Alice Kaplan, white feminist nut. Her most recent work of scholarship is a book about the Paris years of Jackie O., Angela Davis and Susan Sontag.
Claudia Ann Koonz, white feminist nut. Her area of expertise is women during the Nazi era.
Pedro Lasch (born Gerry Rivers), white male. He describes himself as: “artist, researcher, educator, activist, cultural organizer.”
Walter Mignolo, white male. His latest book is the captivating thriller, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America Otherwise).
Diane Nelson, white feminist nut, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women’s Studies. She urges students to “actively make alternative histories.” (Hey—let’s start one now with a fake rape story!)
Kathy Rudy, white feminist nut in the Women’s Studies Department. Her work includes “anti-speciesism” and an essay, in which she describes coming to Duke as an undergraduate and moving “quickly into the lesbian community because there was a growing sentiment in feminist discourse that lesbianism was the most legitimate way to act out our politics.…I managed to live most of my daily life avoiding men all together [sic], and spent most of my social time reading, dreaming, planning, talking, and writing about the beauty of a world run only by women,…free of [men’s] patronizing dominance.” Then one day she couldn’t change a flat tire and reconsidered everything.
Pete Sigal, white male. He teaches “Sexual History Around the Globe.”
Rebecca Stein, white feminist, whose Duke Web page states that her work on Israeli cultural politics has appeared in such journals as Journal of Palestine Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
One begins to understand why today’s students don’t enjoy reading. Also why the Duke University Press is referred to as “the laughingstock of the publishing world.”32
As is evident, the rush to judgment in the Duke case was led by the chroniclers of white-male patriarchy, anti-speciesism and the gender-power-and-privilege crowd—not the descendants of slaves. The stripper could have been white for all they cared. The race angle gave the story a little frisson, but the main point was that a member of the lower class had been raped by white male oppressors—from the lacrosse team, no less. Cathy Davidson, one of the signatories, later explained that the “social disaster” referred to in the ad included the fact that “women’s salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men’s.”33
The black experience in America had been ripped off by feminists.
White female termigants Nancy Grace and her partner in righteous anger, Wendy Murphy were the Alton Maddox and Al Sharpton of the Duke lacrosse case. After it was established that none of the players’ DNA was found on the accuser, Nancy Grace had this exchange with a Duke student on her Headline News show:
STEPHEN MILLER, DUKE CONSERVATIVE UNION: Well, I think I speak for many students when I say that we’re very, very concerned that two innocent people may have possibly—
GRACE: Oh, good lord!34
In April 2006, Wendy Murphy explained that the lacrosse players see “women as objects, that they would degrade a woman, rape her, strangle her, beat her senseless. Why wouldn’t they, then, write an e-mail saying, ‘And, oh, by the way, the next time I do this, I think I’ll just cut right to the chase and kill her outright.’ I think it shows a state of mind of utter disrespect for that woman in particular, for women in general.”
She said the players were “thinking, ‘I was entitled to do this. I’m a member of a wealthy white boy’s school in a community that allows me to do what I want when I want. They’ve gotten away with a lot for a very long time. Why not go home and celebrate?’…The e-mail shows that these guys were of the mind that whatever had happened to this woman was just another day at the beach. They’ll rape her, sodomize her and tomorrow they’ll kill her.”35
A month later, as the case continued to disintegrate, Murphy said, “I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth.”36 She said: “Over 99 percent of cases indicted are in fact legitimate,” adding, “the guys are guilty. I have scientific, statistical proof.”37
Even feminists only claim that 2 percent of rape claims are false, which itself is an unsubstantiated factoid from Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book, Against Our Will.38 Brownmiller’s only “source” is a mimeograph of a speech by a state court judge, to the New York State Bar Association, in which he made a passing remark about a single New York precinct with an all-female rape squad. Nothing more is known about what the rape squad studied, how it analyzed the information or the precise results. No trace of it exists.
According to the FBI, a higher percentage of rape claims are false than any other criminal complaint, 8 percent compared to 2 percent for other crimes.39 More detailed studies have found much higher rates of false rape charges. A study of all rape allegations in a Midwestern city over nine years found 41 percent were false40 and a study of more than a thousand rape allegations on air force bases over the course of four years concluded that 46 percent were false. In 27 percent of the cases, the accuser recanted.41
Even after Jesse Jackson had thrown in the towel, Murphy was still convinced the stripper was telling the truth. Nine months into the investigation, prosecutor Mike Nifong amended his filing to say there was no rape, and he further admitted to the court that Mangum had the DNA of at least five other men in or on her—but none from any of the lacrosse players. Murphy responded by hypothesizing nonexistent evidence, saying Nifong might have photos from cooperating witnesses at the party. Yes, and he might also have photos of Big Foot and the Easter bunny dancing the Charleston at the Loch Ness monster’s house. He might have had photos of Wendy Murphy assaulting the stripper.
