS: But it’s interesting in terms of what is–where are controversies. And this is one of the things I found fascinating about your movie. It seems to me–and I don’t want to minimize the hostility that gay people encounter. But we’ve had tremendous change. I just was in the–it is San Francisco, but in Terminal 1 of the airport, and there you have the whole history of gay life in San Francisco, and Harvey Milk–it’s named the Harvey Milk terminal. And people stop and they read it and everything. And it has a feeling of not being controversial, of just sort of obvious truth. Yes, we went through this dark period, and now we’re coming to our senses, and we recognize–you know, and so forth. That hasn’t happened in racial relations. Not in that way.

RC: No, and would say, like, that type of acceptance has happened on the coast. [Laughs] You know, I think the rest of the country is not exactly up to speed.

RS: I don’t want to minimize it. But even for the rest of the country, I suspect the fact that you are, were thought of as black, bringing news of black roots of the family, was far more of interest to them than that you are gay.

RC: Yes, I would say so. For sure.

RS: Right, yeah. And then you point out one of the Nebraska white people, so-called, has a gay offspring. And one of the interesting things about the gay issue is gays show up everywhere.

RC: Exactly. Straight people make gays. [Laughs] So.

RS: Yeah, and they show up as Catholics, and they show up, you know, all over the place. So you can’t–once gay people are out of the closet, you can’t dismiss them in that way, because it’s your nephew, it’s your child, what have you. OK. The sad thing–and watching your movie, it felt profoundly disturbing–this hasn’t crossed racial lines between black and white. We haven’t had that integration of ordinary life. You know, we haven’t had that acceptance, that respect. It holds.

We live in a racially deeply divided society, black-white, brown-white, and so forth. And you know, I would not have expected this if I thought back to the 1950s or something, where the treatment of gay people was in some ways worse than any other minority. But now, you know, OK, we got over that one. Even Donald Trump, he’s not particularly going to bash gay people or anything.

RC: Well, he’s, I mean, he’s going to try to take away our rights.

RS: He brought the first gay speaker to the Republican convention, Peter Thiel. I’m not going to try to make him, sugar-coat Donald Trump. But the interesting thing about your movie is it’s made by–you’re central to this film, and I should give the title again, “Passing: A Family in Black & White.” I think it’s a very powerful movie, and I’m trying to promote it here unabashedly. But what’s so interesting is the gay part, because you show up in the film with your significant other. I gather you’re getting married soon.

RC: Yes, that’s right.

RS: That’s a non-issue in this film. To the people, it seems to me. The real issue is this thing that you thought would have disappeared by now: race. Skin color. What’s that about?

RC: No, I don’t think it would have disappeared by now.

RS: Well, I thought it would.

RC: No.

RS: I actually thought as a kid–I’m much older than you are–I thought, wow, the civil rights movement, the end of segregation–you know, and all that–no. It holds. A really sharp, ugly edge–

RC: Yes, yes! Because every white person in this country is indoctrinated into white supremacy. Whether they want to be or not. Even the good liberals. You know. And it’s the work of white people to continue to undo that thinking. And read books like White Fragility, and call out their family members who are not up to speed, and still hold onto those values. Whether they think they’re holding onto them or not. They’re–it’s ever-present. So that work has to be addressed and taken on by white folks. And that’s why it still exists, because nobody wants to do it.

RS: Well, and also, I think, bringing it back to the film, one could make the argument that these folks in Nebraska want to hold onto it because it is privilege.

RC: Of course. Definitely.

RS: Right, I mean, that’s the key. And so they could say, hey, she’s a lot of fun to be with–

RC: [Laughs] But white privilege is even more fun than hanging out with Robin. That’s the key takeaway. [Laughs]

RS: Even–and you are actually, I don’t know, just eyeballing it, a successful member of this family. You have a reputation, they can look you up, you perform, you write, you make movies. You’re a success story. Probably as successful as any one of the Nebraska people, right? I don’t know.

RC: Yeah, I mean, the irony is I would say the black side of the family is more successful than the white side. Like, most of my cousins are doctors, lawyers, ah–

RS: The black cousins.

RC: Yes, yes. We are more successful.

RS: OK. But instead of embracing that and saying, hey, we come from good stock, look at these folks, you know, they’re doing great–there’s still a strong feeling that first of all, their neighbors might not feel that way. I don’t know, you’re the one who experienced it, you went to Nebraska.

RC: Right, I did.

RS: So what happened?

RC: Ah, what I found was the younger generation, like Katie and Josh, were willing to meet with me even though, you know, Katie was hesitant. And the older generation, being some of Becky Jo’s older children and Becky Jo’s siblings, were not interested in meeting me. I think that they just weren’t prepared to take on that type of conversation. Or the level of acceptance. I mean I think to this day, some of them still really don’t believe this is true.

