Roberts worked pro bono for homosexuals:

NYT
LAT

UD’s Residence Life program for incoming students did not, as you might expect, confine itself to imparting lessons on the city’s bus system or hip restaurants and beer joints. Instead, it taught students what’s wrong with whitey.

Consider these excerpts from the program’s core document: “A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States. . . . By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)

“REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites. . . . In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’

“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

Last year, when the university watchdog group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) publicized this bizarre screed, UD’s president canceled the program. “While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware,” he declaimed, “there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.”

How one could “misrepresent” the purpose of the program is unimaginable, given the inflammatory and naked vitriol directed at palefaces. This is the key demographic group, of course, supporting the university through contributions. In any event, this past spring, a new, improved program rose from the ashes of the old one. The program plan published online does not include the words racist or racism or hate, or even the cosmically silly multicultural. Diversity shows up six times, which must be an all-time low for a document published by university eggheads.

What possessed UD’s administration to create such a program, and what did they hope to accomplish? Since it is whites who are promoting this nonsense, antiwhite racism doesn’t fully explain it. Rather, the “all-whites-are-racist” trope emerging from the First State’s phrontistery and other education factories is merely part of the radical left’s broader attack on Western culture and Christianity, which the left perceives as white racial artifacts impeding the imposition of leftist ideology on society. If all whites are racist, then so is Western civilization. And so, then, is Christianity itself.

Much of this racialism emerges from an ideology for which “race does not exist.” So, how can one destroy something that isn’t there?

Even leftist race deniers know that [...]]]> In this space in the June issue, readers learned about a flock of students from the American Studies program at Randolph College who flapped off to the Chicken Ranch Brothel in Nevada to study the profundities of the cathouse. They also learned about yet another aesthete who believes emissions from the nether regions of the human anatomy constitute art. But these two contributions to the chronicles of the campus have nothing on the University of Delaware’s failed Residence Life Program. Whereas the other schools joined the culture war with attacks on erudition and art, UD is battling against the White Man—not that the other schools haven’t honed their ideological tomahawks to lift a white scalp or two.

UD’s Residence Life program for incoming students did not, as you might expect, confine itself to imparting lessons on the city’s bus system or hip restaurants and beer joints. Instead, it taught students what’s wrong with whitey.

Consider these excerpts from the program’s core document: “A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States. . . . By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)

“REVERSE RACISM: A term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege. Those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites. . . . In the U.S., there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’

“A NON-RACIST: A non-term. The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”

Last year, when the university watchdog group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) publicized this bizarre screed, UD’s president canceled the program. “While I believe that recent press accounts misrepresent the purpose of the residential life program at the University of Delaware,” he declaimed, “there are questions about its practices that must be addressed and there are reasons for concern that the actual purpose is not being fulfilled. It is not feasible to evaluate these issues without a full and broad-based review.”

How one could “misrepresent” the purpose of the program is unimaginable, given the inflammatory and naked vitriol directed at palefaces. This is the key demographic group, of course, supporting the university through contributions. In any event, this past spring, a new, improved program rose from the ashes of the old one. The program plan published online does not include the words racist or racism or hate, or even the cosmically silly multicultural. Diversity shows up six times, which must be an all-time low for a document published by university eggheads.

What possessed UD’s administration to create such a program, and what did they hope to accomplish? Since it is whites who are promoting this nonsense, antiwhite racism doesn’t fully explain it. Rather, the “all-whites-are-racist” trope emerging from the First State’s phrontistery and other education factories is merely part of the radical left’s broader attack on Western culture and Christianity, which the left perceives as white racial artifacts impeding the imposition of leftist ideology on society. If all whites are racist, then so is Western civilization. And so, then, is Christianity itself.

Much of this racialism emerges from an ideology for which “race does not exist.” So, how can one destroy something that isn’t there?

Even leftist race deniers know that race exists. But leftism is inherently mendacious. Even worse, it is congenitally totalitarian and viciously anti-Christian. It has always sought to destroy the Church. The historical fact that Caucasian missionaries successfully proselytized the Faith, along with its artistic, musical, and literary riches, is why whites, at long last, are a preferred and open target in the left’s war on culture and religion.

So the charge of racism only superficially attacks whites and really strikes at Western culture and the Faith itself, for anything affiliated with the white man must also bear the mark of Cain with which the left has branded him.

