Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama
the word “the.”
The word “the” made the racist hit parade when Donald Trump said he had a “great relationship with the blacks.” Ditto with basketball references—also from Trump, after he advised Obama to get off the basketball court and deal with high oil prices. (Obama does play basketball a lot. Trump wasn’t inventing that.)
But the main proof of racism was any criticism of Obama. The media’s racism diving rod brought back all the worst elements of society that flourished before the OJ verdict.
THE MCCAIN PALIN CAMPAIGN AD
The Associated Press reported that Sarah Palin’s description of Obama “palling around with terrorists carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”1 If AP read the news, it would know that Palin was referring to Bill Ayers, the white, privileged, upper middle class member of the Weather Underground who bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol.
When the McCain campaign ran a surprisingly effective commercial in 2008, that was called racist, too. The ad, titled “Celeb,” began with clips of crowds ecstatically cheering Obama, followed by photos of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, as the narrator called Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world.” Then, the music turned ominous, and the narrator listed Obama’s high-tax policies and opposition to offshore drilling, before saying that this was “the real Obama.”
It must have taken hours to come up with something racist about that ad, but Jonathan Alter and Keith Olbermann set their minds to it and finally found it:
ALTER, NEWSWEEK COLUMNIST AT THE TIME: “The larger issue, I think, is clear—which is they’re trying to portray him as being uppity. Now, is that racist? I’m not sure.”
OLBERMANN: “Well if we’re playing Password, if you say ‘uppity,’ the word that comes into my mind, that’s racist, yes.”2
Wait—who said “uppity,” again? Did any Republican call Obama uppity? No. Did the ad call Obama uppity? No. Alter said “uppity.” It’s about Obama’s uppitiness. That much we know. Is that racist? That’s for the public to decide. I remain neutral.
The ad had nothing to do with Obama being uppity. It was nearly the opposite, comparing him to lightweight celebrities.
CBS News’s Katie Couric referred to the “Celeb” ad as “infamous,” and reporter Dean Reynolds said McCain’s new tone in the ad “appears to conflict with some of his more high-minded talk of the need for civility on the stump.”3
NOT VOTING FOR OBAMA
Throughout the 2008 campaign, liberals sagely informed us that America would never make a black man president. In a cast of thousands, Slate magazine’s Jacob Weisberg said that only if Obama won the election would children in America be able to “grow up thinking of prejudice as a nonfactor in their lives.” But if he lost, Weisberg continued, “our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to.”
Why weren’t liberals worried about what children would think if Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination had been defeated? No, no—only electing the most liberal person ever to seek the presidency on a major party ticket would prove that the country could “put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.”4
And guess what? Weisberg was right! Obama won and we haven’t heard another peep about racism.
Not only did Obama win, he got 43 percent of the white vote—the highest of any Democrat running for president in a two-man race since 1976. Still, liberals detected racism. Immediately after whites had been mau-maued into electing the most left-wing president in U.S. history to prove they weren’t racists, Slate’s Tim Noah was consternated that white people hadn’t given a majority of their votes to the black candidate. The fact that McCain received 53 percent of the white vote, Noah said, was “a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that warrants greater attention.”5
The white vote for McCain, Noah said, proved that whites couldn’t forgive Democrats for abolishing Jim Crow. Which the Democrats didn’t abolish. Which Democrats created and preserved. And which Republicans abolished over the ferocious objections of a bunch of Democrats.
Meanwhile 96 percent of blacks voted for Obama after careful attention to the issues without any notice of race.6 But Noah didn’t think that black people’s one-party vote was “a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that warrants greater attention.”
Then, in 2012—which happened to be a presidential election year—the New York Times was again promoting the theory that a vote against Obama was prima facie proof of racism.
The Times published the results of a “racism” study by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz that first looked for the areas of the country with the most searches for racist words and jokes on Google, and then—after excluding searches originating from Jonathan Alter and Keith Olbermann’s apartments—compared the vote for Kerry and Obama in Wheeling, West Virginia (the seventh most “racist” city), to the vote in Denver, Colorado (the fourth most enlightened city).7
John Kerry won about 50 percent of the vote in both cities in 2004, but, four years later, while Denver voted for Obama by 57 percent, Wheeling gave Obama only 48 percent of its votes.
First of all, why are we not supposed to conclude that 7 percent of white people in Denver harbor such racist prejudices that they believed the only way to cleanse themselves was to vote for the first black president? Why else vote for Obama when you didn’t vote for Kerry? Was Kerry too arrogant for them?
Second, it is simply assumed, at places like the Times, that only one dimension was at play in the 2008 election: Obama’s race. Isn’t this the sort of simplistic thinking normally associated with red-state voters?
The Stephens-Davidowitz study failed to consider, for example, the fact that Obama was the most fabulous, celebrity-backed candidate for president in recent memory. That sort of thing probably matters more to people in Denver than in West Virginia.