RS: Have they done the biological testing?

RC: I think, yes, a few of them have. But the ones with the most doubt, they have not.

RS: And the ones that have done the testing, do they find–

RC: Oh yeah, for sure. You know, they’re–at this point, like, I am 66% black, like you know, 27% white or whatever. And so you know, they’re–they end up being like 15%, or like 20. It’s a small percentage, right. But like even my grandmother was probably, like, 50/50. So I mean, it’s very rare to be, like, 100% African as an African American, just because of the history of slavery.

RS: But it is interesting. And the Trump appeal is critical. You say one of your relatives in Nebraska does feel this way, or–?

RC: Yes.

RS: And the appeal, this nativist appeal, is quite dangerous precisely because it’s a way of explaining your own failures, or you know, it’s a way of trying to claim special privilege, and be opposed to anything done in society to make it fairer, whether it’s affirmative action or ending discrimination or what have you. And so it’s interesting. Your film really deals with an up-to-the-minute issue. This is not ancient history. And the reason it’s not ancient history is that racism survives precisely because it’s good for demagogues. And it’s a way of explaining away other contradictions in the society. You know, why are white workers not doing better in certain areas of Omaha or whatever, you know.

So let me–I want to–and that’s by way of an advertisement for this film. This is not an old subject of racism in South Carolina. It’s up to the minute, because it goes to–and again, I love this quote from you: “Culture almost outweighs blood.” And what it’s really saying is an illusion outweighs reality. The fact is, as you point out, we’re 60% this, 40% that, blah, blah, blah–you know, our makeup really is not traced to any particular bloodline. It’s the cultural perception of it–

RC: That makes you who you are, yes.

RS: And I tell you, one reason I got hooked on this movie of yours–I’m going to give the title just in case people are tired of hearing my voice—“Passing: A Family in Black & White.” And they can get it how?

RC: Ah, topic.com/passing.

RS: Good. And if people watch it, I really wish they would get back to me and tell me whether I read it wrong or so forth. But I had a personal connection with this, and maybe I’ll kind of wrap this up on this. And I suspect a lot of people have things in their family, wherever their family’s from, that reflect these kinds of tensions and false consciousness and everything else. But in my case, my father was a German Protestant–people who listen to these podcasts probably have heard me mention this too often, but it was a formative thing in my life–and my mother was a Russian Jew.

And I was born in ‘36. So the first 10 years, 12 years of my life, the big thing that I was aware of was there’s this horrible war going on, and the Jews were on the receiving end. And we had relatives who were killed, and all of our relatives were killed in Europe. And the people, the “krauts,” the Germans that were doing most of this–a lot of people took their anger out on the Japanese, but they weren’t doing that to the Jews. And people conveniently ignored the Italians, who were my neighbors in the Bronx. But somehow the Germans, they were doing it. And so after the war I went and found my German relatives and so forth, and tried to examine this. And there was one incident that happened, that when I was watching your movie, I thought, what you were going through–that was me. Because I found my father’s brother, who had been in the German army, and had been wounded at Stalingrad and so forth. And I finally got to, found his house, and found him.

And in my–I did study German, and I did hear Yiddish and German spoken at home, so I tried to explain who I was; his English wasn’t very good. And I tried to explain who I was, and I said–and so he suddenly said, “Oh, Arnold! Arnold!” And that’s my half-brother who’s all German Protestant. And I said, “No, nicht Arnold. Robert.” And he said “Oh, der Juden.” The Jew. And–but he didn’t mean it in some–I mean, it was a defining statement. It turned out we got along quite well, and my relatives in Germany were actually–like the guy you met in Nebraska, the younger ones were quite hip. And they were peaceniks, they supported the Greens, and everything else. And they all were quite clear about how evil the experience of the war. But nonetheless, they were Germans of another culture. And they really didn’t want to explore all this too much.

It was kind of an inconvenient truth. I’m a nice guy, I was interesting, they’d actually read my books. But you know what, Bob, don’t keep bringing this up. And for me, I couldn’t let it go. You know, I just couldn’t let it go. The question was, wait a minute, how did this happen? And the fact is, in this movie, that’s the tension that I detected. That the white part of the family really doesn’t want to examine this history any more than white America wants to examine this history, whether it’s about Native Americans, whether it’s about brown Americans, and certainly about black Americans. They just don’t want to think about it. And not just in Nebraska, but I suspect right here in Los Angeles near our school. It’s just–

RC: And it’s really sad. You know, it’s a disservice to our culture, to our world, to our communities.