—R. Cort Kirkwood

This article first appeared in the August 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Murdoch’s News Corporation is a globe-straddling, eye-popping behemoth: It owns FOX News, the Times of London, the Australian, as well as myriad smaller companies too numerous to mention. Murdoch also owns the book publisher HarperCollins. The whole kit and caboodle is worth some $70 billion. If you wanted to prove Balzac’s maxim that a crime lies behind every immense fortune, Murdoch’s bazillion-dollar media kingdom would be a good place to sniff around.

Owned by the Bancroft family, Dow Jones is the century-old company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, the Ottaway dailies, and Barron’s. The Journal also owns its share of Pulitzer prizes and is deservedly regarded as the best brand name in financial journalism. Like FOX News, its editorial page is a neoconservative megaphone that barks and bellows for globalism, free trade, and open borders. For years, the page whipped Bill Clinton like a red-headed stepchild, and it gained a richly deserved reputation for slugging crackpot leftist Democrats upside the head. No wonder leftist crackpots everywhere loathe it.

To mute the tocsin about “meddling,” Murdoch agreed to establish an independent panel to keep an eye on things, lest he turn the Journal’s newsroom into an arm of its insane editorial page. How that will shake out remains to be seen, but, in any event, the worries over Murdoch’s owning the Journal fall into two categories: legitimate and ridiculous.

Murdoch already uses his media power to influence public officials, domestic and foreign—which is a legitimate cause for worry. In 2003, Congress considered a regulation that would have required Murdoch to sell some properties. As the New York Times reported, one man who was behind the new rule was Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), an alleged conservative. Then Lott changed his mind. HarperCollins had paid Senator Lott $250,000 in advance royalties for his unheralded book, Herding Cats. Before that, Murdoch’s publishing house had offered a $4.5 million advance to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which precipitated such vehement reproach that Gingrich returned it.

The most scandalous of Murdoch’s monkeyshines occurred in China. When he publicly proclaimed that modern media “proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” the Chinese Reds banned private ownership of satellite dishes, which threatened Murdoch’s Asian broadcasting venture, Star TV. No problem. HarperCollins published Deng Xiaoping’s biography, which, according to Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, included “mainly recycled propaganda about Mr. Deng.” Murdoch schmoozed with Deng’s handicapped son as well. He “chartered a jet to ferry a troop of disabled acrobats that the younger Mr. Deng had promoted to perform abroad.” And Star TV dumped the BBC because the Chicoms didn’t like its newscasts. That should worry journalists everywhere.

On the other hand, the relentless, daffy propaganda that Murdoch might “meddle” in the Journal’s newsroom is ridiculous. Whether Murdoch is already prone to wander from office to office depends on which of his editors you listen to. The fear of Murdoch’s vaticinated meddling runs something like this, from leftist Eric Alterman of Media Matters for America:

On the day the takeover bid was announced, I appeared on CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” and heard the claim, made over and over, that a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal might somehow even [...]]]> If Rupert Murdoch gets his way, all Earthlings will read one newspaper and watch one television station. And Murdoch will own both. So even before the Media Monster That Ate New York and London had the Wall Street Journal for dessert, the liberal-media elite flew into a rage worthy of the Tasmanian Devil. He’ll interfere, they bayed. He’ll wreck the newsroom, they barked. He’ll put profits before good journalism, they brayed. Whether any or all of these calamities come to pass, the liberal-media elites, as one would expect, opposed Murdoch’s acquisition of the Journal for the wrong reasons.

Murdoch’s News Corporation is a globe-straddling, eye-popping behemoth: It owns FOX News, the Times of London, the Australian, as well as myriad smaller companies too numerous to mention. Murdoch also owns the book publisher HarperCollins. The whole kit and caboodle is worth some $70 billion. If you wanted to prove Balzac’s maxim that a crime lies behind every immense fortune, Murdoch’s bazillion-dollar media kingdom would be a good place to sniff around.

Owned by the Bancroft family, Dow Jones is the century-old company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, the Ottaway dailies, and Barron’s. The Journal also owns its share of Pulitzer prizes and is deservedly regarded as the best brand name in financial journalism. Like FOX News, its editorial page is a neoconservative megaphone that barks and bellows for globalism, free trade, and open borders. For years, the page whipped Bill Clinton like a red-headed stepchild, and it gained a richly deserved reputation for slugging crackpot leftist Democrats upside the head. No wonder leftist crackpots everywhere loathe it.