Not only that, but on November 2, 2008, two days before the election, Obama vowed to bankrupt the coal industry. He had actually unleashed that bombshell in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle much earlier in the year, but the tape was only revealed to the public days before the election.
Obama had told the Chronicle that under his “aggressive” cap and trade plan “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”
Although the New York Times neglected to mention Obama’s plan to bankrupt the coal industry, the tape was played many times on Fox News,8 it was all over the Internet9 and covered heavily in West Virginia newspapers.10
Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz probably wouldn’t know this, but West Virginia’s economy is extremely dependent on coal, providing 99 percent of the energy and 60 percent of all business taxes in the state. The average West Virginian is as well informed about the coal industry as the typical New York Times reporter is about the president’s position on gay marriage.
The real way to test Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s theory about West Virginians would be to run a nonflashy black candidate who had not pledged to destroy the coal industry and then compare votes.
Be that as it may, wishing to replicate Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s experiment and bolster his results, I have compared different states’ participation in the military, an institution with a high degree of racial mixing, to determine the most racist states. The surest evidence of a person’s level of racial tolerance isn’t a joke search, but his willingness to live in close quarters with people of other races. Residing cheek-by-jowl with black people in military barracks would be hell for racists!
Here are the study’s results: The least racist states were Montana, Texas, Wyoming, Alabama, Alaska and Idaho, and the most racist were Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.11 The most racist areas of the country are Marin County, closely followed by New York City and Malib
u. Of course, we can’t tell the race of those joining the military from these areas (Marin County: 0.0 percent black), but nor can we tell the race of those searching for racist jokes in Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s study.
The New York Times had told me the opposite was true—that West Virginians were so racist they would happily vote for a white person who promised to destroy to coal industry, but not a black one!
SUPPORTING THE TEA PARTY
The Tea Party, being composed of millions of Americans strongly opposed to Obama’s policies, came in for some of the most fervid accusations of racism.
According to a batch of polls taken about the Tea Party movement in 2010, about a quarter of all Americans called themselves Tea Party supporters. (USA Today poll: 28 percent; New York Times/CBS poll: 18 percent.)12 They were wealthier and better educated, but not much whiter than the nation as a whole.13 (According to Gallup, Tea Party supporters were 79 percent white in a country that is 75 percent white. Less than half—49 percent—were Republicans.14) They were united only in believing the government was too big and Obama was taking it in a socialist direction.
Rasmussen polls showed that a majority of voters held a favorable opinion of the Tea Party movement, up to 58 percent by April 2010. By contrast, 98 percent of the political class had an unfavorable view of the Tea Partiers.15
It was time to panic. The media had to act fast to make the Tea Party movement toxic. So they called it racist. You might get off with a warning once, but if the media caught you agreeing with the Tea Party again, then you’d be a racist, too.
To be sure, there were a lot of white people at the Tea Parties. At no point did it flicker across liberal brains that protests against the first black president probably wouldn’t draw a lot of black people, even apart from the fact that most blacks are Democrats. How many white evangelicals do Democrats have at their rallies? Complaints about Tea Partiers being white was reminiscent of the headline from the satirical magazine the Onion, September 20, 1990: “Iowa Family Blasted for Lack of Diversity: Exclusionary, All-White Petersons ‘Deeply Offensive,’ Say Activists.”
This is the kind of thinking we get from people churned out by our educational system. Anything that is not “diverse” must be bad. If Israel is such a great place, where are the Nazis?
Unfortunately for the media, but fortunately for the country, no one was ever able to produce evidence of the much-ballyhooed Tea Party racism. We keep batting averages around here.
So the media lied. As with the endless stream of racist incidents from the seventies and eighties, all the examples of Tea Party racism triumphantly produced by the media turned out to be phony.
There were three basic categories of false “racism” charges:
1. Things that never happened;
2. Liberal infiltrators pretending to be racist Tea Partiers; and
3. Ludicrous claims of racism about anything liberals didn’t like.
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN
Because many journalists are zealots, they never hesitated to believe every vile calumny about the Tea Party.
Hoping to provoke an ugly confrontation with the Tea Partiers, whom everyone kept calling racist, on the day of the Obamacare vote, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi marched members of the very liberal black caucus right through the middle of protesters on Capitol Hill. But the protesters didn’t oblige the speaker by acting racist, so the media just lied and claimed they did.
A hue and cry went up about Representative Emmanuel Cleaver allegedly being spat on, but when video evidence proved that false, Cleaver walked back his claim.
Most outrageously, the non-Fox media said Representative John Lewis had been called the N-word fifteen times. Fifteen. I guess if you’re going to invent an N-word story, you may as well go for the gold.
The protesters vehemently disputed that anyone had called Lewis the N-word, and commentator Andrew Breitbart promptly put up a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of it. Despite the media’s desperate quest for anti-Obamacare racism and hundreds of cameras at the protest, no one has ever been able to produce a video of the N-word being used. To this day, the reward remains uncollected. (If only journalists had cell phone cameras!)