RS: Well, worse than that, we keep repeating the same error. I mean, if we don’t understand that we can be–we whites–can and have been the brutes, have been the killers. And you know, one of the interesting things about Germany for me is that the German American population was the–and it still is, I think–the largest part of the white population in America. This was not the “other.” The immigrants in this country, that was the largest group, more than from England. And Germany was admired and had the highest level of science and teaching and so forth, and they were the greatest barbarians of modern time. Not some Arabs or Muslims or anybody else–no, German Christian, you know, white people. And we never examined that after. And I think the power of your film is we never really have examined racism, and that’s why it’s with us.

RC: Yes.

RS: The reality is, we don’t want to think about it. We want to think it’s an old story.

RC: Yeah, and white people are like–oh, why, you know, stop talking about slavery. Oh, another slavery movie. Oh, stop being triggered. You know, all those things.

RS: Yeah.

RC: They don’t want–like the woman who recently, you know, went to the plantation and was mad about the guide giving the detailed, you know, story from an African perspective. You know, she just wants to go and experience Southern life.

RS: But the power of your film, “Passing: A Family in Black & White”—you know, I must tell you. I give my son, Josh, who’s the producer of the show, great credit for getting guests that I wouldn’t have had–and I must tell you, as recently as yesterday, I wondered, what the hell did Josh do here, why did he have this guest?

RC: [Laughs]

RS: Because I, you know, was having trouble getting the film to play, and what is this about, and what’s really different here. And then I watched it and I was blown away. I was blown away at precisely how relevant it is. Because you can’t dismiss it. It’s not an abstraction. It’s your family. And there you are, you’re seeing these very nice white people–you know, the ones we get to meet. They’re very nice. But they’re also awkward in this situation. They also don’t want to go there. They don’t really want to visit this thing.

You are the inconvenient truth, made all the more inconvenient by the fact that you’re quite presentable, you’re reasonable, you’re nice. You didn’t come there to guilt them, you know. You’re a very good reporter in this film. You’re reaching out to them, you’re very nonthreatening. This is not a threatening film. So they should actually, under normal human circumstances, welcome this–oh! Cousin so-and-so’s here, a relative, great! Tell us about the family–right? That’s the way we mostly–

RC: Yes, you would think, but, you know.

RS: Yes, the way we mostly receive people who show up and say, hey, you know, my aunt was your father’s second cousin twice removed. And we say, oh yeah, well what do you know about him? Well, I’ve got some pictures–you had the scrapbook. You have the data. You are the family historian.

RC: And imagine seeing a picture of your grandmother at a black family reunion and still not believing that it’s true. Like, that’s how deep this issue is that you’re talking about, about white people not wanting to deal with race. Like, here is a photograph of her, sitting next to her brother-in-law, who’s a black, brown-skinned man. And they still almost can’t believe it.

RS: Yeah, no, they’re awkward.

RC: It’s wild.

RS: Well, that’s the power of this film, really. But it’s also, as I said at the very beginning of this, I really got into this because I see America as this crazy-quilt of different cultures. And I’m interested in talking to American originals, and everyone’s got some kind of crazy history in all this, not always–very often, not positive.

And what the power of this film is, there’s an undeniable humanity to it. That’s us. And yet there’s a “banality of evil,” to quote Hannah Arendt, also woven through it. Why don’t we receive the other? Why don’t we welcome? After all, Jesus in the Good Samaritan was supposed to be welcoming to the stranger. But here, in your own family, why don’t they say–oh, great! A relative has showed up!

RC: Well, we know the answer to that.

RS: Well, do we? Why don’t we end on that. What is the answer? Because it’s–no, you know the answer–

RC: Racism. Racism! And white supremacy, and white privilege, is the answer. It prevents–

RS: But those are words. What does it really mean to–

RC: It means that, like, a white person living in this country who has all the status, the comfort of being top on the totem pole, doesn’t want to relinquish that. Even if it’s blood-related. It’s more important to hold on to your status.

RS: Yes. Well, that’s a frightening idea. “Culture almost outweighs blood”–no, culture outweighs blood. You will–this is a real issue that people face. You would probably–one would–if culture outweighs blood, you’ll turn over your mother, your sister to the Gestapo if it saves you. If it conforms to an ideology that you’ve been lectured into.

RC: Exactly. Isn’t that what we’ve seen in history?

RS: Yeah. But you have, your film provides an insight into that. Really important truth. And so then it’s not really culture, it’s opportunism, it’s greed, it’s power that’s wrapped into that word. And you don’t want to surrender your advantage, your power, your corruption, your greed. You will sacrifice your siblings. That’s the theme of your movie.