To mute the tocsin about “meddling,” Murdoch agreed to establish an independent panel to keep an eye on things, lest he turn the Journal’s newsroom into an arm of its insane editorial page. How that will shake out remains to be seen, but, in any event, the worries over Murdoch’s owning the Journal fall into two categories: legitimate and ridiculous.

Murdoch already uses his media power to influence public officials, domestic and foreign—which is a legitimate cause for worry. In 2003, Congress considered a regulation that would have required Murdoch to sell some properties. As the New York Times reported, one man who was behind the new rule was Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), an alleged conservative. Then Lott changed his mind. HarperCollins had paid Senator Lott $250,000 in advance royalties for his unheralded book, Herding Cats. Before that, Murdoch’s publishing house had offered a $4.5 million advance to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which precipitated such vehement reproach that Gingrich returned it.

The most scandalous of Murdoch’s monkeyshines occurred in China. When he publicly proclaimed that modern media “proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere,” the Chinese Reds banned private ownership of satellite dishes, which threatened Murdoch’s Asian broadcasting venture, Star TV. No problem. HarperCollins published Deng Xiaoping’s biography, which, according to Joseph Kahn of the New York Times, included “mainly recycled propaganda about Mr. Deng.” Murdoch schmoozed with Deng’s handicapped son as well. He “chartered a jet to ferry a troop of disabled acrobats that the younger Mr. Deng had promoted to perform abroad.” And Star TV dumped the BBC because the Chicoms didn’t like its newscasts. That should worry journalists everywhere.

On the other hand, the relentless, daffy propaganda that Murdoch might “meddle” in the Journal’s newsroom is ridiculous. Whether Murdoch is already prone to wander from office to office depends on which of his editors you listen to. The fear of Murdoch’s vaticinated meddling runs something like this, from leftist Eric Alterman of Media Matters for America:

On the day the takeover bid was announced, I appeared on CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” and heard the claim, made over and over, that a Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal might somehow even out the balance of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, etc.

The point is misguided in myriad directions simultaneously. First off, those papers all have objective-seeking journalists doing the news, not liberals as Kudlow was implying.

This, of course, is a jug of pink moonshine, but it’s typical of the leftists for whom objectivity means a sinistral view of the world.

Murdoch’s critics might not want to gabble about “meddling” and ethics, either. Murdoch may be unethical, but he’s no more so than his competitors. The same worrywarts said nothing when the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulz­berger, flatly declared that “diversity,” as opposed to accuracy, is the “most important issue facing the paper.” That bit of interference—which was also unethical—led to Jayson Blair’s plagiarism and fabrication fiasco. Indeed, the newsroom’s managing editor, Howell Raines, admitted that he overlooked Blair’s transgressions because Blair is black. The worrywarts said nothing when the Pulitzer Prize Board refused to revoke, and the Times refused to return, Walter Duranty’s award, which he won for his flatly mendacious reportage from Stalin’s Soviet Union. Or how about this: The Times hatched a real-estate deal with the state of New York to condemn and seize a property, subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $79 million, for its 52-story corporate headquarters. No worries there.

And what might they say if they saw Donald Graham “meddling” in newsroom decisions the way his mother did during the Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate and Pentagon Papers stories? Katharine Graham rightly participated in decisions about those stories, and, should such a story present itself to the Journal, Murdoch might rightly participate as well.

In the abstract, it is absurd for Murdoch’s critics to argue that someone who paid five billion dollars for a company cannot run it the way he sees fit. (Then again, liberals aren’t much on private-property rights, as we know from 50 years of editorials from the New York Times.) But no man needs this much money or power. Observed James B. Ottaway, a Dow Jones director and a former owner of the Ottaway chain,

I am opposed to Rupert Murdoch’s buying Dow Jones to boost his personal prestige, political power, and global media business control. . . . [Murdoch’s] taking over Dow Jones . . . would add to already too much concentration of American and global media ownership, and political influence on American society and government decision making.

One wonders why Ottaway sold his papers to Dow Jones, for that, too, concentrated media power in fewer hands. Nonetheless, Ottaway and others made an even more salient point: Wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of 99 percent of their readers, the Bancroft Family had neither good reason nor the need to sell Dow Jones.