No matter: Hundreds of news stories on TV, in newspapers and on the Web have repeated this lie, despite the absence of evidence that it happened. On MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Salon.com’s Joan Walsh was indignant that anyone would question “whether John Lewis heard the N-word.”16 Except Lewis didn’t claim he heard it. Others claimed it on his behalf.
The media kept playing bait-and-switch with the racism charges.
We have definite proof they’re racist! The protesters spat on one black congressman!
Show us.
All we brought was the Stalin sign.
Where’s the racist stuff?
I must have left it in the car. I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.
They are making the case—where’s the evidence? There’s nothing.
It’s great that the media don’t need proof. Journalists hold themselves to a Tawana Brawley truth standard. Using that criterion, why is no one talking about Chris Matthews’s gay porn collection?
According to Nexis, the lie about Lewis being called the N-word has been repeated dozens of times, even long after Breitbart conclusively demonstrated it didn’t happen. How many times is Chris Matthews—whose gay porn collection is way out of control—going to get away with this? How about Ed Schultz, who dates underage girls? Or Rachel Maddow, who has a major heroin problem?
These claims are based on the precise quantum of evidence that they have for the claim that anyone at the anti-ObamaCare rally called Rep. Lewis the N-word—actually less, since my slurs haven’t been thoroughly investigated and disproved.
Liberals smeared vast swaths of the country for failure to go along with the whole Obama agenda. In response to slanderous attacks on the Tea Party activists as racists, a number of conservative television pundits thought it was a great retort to say: “There is the fringe on both sides.”
Gee, thanks. Of course, since no one in the media was suggesting that liberals are racists, these idiots had just admitted that some conservatives were racists. Liberals have never been able to produce a single example of this alleged conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can come up with when defamed as racists is: “Man is imperfect.” Perhaps later in the taxi home, they think to themselves, “You know what I should have said? It might have been better to say ‘That’s a complete lie.’”
Republicans have to be trained that when they are falsely accused of racism, the proper response is: You are a liar. That never happened.
How about trying that?
LIBERAL INFILTRATORS
The liberal infiltrators at conservative events were always like guys who do bad gay impressions—a little too flamboyant to be believable.
Tyler Collins, liberal infiltrator at a Rand Paul event in August 2010, claimed to be a Rand Paul supporter chirping “the Rand Paul campaign is a little bit racist” and denouncing Dora the Explorer, an illegal immigrant who was “corrupting our children.” He certainly enjoyed being interviewed! Collins was caught later that day, walking with supporters of Paul’s opponent.17 Then it turned out he had also written an incoherent column in a local newspaper two months earlier attacking the Tea Party.18
In July 2010, the George Soros–backed Center for American Progress produced a video purporting to show racism at Tea Parties. Most of the forty-three-second video showed innocuous signs, such as one saying,GOD BLESS GLENN BECK; or old clips before there was a Tea Party, such as a random man calling illegal aliens “wetbacks” in 2006; or loopy, but nonracist, signs and statements. There was only one racist clip in the entire 43-second video, so it was showed twice. It was a well-known liberal infiltrator bellowing “I’m a proud racist!”
The full video of this wacko had been posted by the Tea Partiers themselves to identify the man as a liberal plant. In the original vi
deo, the Tea Partiers surround the infiltrator, jeer at him, tell him he isn’t one of them and to please go home. In a spectacularly evil fraud, Soros’s people used the video, but edited all that out.19
Only one TV show presented the full video: Fox News’s Glenn Beck show.20 (That’s probably why the Tea Partiers wanted God to bless him.)
On the very day Beck had shown the video of Tea Partiers ejecting the liberal acting like a racist—we’ll generously assume he was acting—Chris Matthews announced on his show that he would believe the Tea Partiers weren’t racist as soon as “just one of those Tea Party people pull down one of those racist signs at the next Tea Party rally. I’m going to just wait. Reach over, grab the sign and tear it out of the guy’s hands. Then I will believe you.”21 Forget the sign, how about throwing the racist liberal out? That’s what actually happened, so the media didn’t report it.
IT WASN’T RACIST
Then there were the examples of putative right-wing racism that had absolutely nothing to do with race.
In August 2009, the media hysterically warned that people were bringing rifles to protests against the first black president. As MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer put it: “Here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns.” She continued ever more frantically, “there are questions about whether this has racial overtones…white people showing up with guns.”
The network’s culture commentator, Touré, said there was a lot of “anger about a black person being president,” adding, “I’m not going to be surprised if we see somebody get a chance and take a chance and really try to hurt him.” MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan concurred: “Angry at government and racism, you put those two together…”22
And sure enough, all over TV and the Web, there was a photo of a man carrying a rifle! But it was edited strangely, zooming in on the rifle, but cropping out the person holding it. When the photo was expanded on various media-watch Web sites, the armed man turned out to be…an African American Second Amendment supporter.