RC: [Laughs] One of them, yes.

RS: Well, I think it’s an important observation. And it’s, I want to caution people, it’s not done in a scolding way. It’s done in a loving–you actually, the film extends to these people, it wants to include them, it wants to embrace them. There’s no built-in hostility in this film. It’s great journalism, from my point of view. Because you really are curious, you really are open. Hey, look! And there’s aunt so-and-so, and there’s cousin so-and-so. And they happen, they still look pretty black, but they say they’re white–and, wow!

You know, wonder what they’re doing, and wonder whether they know this, and won’t they be excited to see this picture. Well, you know, guess what. Maybe they’re excited, but they don’t want to show it too much. Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re confused, right? And maybe they don’t want to confront the role of racism in our culture. That’s it for this edition of “Scheer Intelligence.” Our producer, and I got to give him particular credit here for bringing me with our guest Robin Cloud–who I must say, before I saw her film and before I watched all her great comedy and checked out her writing, did not know who Robin Cloud was. I’m blown away by this work. I think it’s a very powerful film.

RC: Thank you.

RS: So again, Joshua Scheer, the producer, creator of this show. Sebastian Grubaugh here at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, has put this all together and done the engineering. And we’ll see you next week with another edition of “Scheer Intelligence.”

truthdig.com

The irony is that America’s last three presidents quite plausibly can be regarded as having their margins of victory attributed to a peace vote. George W. Bush promised a more moderate foreign policy in his 2000 campaign, Obama pledged to undo much of the harsh response to 9/11 promulgated by Bush, and Donald Trump was seen as the less warlike candidate when compared to Hillary Clinton. So the public wants less war but the politicians’ promises to deliver have been little more than campaign chatter, meaning that the United States continues to be locked into the same cycle of seeking change through force of arms.

Just last week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke to a BBC journalist and said Iran must do what Washington demands “if they want their people to eat.” Pompeo’s comments should have shocked the public, but they were not widely reported. If Pompeo spoke for the Administration, that means that Washington is now ready, willing and often able to starve civilians and deny them medicines as a foreign policy tool. Iran is now on the receiving end, but the US has also been supporting similar action by the Saudi Arabians in Yemen, which has resulted in widespread starvation, particularly among children. The current policy recalls former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s infamous comment that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to sanctions had been “worth it.”

It is hard to believe that most Americans support Pompeo. To be sure, there are a number of groups in the United States that have the word “peace” or “antiwar” somewhere in their titles. Most would describe themselves as “progressive,” wherein lies the problem in pulling together a more broadly-based coalition that would make America’s warfare state a key target in the national election in 2020. Progressives, or, as they used to be called, liberals, are not like everyone else. Some commentators observing their antics describe them scathingly as “social justice warriors” or SJWs. That means that they have a mandate to oppose all the evils in the world, to include racism, sexism, limits on immigration and capitalism to name only a few. War is somewhere on the list but nowhere near the top.

SJWs have no comfort zone for dealing with anyone who does not fully buy into their blueprint for global rejuvenation. This means in turn that the antiwar movement, such as it is, is fragmented into a gaggle of groups with grievances that have little ability to establish cohesion with other organizations that might agree completely with their worldview. Folks like me, who are socially and politically conservative but antiwar, do not fit well with their priorities and would prefer to focus on the wars, but that option is not on offer without accepting a lot of sanctimonious garbage.

A recent email from the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights illustrates precisely what is wrong. I would support the group based on my concern for justice for the Palestinians but have no interest in its ridiculous stereotyping of who is the enemy, i.e. the omnipresent evil “white supremacists” who are also male, Gentile and heterosexual. The email, sent by one Nusayba Hammad, Communications Director, begins: “In the past week, white supremacist gunmen murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and two Black people in Louisville, and Trump announced his intention to try to erase trans, non-binary, and intersex folks… Our struggles for justice are inextricably linked: rejecting white supremacy means rejecting antisemitism, anti-Black racism, Zionism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression. This is especially important knowing that many, many people carry overlapping identities and thus are marginalized at the intersection of overlapping oppressions.” 

Yes, I know, it is impossible to understand what she is going on about unless one is educated in the progressive codewords. And also yes, the text could have been written by Monty Python. After that introduction the email goes on to provide some resources to “expand [one’s] knowledge,” including this gem:

“Palestine as a Queer Struggle (video)
This webinar with Nada Elia, Falastine Dwikat, and Izzy Mustafa covers the intersecting struggles against heteropatriarchy and Zionism. With Trump’s most recent attack on trans, non-binary, and intersex folks, it’s imperative that we understand the importance of standing with queer and trans people in the US and in Palestine as they face multiple layers of oppression.” 