Ottaway wrongly believes Murdoch’s News Corporation differs substantially from the other massive media plantations that dominate the landscape. The truth is that News Corporation is the same, only bigger. The sad tragedy of American journalism has been the near-complete eradication of locally or family-owned, small-town dailies. A few gargantuan media companies own many of them—most notably, that hideous Gorgon of anti-American corporate leftism, Gannett. Gannett’s journalistic crimes aside, it suffices to say that the owners of a paper in Iowa should not live in New York, anymore than the owners of the Baltimore Sun should reside in Chicago or Denver or wherever the Tribune Company’s directors and major stockholders live. Most of them have no interest in or knowledge of the communities their papers “serve.”

This is the irony of the news media’s operation in the free market. With complete freedom to expand, a few companies such as Gannett devoured local dailies by the bushel. So consumers from Portland East to Portland West get their news from faceless, nonlocal media conglomerates that hire nonlocal editors and writers, whose political, religious, and cultural beliefs, which surface in stories and editorials, are often hostile to the community’s. Given that starting a daily newspaper is financially impossible for anyone but Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, the only alternative for locals is a newspaper on the web. Of course, media giants create those, too. A few large corporations control too many newspapers and dominate the media landscape. Strangely, the liberals who despise Wal-Mart are not discussing the gigantism and raw power that Murdoch’s insidious accumulation of media properties means. Perhaps they do not care, which might be why they don’t complain about Tribune or Gannett. The selective criticism reeks of hypocrisy. Liberals don’t oppose concentrated power or influence peddling; they oppose only Murdoch.

And only because of his alleged ideology. Well, then, here is a news flash: Murdoch isn’t the conservative the liberal Pecksniffs think he is. No conservative would put naked women on Page Three of his newspapers, or produce ribald television programs such as Married With Children, or jump into bed with the Chicoms. Nor would a conservative donate money to Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. Murdoch has done it all. His London tabloid, the Sun, endorsed leftist Tony Blair. His FOX News Channel is a shill for the Bush administration. Murdoch uses, and will continue to use, his billions to wield power in politics and government. In short, like William Randolph Hearst, he is a public menace.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the September 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

So Giuliani told a double lie—the falsehood that Paul had claimed that the war in Iraq inspired the terrorist attacks of September 11 (a chronological impossibility), and the greater absurdity that he’d never heard of the blowback theory.

If the Stupid Party does not want to lose the 2008 election, not to mention its tenuous hold on solid conservative voters, it had better think twice about nominating “America’s Mayor” for president. A liar, an adulterer, and a leftist goon, Giuliani has already out-Clintoned Bill Clinton, and on many of the same low crimes and misdemeanors.

Topping the list of the goombah’s infamous deeds are his sordid marital monkeyshines. He dumped his first wife on grounds similar to those used by Henry VIII when he tossed Catherine of Aragon overboard. After 14 years of marriage, Giuliani “discovered” that his wife was a second cousin and received a declaration of nullity from the Church. He then married Donna Hanover, whose principal claim to fame is having wangled the lead role in an off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues. While married to Hanover, Giuliani jumped between the sheets with his next wife, Judith Nathan, the home wrecker who was prowling Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, before the mayor’s second marriage ended. Hanover learned of her forthcoming divorce when Giuliani announced it at a press conference. Not surprisingly, Hanover accused Giuliani of “open and notorious adultery” and received a restraining order to bar Nathan from the mansion. At least Clinton has been down the aisle only once.

Also like Clinton, Giuliani has parlayed politics into tremendous wealth. In December 2001, just three months after the terrorist attacks, Giuliani opened a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners LLC. The original principals included Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief accused of ties to the Mob and guilty of misdemeanor corruption; a former priest accused of covering up sex abuse in the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island; and an FBI agent who pilfered souvenirs from Ground Zero. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the firm collected more than $100 million in fees over five years, and Giuliani became a multimillionaire. His clients “have included a pharmaceutical company that, with Giuliani’s help, resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with only a fine; a confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to ensure his security company could do business with the federal government; and the horse racing industry, eager to recover public confidence after a betting scandal.”

For “someone who lived through” September 11, Giuliani is rather soft on illegal immigration. In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald wrote that the man who would be president went to the mat to stop the federal government from enforcing the country’s immigration laws. “Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. . . . The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to ‘terrorize people.’ Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government.”