Murphy said that dropping the rape charge from a rape prosecution was a brilliant strategic move, because by dumping the vaginal rape charge, we’re not going to hear about the sex she had with five or ten or fifteen other guys, and that’s a good thing for the prosecution.”42
Feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte (the potty-mouthed activist briefly hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign) was still going strong long after the rape had been exposed as a fraud. At the point when Nifong had been removed from the case and ethics charges brought against him by the state bar, she blogged:
I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.43
Demonstrating her deep sensitivity to racial issues, Marcotte’s book, It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments had to be pulled and reissued because the illustrations were so laughably racist. The book’s drawings portrayed various scenes of a buxom blonde battling African savages in loin cloths.44
Hysteria over the alleged rape by Duke lacrosse players was entirely a feminist enterprise. That’s modern civil rights.
It’s not about Democratic governors blocking the schoolhouse door: It’s about giving women the right to make false charges of rape. It’s about “equal pay” for women with education degrees, compared to men with engineering degrees. It’s about the Augusta National Golf Club not admitting women as members. And it’s about bringing “nationally recognized speakers on sexual harassment” to speak at universities at least twice a year to supplement the speeches on sexual harassment already given every hour of every day on college campuses.
And it’s about abortion, gay marriage and amnesty for illegal aliens.
It’s fantastic that the Democrats have finally come out in favor of civil rights. It would have been a lot m
ore help, though, if they had done so when their own party was denying blacks the right to vote, to go to school, to sit in nonsegregated diners and to use the same water fountains as whites. But Democrats’ commitment to civil rights has always been directly proportional to how much it helps them politically. These days, blacks are nothing more than window dressing for the issues liberals really care about.
And the left’s most important political cause since sometime in 2007 has been Barack Obama. Even he doesn’t take the legacy of slavery seriously. As the cover of Newsweek proclaimed, Obama is our “first gay president.”
CHAPTER 12
CIVIL RIGHTS CHICKENHAWKS
A staple of Democratic campaigning is to accuse Republicans of being racists. Republican candidates can expect to have their entire life histories probed to find out if, as twelve-year-olds, they caddied at an all-white golf club or ever lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. When liberals can find no archaic restrictive covenant on some piece of property owned by the Republican, they invent stories about Republicans opposing civil rights, having a “despicable” history on race relations and pursuing an imaginary “southern strategy” to win racists over to their party.
Liberals’ neurotic obsession with this apocryphal “southern strategy”—it’s been cited hundreds of times in the New York Times—is supposed to explain why Democrats can’t get nice churchgoing, patriotic southerners to vote for the party of antiwar protesters, abortion, the ACLU and gay marriage. They tell themselves they can’t win the South because they won’t stoop to pander to a bunch of racists—which should probably be their first clue why southerners don’t like them.
The premise of liberals’ southern strategy folklore is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican is a racist. They are counting on no one noticing, much less mentioning, the real history of racism in this country.
The single most important piece of evidence for the Republicans’ alleged southern strategy is President Lyndon B. Johnson’s statement, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” That self-serving quote is cited by liberals with more solemnity than Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Johnson’s statement is of questionable provenance. The sole source for the quote is LBJ assistant Bill Moyers, whose other work for the president included hunting for gays on Barry Goldwater’s staff and monitoring the FBI’s bugs on Martin Luther King’s hotel room, then distributing the salacious tapes to select members of the Johnson administration and the press.1 If this were my case-in-chief for an important point, I’d want better sourcing than a sanctimonious liberal fraud.
A source for information about LBJ who is not a partisan hack, dirty trickster and MLK-adultery publicist is Robert M. MacMillan, Air Force One steward during the Johnson administration. MacMillan reports that when LBJ was flying on Air Force One with two governors once, he boasted that by pushing the 1964 civil rights bill, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”2
Regardless of whether Johnson actually said the Democrats’ passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had delivered the south to Republicans, who cares?
That’s not proof! Liberals always produce this quote as they’re brandishing a signed confession to the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. We have the smoking gun! But LBJ’s statement was the opposite of a confession; it was a self-glorifying tribute to his own high principles. (These were principles of recent vintage: Johnson had ferociously opposed civil rights laws up until five minutes before he became president.)
Do you doubt that LBJ said it?
We’ll assume he said it.
Do you have some other explanation?
Yes. He was bragging about his bravery while simultaneously smearing Republicans.
How about this: When Bush attacked the Taliban, he said, “We just delivered the Northeast to the Democrats for a long time to come.” Would that be accepted as proof of the liberal Northeast’s complicity with al-Qaeda?
But that’s not the only problem with Johnson’s self-serving quote. Both parts of his analysis are false. First, the Democrats didn’t pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That bill, along with every civil rights bill for the preceding century, was supported by substantially more Republicans than Democrats. What distinguished the 1964 act is that it was the first civil rights bill that Democrats finally supported in large numbers. Congratulations, Democrats!