As war, in this case the slaughter of the Palestinians by the Jewish state, is the ultimate evil and it brings with it many other forms of suffering, it would seemingly not be asking too much to worry about it as a first priority before getting into the “multiple layers of oppression” that seem to bother lefties so much. But, alas, they cannot jettison that baggage and for that reason many “normal” people who want the wars to stop will not be participating in their protests. It’s a shame really, as joining together and fighting to stop the next war is well worth doing for every human being on this planet.

Yesterday's terror attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh was committed by a man with extremely anti-Jewish and anti-immigration views. It is third attack on houses of worship in three years.

Like the earlier incidents it is a heinous crime for ignominious reasons.

But there is little sound reason to blame the incident on Trump. It does not justify to falsely claim "increased anti-semitism". To exploit it for a racist driven colonial cause makes a mockery of its victims.

The New York Times reports:

Armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and at least three handguns, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers and two others, the authorities said…

The assailant, identified by law enforcement officials as Robert D. Bowers, fired for several minutes and was leaving the synagogue when officers, dressed in tactical gear and armed with rifles, met him at the door. According to the police, Mr. Bowers exchanged gunfire with officers before retreating back inside and barricading himself inside a third-floor room. He eventually surrendered.

From reading between the lines we learn that the killer is not a Muslim. Otherwise he would be called a 'terrorist'. We can also conclude that the killer was white. Otherwise the police would have killed him.

The murderer was extremely anti-Jewish. He was a white supremacist who had the delusion that people of Jewish belief caused all the problems he perceived:

The suspect in the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue told officers that Jews were committing genocide and that he wanted them all to die, according to a charging document made public early Sunday…

Worshippers “were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith,” said Bob Jones, head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, though he cautioned the shooter’s full motive was not yet known.

Social network posts by Robert Bowers show that the immediate reason for attacking the synagogue was last week's National Refugee Shabbat ceremony by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS):

Hours before Saturday morning's shooting, the account posted again, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."

HIAS is 137 years old organization founded by and for Jews who were fleeing pogroms in Russia. It nowadays supports all refugees. The killers hate for HIAS points to the ideological closeness of white supremacists and Zionists:

On the Jewish far right, the Zionist Organization of America has attacked HIAS and other Jewish organizations for lobbying to admit Syrian refugees to the U.S. and has accused HIAS of doing so for profit.

The NYT tries to connect the incident with Trump:

[The assault] also took place in the wake of the arrest Friday morning of a man who the authorities said sent more than a dozen pipe bombs to critics of Mr. Trump, including several high-profile Democrats.

The pipe bombs, which could not have killed anyone, were sent by a Trump supporting loon in Florida. All were detect before they reached their intended target.

The Pittsburgh killer hated Trump. He rallied against him on social networks as being controlled by Jews. He wrote that he did not vote for him. From his archived tweets (part 1, part 2):

Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.

But the NYT report ignores the killer's anti-Trump stand. It goes on to blame the incident on Trump's rhetoric:

The anguish of Saturday’s massacre heightened a sense of national unease over increasingly hostile political rhetoric. Critics of President Trump have argued that he is partly to blame for recent acts of violence because he has been stirring the pot of nationalism, on Twitter and at his rallies, charges that Mr. Trump has denied.

This ignores that Trump uses the same nationalistic rhetoric that all U.S. presidents use:

At the U.S. Military Academy last year, Obama pronounced unequivocally: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”

Nor are anti-immigration positions a Trump phenomenon. It was Obama who was called the "deporter-in-chief":

More than 2.8 million undocumented immigrants have been deported over the last eight years, …

Extreme nationalism and anti-immigration positions are as American as apple-pie. Hostile political rhetoric in the U.S. is certainly not a one-sided issue. It was Hillary Clinton who spoke of citizens as "deplorable" people. It is only Trump's style, not the content, that differentiates his "stirring the pot" from that of other politicians. To blame this incident on Trump is an attempt to avert that insight.

The NYT also conflates the killers anti-immigration motive with 'anti-semitism' when it cites the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) with a false statistic:

[The massacre] came amid rising anxiety about illegal immigration and in a decade that has seen an uptick in hate crimes. According to an annual report by the Anti-Defamation League issued earlier this year, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017, the largest rise in a single year since the A.D.L. began tracking such crimes in 1979.