Giuliani is also a staunch [...]]]> During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

So Giuliani told a double lie—the falsehood that Paul had claimed that the war in Iraq inspired the terrorist attacks of September 11 (a chronological impossibility), and the greater absurdity that he’d never heard of the blowback theory.

If the Stupid Party does not want to lose the 2008 election, not to mention its tenuous hold on solid conservative voters, it had better think twice about nominating “America’s Mayor” for president. A liar, an adulterer, and a leftist goon, Giuliani has already out-Clintoned Bill Clinton, and on many of the same low crimes and misdemeanors.

Topping the list of the goombah’s infamous deeds are his sordid marital monkeyshines. He dumped his first wife on grounds similar to those used by Henry VIII when he tossed Catherine of Aragon overboard. After 14 years of marriage, Giuliani “discovered” that his wife was a second cousin and received a declaration of nullity from the Church. He then married Donna Hanover, whose principal claim to fame is having wangled the lead role in an off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues. While married to Hanover, Giuliani jumped between the sheets with his next wife, Judith Nathan, the home wrecker who was prowling Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence, before the mayor’s second marriage ended. Hanover learned of her forthcoming divorce when Giuliani announced it at a press conference. Not surprisingly, Hanover accused Giuliani of “open and notorious adultery” and received a restraining order to bar Nathan from the mansion. At least Clinton has been down the aisle only once.

Also like Clinton, Giuliani has parlayed politics into tremendous wealth. In December 2001, just three months after the terrorist attacks, Giuliani opened a consulting firm, Giuliani Partners LLC. The original principals included Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief accused of ties to the Mob and guilty of misdemeanor corruption; a former priest accused of covering up sex abuse in the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island; and an FBI agent who pilfered souvenirs from Ground Zero. According to a recent article in the Washington Post, the firm collected more than $100 million in fees over five years, and Giuliani became a multimillionaire. His clients “have included a pharmaceutical company that, with Giuliani’s help, resolved a lengthy Drug Enforcement Administration investigation with only a fine; a confessed drug smuggler who hired Giuliani to ensure his security company could do business with the federal government; and the horse racing industry, eager to recover public confidence after a betting scandal.”

For “someone who lived through” September 11, Giuliani is rather soft on illegal immigration. In the City Journal, Heather Mac Donald wrote that the man who would be president went to the mat to stop the federal government from enforcing the country’s immigration laws. “Giuliani sued all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a 1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating with the INS. . . . The INS, he claimed, with what turned out to be grotesque irony, only aims to ‘terrorize people.’ Though he lost in court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government.”

Giuliani is also a staunch supporter of abortion. So wedded is he to the cause of infanticide that he claims it for conservatives. To justify legally murdering the unborn, he observed that “a strict constructionist” Supreme Court, out of respect for precedent, would never overturn Roe v. Wade. Of course, Giuliani is of the “personally opposed, but” persuasion, a reformulated version of the famous Clintonian locution “safe, legal, and rare.”

Giuliani’s personal life and leftist politics may explain his conduct when he was U.S. attorney in Manhattan. In that job, he railroaded “junk-bond” king Michael Milken and others for crimes they did not commit. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote, “Giuliani was unknown until in search of name recognition he staged a stormtrooper assault on the financial firm Princeton/Newport involving fifty federal marshals outfitted with automatic weapons and bulletproof vests. On another occasion, he had two New York investment bankers hauled off their trading floor in handcuffs. Giuliani’s victims had done nothing and were exonerated.”

This is the man the “Hannitized” Smear Bund of conservatives thinks should be president. So they mauled Ron Paul, the only candidate who understands the Constitution and what it was meant, and not meant, to do. The conservatives who backed George W. Bush for president can be excused, at least partly, because he, as McCain and Romney do today, told them lies to get elected.

To his credit, Giuliani hasn’t done that. He’s a liberal, and proud of it. So the conservatives who back him cannot be excused. If the GOP nominates Giuliani, “a small man in search of a balcony,” as columnist Jimmy Breslin called him, the party may be more stupid than anyone thinks, but at least it would reveal the GOP for what it is and likely spell the end of its undeserved reputation as the political home for conservatives.