Second, that’s not what happened: The south kept voting for Democrats for decades after the 1964 act. The very year Johnson said it, even Goldwater couldn’t win the South. You don’t get a better test case than that.
Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators to vote against the 1964 act, on libertarian grounds, and the other five did so only because they supported Goldwater’s presidential nomination.3 Although a much larger percentage of Republicans had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats—Republican leader Everett Dirksen publicly rebuked Goldwater for his vote4—Goldwater was the GOP’s presidential candidate that year.
Goldwater went on to win five southern states in 1964—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. But he lost eight—North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Florida. That’s not a sweep anyplace except Chicago.
Democrats argue that it isn’t the number of states Goldwater won, but which states he won. Goldwater’s southern support came from the exact same states that Strom Thurmond captured when he ran for president as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” in 1948—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—with Goldwater adding only Georgia.
That would be a reasonable argument, but only if your entire historical knowledge begins and ends with 1948 and 1964. Far from preparing the GOP for a southern takeover, Goldwater’s 1964 campaign nearly destroyed the party and created no foundation at all—not even in the South. (That’s what purist libertarianism gets you.)
The southern states Goldwater won were the very states that Nixon and Reagan would go on to lose, or almost lose, in their triumphant elections of 1968 and 1980. On the other hand, Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would do pretty well in the Goldwater states in their southern sweeps of 1976 and 1992.
Republicans did not flip the states Goldwater won. Those states went right back to voting for the Democrats for many decades to come. Republicans always did best in the southern states Goldwater lost, which happened to be the same ones Republicans had been winning with some regularity since 1928.
These are the facts:
In 1928, Republican Herbert Hoover won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas and North Carolina. (See Appendix A for electoral maps.)
In the thirties and forties, FDR and Truman dominated national elections throughout the country, so there is little to be learned about southern voting patterns from those dark days.
In 1952, Republican Eisenhower won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Texas, losing Kentucky by a razor-thin 0.07 percent margin.
In 1956, Ike again won Virginia, Tennessee and Florida and added Texas, Kentucky and Louisiana.
In 1960, Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida and Kentucky.
You will note that 1928, 1952, 1956 and 1960 are years before 1964.
In 1968, Nixon won thirty-two states overall, including six southern states—all the usual Republican favorites: Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. These were the exact same states Republican Hoover had won in 1928, plus South Carolina. Nixon lost Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi—four of the five states Goldwater had won.
Four years after Goldwater’s run, the segregationist vote went right back to the Democrats. Democrat Hubert Humphrey picked up about half of George Wallace’s supporters that year; Nixon got none of the segregationist vote, as the polls demonstrated.5 Nixon’s early poll numbers were the same as his vote, whereas Humphrey miraculously gained 12 percentage p
oints—just a little bit less than Wallace lost on Election Day.
Then, in 1976, despite Nixon’s malevolent plot to corral racist Democrats, Jimmy Carter swept the entire South. All eleven states of the Old Confederacy—except the great commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back and voted Democratic. The electoral map of Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976 virtually splits the country down the middle, with Carter taking the entire South, a few solidly Democratic northeastern states and his vice president’s home state of Minnesota and neighboring Wisconsin. On the entire continental United States, Carter did not win a single state west of Texas. Of 147 electoral votes in the South, Carter won 127 of them.
Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only appealing to bigots when Republicans win in the South?
In 1980, Reagan won a landslide forty-four states. Reagan crushed Carter in the southern states Republicans had been winning off and on since 1928—Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas and Kentucky. (Republicans had won at least four of those states in five previous elections—three predating Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—in 1928, 1956, 1960, 1968 and 1972.)
But despite it being a landslide election, Reagan still lost, or barely won, the Goldwater states, narrowly winning Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina6 and losing Georgia outright. Reagan prevailed in only one Goldwater state by a significant margin: Louisiana. But so did Eisenhower in 1956. Even in an election in which the Democrats carried only six states in the entire country, one of those six was a Goldwater state.
Noticeably, Reagan won among young southern voters—and lost among their seniors, i.e., the ones who had voted in 1948 and 1964. The segregationists never abandoned Democrats. Eventually, they died or were outvoted by other, younger southerners.
Extensive college polling in 1980 put Reagan in third place in the northeast, well behind John Anderson and Jimmy Carter. But at southern colleges, Reagan massacred both Anderson and Carter. Thus, Reagan won 14 percent of the student vote at Yale but 71 percent at Louisiana Tech University.7 Are we supposing the LTU students were Goldwater men at age three? Dixiecrats before birth? No matter how you run the numbers, neither Nixon nor Reagan ever captured the Goldwater voters. Republicans certainly weren’t winning the Dixiecrat vote. Even in 1968, twenty years after Thurmond’s 1948 campaign, Nixon carried only one of Thurmond’s states, despite taking six southern states in all. After Thurmond’s presidential run, the Dixiecrats went right back to voting for the Democrats for another half century.