The ADL does not track "such crimes", but any incident its perceives as harassment or threat or "anti-semitic". The extreme rise in the 2017 ADL statistics only appeared because the ADL fudged the numbers, as other Jewish organizations criticized, by including hundreds of threats a unstable Jewish teen made against Jewish institutions:

A 19-year-old American-Israeli man was convicted of making hundreds of bomb threats to Jewish community centers and Jewish schools in the United States, as well as airlines…

The hoax threats to the JCCs and other Jewish institutions in the first three months of 2017 forced widespread evacuations and raised fears of a resurgence in anti-Semitism. Kadar’s parents and lawyer have not disputed his involvement in the bomb threats but asserted in his defense that he has a brain tumor and a low IQ.

The ADL not only fudge its numbers but notoriously conflates hate against people of Jewish belief with anti-Zionist activism like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The alleged increase in anti-semitism ADL claims is a 'shark story':

The Brandeis Center’s Marcus said some recent reports of anti-Semitic incidents “are what one might call ‘shark stories,’” referring to media reports about shark attacks several summers ago. Many people, he said, “feared that shark attacks were spiking, and experts struggled to identify the reason. At the end of the day, it turned out that such attacks were not increasing at all—there were more stories about them because the shark narrative had caught the attention of influential editors and media outlets.”

Robert D. Bowers was active on the social media platforms Facebook and Gab, a Twitter like service with a minimum of censorship. He posted and reposted lots of anti-Jewish slander. Gab, which is often used by people who are censored elsewhere, reacted immediately after the incident. It archived and closed the account and informed the police. Nonetheless it was immediately censored itself. Paypal, which Gab used to collect donations, shut down its account without giving any specific reason. Such unreasonable reaction will only reinforce the extreme right feeling of being persecuted.

The Israeli government will send its probably most racist member, education minister Naftali Bennet, to exploit the incident for its colonization of Palestine. Bennet boasted about killing Arabs:

“I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

He calls refugees who came to Israel "infiltrators". He would have applauded the killer if the target had been some other religious group:

Education Minister Naftali Bennett won the backing of a leading anti-illegal immigration activist Thursday, after he vowed to block plans to legalize hundreds of Sudanese infiltrators…

On Thursday, [..], the Jewish Home party, led by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, announced that it would block implementation of the Interior Ministry’s plan to grant residency permits to the 300 Sudanese…

"There's no justification for absorbing those infiltrators in Israel."

Israel declared itself an Apartheid state. Its government holds the same extreme rightwing views against 'others' as the attacker in Pittsburgh. Like him it confuses people of Jewish belief with a race. Like him it rallies against immigration. Sending Bennet to exploit the terror attack is a mockery of its victims.

moonofalabama.org

Photo: Twitter

First US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and appears to make some progress towards his stated goal of putting ties between Washington and Moscow on a positive course. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Trump is a called a traitor. The “sanctions bill from hell” is introduced in the Senate. Trump is forced on the defensive.

Next Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky visits Moscow, where he meets with Putin and gives him a letter from Trump proposing moderate steps towards rapprochement. Paul also talks with Russian Senators and invites them to come to Washington to continue the dialogue. Immediately, all hell breaks loose. Paul is called a traitor. The State Department “finds” the Russians guilty of the using illegal chemical weapons (CW) in the United Kingdom and imposes sanctions. Trump is forced even more on the defensive.

In each instance the actions of the Washington establishment, both in Congress and in even in departments and agencies allegedly part of the Executive Branch of government headed by Trump, moved quickly to nip in the bud even the most tentative efforts by Trump to keep his campaign pledge. With regard to the new CW sanctions it is unclear whether Trump had anything to do with them at all; most likely they either were imposed without his participation or he acceded to them because he felt he had no other option.

It is debatable how much of the US government Trump actually controls. The baseless CW finding by the State Department (with heavy pressure from Congress) is the work of Trump’s globalist enemies in the bureaucracy and in Congress (all of the Democrats, and almost all of the Republicans), with the complicity of his own appointees, to undermine his overtures to Moscow and further erode his Executive authority. Besides blocking every possible path to détente with Russia, this is another step to setting Trump up for removal from office.

Regarding the timing of a second set of sanctions set to kick in November, it’s hard to see how that will be avoided. Russia will not submit to inspections, which the US is arrogantly demanding of Russia, as if she were some pipsqueak country like Libya. Given that the OPCW certified in 2017 that the Russians had completed destruction of 100% of their CW stockpile (cf., the US still has almost 10% of our stocks, which are not expected to be completely gone until 2023), the demand is the equivalent of proving that you have stopped beating your wife (to the satisfaction of someone who admittedly continues to beat his own wife).