Come to think of it, maybe nominating Giuliani isn’t such a bad idea after all. It would leave American conservatives homeless and give candidates such as Ron Paul a serious chance to compete for their votes.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the July 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Some Virginians wondered why they should apologize for something that occurred before any of us, white or black, was born. “Get over it,” Virginia Del. Frank D. Hargrove told blacks before the resolution passed the General Assembly in February, which only energized the apology’s spear carriers and got them pounding the war drums.

The apology rage is another front in the culture war against the South, in particular, and American history, in general. The Southern Baptists gibbered an apology for slavery over a decade ago, and newspapers gabble contrition for their soporific coverage of the “civil-rights struggle.” Never mind the old liberal mantra that only individuals, not groups, are responsible for wrongdoing: One group is the sum of all evils. The resolution is clear on that, and its startling rhetoric and risible leftist moonshine show just what its authors had in mind: perpetual guilt and atonement from whites; perpetual grievance for blacks. One likely goal of this apology, given the failed lawsuits filed against venerable corporations over their involvement with slavery 200 years ago, is the procurement of reparations. Another may well be the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

This Virginia resolution is an extraordinary and subtle ideological indictment not just of slavery but of the United States. “For many African Americans,” it says, “the scars left behind are unbearable, haunting their psyches and clouding their vision of the future and of America’s many attributes . . . ” It also quotes President Bush’s apology for slavery, in which he insisted that, “while physical slavery is dead, the legacy is alive.” Indeed, the resolution continues, “The vestiges of slavery are ever before African American citizens.” Their “psyche[s]” are “haunt[ed]” by both the “overt racism of hate groups” and the “subtle racism” they experience “when requesting health care, transacting business, buying a home, seeking quality public education and college admission, and enduring pretextual [sic] traffic stops and other indignities.” Only official apologies, then, can “assuage” their “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness.”

“Poppycock” is about the only reply this ideological indictment deserves. Words such as “unbearable,” “haunting,” and “perpetual,” as well as the fibs and hyperbole about “subtle racism” in housing, healthcare, and education, all lead to some inescapable observations and conclusions, the first of which is that an event that occurred 200 years ago cannot haunt a man today. This “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness” is no more real than the “repressed memories” recovered in victims of “past abuse,” who suddenly “remember” events suggested by headshrinkers.

Yet even an apology bereft of this ideological hokum would be silly, as some blacks are attesting. “I don’t want or need an apology for slavery,” writes Lyle V. Harris, a black editorialist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Said a professor at historically black Clark Atlanta University, “I’m not sure the average [black] guy who works from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. is thinking about this.”

He isn’t thinking about it, of course, and neither are whites who know the politicians’ game. Like Hargrove, they aren’t sorry for anything except electing the politicians who assiduously assist professional race hustlers in attempting to make them feel guilty for something that happened in the 19th century.

Whites are terrified, however. They know what awaits those who cross the Pettus Bridge of modern racial taboo by defending themselves and opposing the antiwhite Zeitgeist: a rubber-hosing with the r-word.

The overall effort exerted by proponents of the Virginia apology suggests a certain [...]]]> With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and lather up with the ideological lye faster than you can say Jackie Robinson.

Some Virginians wondered why they should apologize for something that occurred before any of us, white or black, was born. “Get over it,” Virginia Del. Frank D. Hargrove told blacks before the resolution passed the General Assembly in February, which only energized the apology’s spear carriers and got them pounding the war drums.

The apology rage is another front in the culture war against the South, in particular, and American history, in general. The Southern Baptists gibbered an apology for slavery over a decade ago, and newspapers gabble contrition for their soporific coverage of the “civil-rights struggle.” Never mind the old liberal mantra that only individuals, not groups, are responsible for wrongdoing: One group is the sum of all evils. The resolution is clear on that, and its startling rhetoric and risible leftist moonshine show just what its authors had in mind: perpetual guilt and atonement from whites; perpetual grievance for blacks. One likely goal of this apology, given the failed lawsuits filed against venerable corporations over their involvement with slavery 200 years ago, is the procurement of reparations. Another may well be the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

This Virginia resolution is an extraordinary and subtle ideological indictment not just of slavery but of the United States. “For many African Americans,” it says, “the scars left behind are unbearable, haunting their psyches and clouding their vision of the future and of America’s many attributes . . . ” It also quotes President Bush’s apology for slavery, in which he insisted that, “while physical slavery is dead, the legacy is alive.” Indeed, the resolution continues, “The vestiges of slavery are ever before African American citizens.” Their “psyche[s]” are “haunt[ed]” by both the “overt racism of hate groups” and the “subtle racism” they experience “when requesting health care, transacting business, buying a home, seeking quality public education and college admission, and enduring pretextual [sic] traffic stops and other indignities.” Only official apologies, then, can “assuage” their “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness.”