In the absence of capitulating to the US demand, which Russia will not do, legally Trump can waive the sanctions. But that option is no doubt part of the political trap being laid for him, presenting him a Hobson’s choice. On the one hand, he can waive the sanctions, further hyping the charges of treason against him (and, if the waiver is before the elections, giving the Democrats another red flag to wave), as well as inviting new legislation passed by a margin “Putin’s puppet” cannot veto; or he can let them go into effect.

If, as seems likely, the harsher measures are applied it is hard to overstate the danger created. These are the kind of things that countries do just one step from totally breaking relations in advance of war: cutting off access to American banks, barring Aeroflot from the US (in context, the least of our concerns, though symbolic), effectively blocking all exports and imports, and downgrading or suspending diplomatic ties. With respect to the last – a direct assault on Trump’s presidential authority to send and receive ambassadors under Article II of the Constitution (oddly, no one in Congress seems to care that presidents routinely usurp their authority to make war) – this likely would mean withdrawing the US ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador in Washington, while maintaining relations if at all at the chargé d’affaires level.

In word, this is insanity. What’s perhaps worse is that this political warfare is being conducted with total disregard for the truth, much less an honest attempt to find it. It’s worse than a presumption of guilt; it’s a positive, unambiguous verdict of culpability under circumstances where the accusers in Washington and London (I would guess but cannot prove) know perfectly well that the CW finger pointing is false.

It has been clear from the beginning of Trump’s meteoric rise on the American political scene that he and his American First agenda were perceived by the beneficiaries of the globalist, neoliberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them. Maintaining and intensifying hostility toward Russia, even at the risk of a catastrophic, uncontainable conflict, lies at the center of their efforts. This political war to save globalism at all hazards is intensifying.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand hostility to Russia as just a cold calculation of pecuniary and social advantage by a corrupt mandarin class. It is all that of course, but it is also deeply ideological, reflecting the agenda of the entrenched pseudo-elites to dismantle the traditional national identities and Christian moral values of the West – and impose their godless agenda on the East as well.

But there is something else too, something that touches the emotional heart of both Russophobia in a global context and anti-Trumpism domestically. That is the accusation of racism.

Unsurprisingly one of the first to give voice to this concept was Hillary Clinton, who in her August 2016 “tinfoil hat speech” sought to portray Trump as a creature of the “Alt-Right” because, among other things, he once complimented Infowars’ Alex Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.” But in Hillary’s estimation, who is “the grand godfather” of the worldwide Alt-Right? You guessed it: “Russian President Vladimir Putin.” A month later she doubled down in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, branding Trump’s tens of millions of supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” (In an evident oversight, she omitted mention of Putin.)

Give the warmongering old girl credit for her doggedness. Hillary has stuck to this theme even as she sinks into irrelevance (while still reportedly harboring ambitions of a 2020 presidential run!), in June 2018 calling Putin the leader of the worldwide “authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement” who is “emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis.”

Hillary is not alone. As summed up by Jodi Jacobson of Rewire.News (“Putin, Trump, and Kavanaugh: A Triad of White Supremacy and Oligarchy”):

‘Putin is a dictator. His interests are in amassing wealth and power at any cost, both in Russia and globally. … He is an ethnic nationalist, a white supremacist, and an Islamophobe. He aligns himself with radical right-wing religious and political groups to marginalize and attack the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and religious and ethnic groups outside his power base.’ 

But perhaps the most revealing description comes from putative comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of his HBO program, explaining that “Race Explains Shift From Party Of Reagan To Party Of Putin” and excoriating not just Putin but Russians as such for their genetic characteristics:

‘UPDATE, with video The “dirty little secret” that explains how the Party of Reagan morphed into the Party of Putin is a four-letter word, Bill Maher said tonight: Race.

‘“Russia,” Maher said during his New Rules segment on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, “is one of the last places on earth to say, ‘F**k diversity. We’re here. We’re white. Get used to it.’”

‘Attempting to explain how 87% of Republicans (according to a recent poll) are fine with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin visiting the White House, Maher chalked it up to racism, and even quoted a tweet from his old pal Ann Coulter.

‘“Last year Ann Coulter tweeted that ‘In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.’ As far back as 2013 Matt Drudge called Putin the leader of the free world. David Duke called Russia the key to white survival.

‘“Today’s Republicans, what’s left of them, do not like the melting pot,” he said. “And Russia? That pot don’t melt.”

‘Making jokes about White Russians (“Let’s see, I want to get drunk but I also want a glass of milk”) and Russian basketball players (“the team that played against the Globetrotters”), Maher compared racial diversity (or lack thereof) in Russia to that of Western Europe.

‘Ending the bit with a bite, Maher concluded, “A Barack Obama does not become the president of Russia. Wingnuts used to accuse Obama of being a foreign agent who took over America, but when a foreign power actually did take over America and it was the proudly white one, their response was ‘come right on in.’

‘“To the members of the Grand Old Party, Russia meddling in our elections isn’t a breach of national security, it’s just white people helping white people. Or what Republicans call governing.”’

Maher gives away more than he suspects. Very little in the foregoing says anything about racism, either Russian or American, but it does say a great deal about Maher’s own disdain for Russia because it is “recognizably European,” also known as (if you’ll pardon the expression) white. One suspects he doesn’t castigate, say, Koreans or Japanese for the fact that their countries are “recognizably Asian” and are going to stay that way.

Shifting to the US, it is increasingly obvious that what poses as antiracism and opposition to “hate” is little more than hostility to the identity and values of the core American ethnos: English-speaking Christians of European descent, including completely or partially assimilated descendants of immigrants. (In other countries this would be understood in specifically national terms – Russian, French, German, English, etc. – but for historical reasons too complex to summarize here, the core American demographic is generally seen in terms of race, not ethnicity. This stems in part from the absurd but widespread claim that the US not an ethnic state, only a civic one.) More and more this hostility is expressed as hatred of “whiteness” itself, in a manner that would be totally unacceptable applied to any other ethnic, racial, or religious group.

The current Exhibit A of such hatred is the controversy over a newly appointed member of the New York Times editorial board, Korean-born Sarah Jeong, whose expressions of anti-white bias were parodied by African-American conservative Candace Owens, only substituting “Jewish” and “black” for Jeong’s “white.” Unsurprisingly, Owens was suspended from Twitter while Jeong – who also trashes men and the police – is the beneficiary of full-throated support from the assembled forces of diversity, tolerance, and overall wonderfulness.

Jeong is just one example of a phenomenon that has become fashionable among the haters. “White thoughts” are a disease, as is whiteness itself. Among the items various college professors have denounced as tainted by white racism are math, farmers’ markets, interracial friendship, solar eclipses, the Bible (of course), environmental pollution, college football, the song “Jingle Bells,” the nuclear family, punctuality, and (it goes without saying) supporting Trump. The existence of entire US states like New Hampshire and Vermont that are just “too white” is an affront to diversity, a problem demanding a solution. For the über-PCHuffPost.com, whiteness constitutes an entire issue category for the grievances of other racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual “communities,” including helpful advice to liberal white feminists to just “shut the f**k up!” The inevitability of the United States’ becoming a majority-minority country is stated as a fact as inevitable as sunrise and sunset, but it’s “unabashed white nationalism” for even mainstream conservatives who are light-years away from the Alt-Right to point out that Americans never voted for or were asked their opinion about such a future. Conversely, “white-bashing” by self-loathers is a demonstration of the “nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.”

Connecting Putin and Russia with racism feeds into cockamamie phantasmagoria of Crimethink concepts that increasingly are considered outside the protection of what was once quaintly known as free speech: hate speech, fake news, conspiracy theories, white nationalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, “cisgenderism,” and many more. (Astonishingly, this recent video from ADL’s Orwellian-named “Center for Technology and Society,” which claims to identify “online hate” with 78 to 85 percent accuracy through the use of artificial intelligence, is real, not a parody.) Just to be accused of subjectively and politically defined hate is now sufficient to trigger a coordinated muzzling of the offender’s online presence by the lords of the Internet, getting them fired from their jobs, and even subjecting them to physical attack from violent enforcers like Antifa. Ostensibly these actions are undertaken by private entities, conveniently hiding the government hand encouraging tech companies to police content to counter “Russian meddling” and other thought crimes.

The current coupling of a globalist agenda with demonization of our country’s majority demographic has a disquieting precedent. In August 1915 the committed internationalist Vladimir Lenin issued his infamous call to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” In that, if in nothing else, his program was a smashing success, resulting in the deaths of up to ten million people through savage warfare, “Red Terror” repression, disease, and famine. As he summed it up, “I spit on Russia! That’s only one stage we have to pass through on our way to world revolution!” No sacrifice of other peoples’ lives was too high a price to be paid to implement Lenin’s version of globalism.

As Anatoly Karlin notes (“The Real Lenin: Traitor, Parasite, Failure”) the horrendous destruction inflicted by the Bolsheviks was motivated in part by Lenin’s conscious hatred – perhaps not very different from Maher’s today – of Russians as the majority ethno-religious group, who had to be crushed to liberate the certified oppressed minorities. That hatred gives “an inkling of the real reason why Western intellectuals like Lenin a lot more than Stalin,” writes Karlin. Indeed, in light of the Russian experience there is a chillingly familiar ring to today’s legitimatization of racial detestation of the American majority.