“Poppycock” is about the only reply this ideological indictment deserves. Words such as “unbearable,” “haunting,” and “perpetual,” as well as the fibs and hyperbole about “subtle racism” in housing, healthcare, and education, all lead to some inescapable observations and conclusions, the first of which is that an event that occurred 200 years ago cannot haunt a man today. This “perpetual pain, distrust and bitterness” is no more real than the “repressed memories” recovered in victims of “past abuse,” who suddenly “remember” events suggested by headshrinkers.

Yet even an apology bereft of this ideological hokum would be silly, as some blacks are attesting. “I don’t want or need an apology for slavery,” writes Lyle V. Harris, a black editorialist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Said a professor at historically black Clark Atlanta University, “I’m not sure the average [black] guy who works from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. is thinking about this.”

He isn’t thinking about it, of course, and neither are whites who know the politicians’ game. Like Hargrove, they aren’t sorry for anything except electing the politicians who assiduously assist professional race hustlers in attempting to make them feel guilty for something that happened in the 19th century.

Whites are terrified, however. They know what awaits those who cross the Pettus Bridge of modern racial taboo by defending themselves and opposing the antiwhite Zeitgeist: a rubber-hosing with the r-word.

The overall effort exerted by proponents of the Virginia apology suggests a certain desperation: The race hustlers, you see, know their jig is up. No one, least of all young whites, wants to hear about segregation and Jim Crow today, for the same reason Hargrove thinks Virginia’s groveling apology is ridiculous: None of them had anything to do with it. Millions of black Americans are members of the middle class, and others, such as Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods, Colin Powell, and, of course, Barack Obama, have reached the pinnacle of financial, social, and political success. This truth delegitimizes continued caterwauling about racism and discrimination, which is why the race hustlers need the apology. It is a Trojan horse. The real import of the resolution is not the apology per se, but its list of interminable and unforgivable grievances that are little more than an antiwhite bill of attainder.

Everyone, including its authors, knows the apology won’t change anything. Slavery is unforgivable. Its “legacy” is “unbearable,” “haunting,” and “perpetual,” much like Original Sin. All whites bear its stain; all blacks, its pain. But if Baptism removes the stain of Original Sin, surely the War Between the States, with some 600,000 dead, and 50 years of state and federal civil-rights legislation, should have expiated the sin of slavery. It didn’t, of course, which is why we need another “apology.” And the apology, in turn, reminds us why we need more race laws concerning jobs and college admissions and justifies all manner of pernicious discrimination and racial attacks against whites. All of this will further convince some whites, particularly average voters and politicians ignorant of history and uninterested in learning about it, that they bear the guilt for every crime in history since Cain killed Abel.

The Los Angeles Times has dubbed Barack Obama “The Magic Negro.” He’s a “non-threatening” black presidential candidate, the liberals say, for whom a white soccer mom can comfortably vote. As Sen. Joe Biden infamously said, “You got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

So whites can confess and apologize for the besetting sin of slavery. Then they can do penance by voting for Obama.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The truth is, we are never permitted to contemplate the truth about race and crime. Most interracial crime involves blacks harming whites, and federal statistics show that blacks commit more hate crimes than whites. The news media’s stiff-necked refusal to report these facts is escalating and indisputable, as several recent cases show, and invites us to question why so many news professionals—so dedicated to disclosing so many unwelcome facts about so many subjects—are so unwilling to examine this one. “Liberal media bias” isn’t the only answer. Something else is at work.

First, a few examples. The murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tennessee, merited almost no attention from the national news media and none from the New York Times. According to police, on January 7, a band of black criminals carjacked the pair, then treated them to a nightmare of sexual torture. The gang raped Newsom, shot him, burned him with gasoline, wrapped him in bedding, then set him ablaze. Afterward, they dumped his body on nearby railroad tracks. They forced Christian to watch this and repeatedly (and savagely) raped her, then sprayed liquid cleaner in her mouth to erase their residual DNA. After killing her, the thugs placed her in trash bags and stuffed her in a garbage can. Five suspects await trial.

On Halloween, three white girls approached a haunted maze in the backyard of a home in Long Beach, California. A group of a dozen black boys, according to newspaper accounts, began taunting them. The boys grabbed their crotches, asking, “Are you down with it?” The girls went through the maze, but when they returned to the front yard, the boys were waiting to taunt them again. Then they heard another male voice declare, “I hate white people.” “White bitches,” others shouted. The girls started to leave, but a mob of about 30 blacks, including young girls, gathered and pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. “We hate white people,” they hollered, “f--king white people.” When the defenseless girls tried to flee, the mob attacked in full force, beating and stomping the first victim to the ground. When she tried to fight back, a black man smashed her head with a skateboard, then hit her again when she was on the ground, unconscious. The mob kicked her anyway. When one friend tried to rescue her, the mob swarmed, punched her until she dropped, then stomped, and kicked her on the ground. She received 12 facial fractures and severe damage to one of her eyes. The third girl also tried to help, but the mob beat her to a pulp—again, kicking and stomping her when they got her on the ground.

The judge tossed out DNA evidence from a victim’s blood on one attacker’s clothes because, one news report said, it would complicate the case. Ultimately, he sentenced those found guilty to house arrest and probation. Again, the New York Times and other national news media mostly ignored it. No wondering how it could happen. No soul-searching. No lectures on racism from the university [...]]]> If five whites carjacked a black couple, tortured them for hours, then dumped the bodies, the national news media would descend upon the benighted city in which the dastardly crime occurred and, having reported the unspeakable deeds, subject the rest of us to rants on racism and harangues on hate. It happened with James Byrd, the black man dragged to death behind a car in Jasper, Texas, and it happens even when the crimes are fictive, as with huckstress Tawana Brawley and, more recently, the lacrosse team at Duke University. In such cases, we are told that whether or not the crimes actually occurred does not matter: We learn a lesson simply in contemplating them.

The truth is, we are never permitted to contemplate the truth about race and crime. Most interracial crime involves blacks harming whites, and federal statistics show that blacks commit more hate crimes than whites. The news media’s stiff-necked refusal to report these facts is escalating and indisputable, as several recent cases show, and invites us to question why so many news professionals—so dedicated to disclosing so many unwelcome facts about so many subjects—are so unwilling to examine this one. “Liberal media bias” isn’t the only answer. Something else is at work.

First, a few examples. The murders of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tennessee, merited almost no attention from the national news media and none from the New York Times. According to police, on January 7, a band of black criminals carjacked the pair, then treated them to a nightmare of sexual torture. The gang raped Newsom, shot him, burned him with gasoline, wrapped him in bedding, then set him ablaze. Afterward, they dumped his body on nearby railroad tracks. They forced Christian to watch this and repeatedly (and savagely) raped her, then sprayed liquid cleaner in her mouth to erase their residual DNA. After killing her, the thugs placed her in trash bags and stuffed her in a garbage can. Five suspects await trial.

On Halloween, three white girls approached a haunted maze in the backyard of a home in Long Beach, California. A group of a dozen black boys, according to newspaper accounts, began taunting them. The boys grabbed their crotches, asking, “Are you down with it?” The girls went through the maze, but when they returned to the front yard, the boys were waiting to taunt them again. Then they heard another male voice declare, “I hate white people.” “White bitches,” others shouted. The girls started to leave, but a mob of about 30 blacks, including young girls, gathered and pelted them with pumpkins and lemons. “We hate white people,” they hollered, “f--king white people.” When the defenseless girls tried to flee, the mob attacked in full force, beating and stomping the first victim to the ground. When she tried to fight back, a black man smashed her head with a skateboard, then hit her again when she was on the ground, unconscious. The mob kicked her anyway. When one friend tried to rescue her, the mob swarmed, punched her until she dropped, then stomped, and kicked her on the ground. She received 12 facial fractures and severe damage to one of her eyes. The third girl also tried to help, but the mob beat her to a pulp—again, kicking and stomping her when they got her on the ground.

The judge tossed out DNA evidence from a victim’s blood on one attacker’s clothes because, one news report said, it would complicate the case. Ultimately, he sentenced those found guilty to house arrest and probation. Again, the New York Times and other national news media mostly ignored it. No wondering how it could happen. No soul-searching. No lectures on racism from the university professoriate, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton.

In April 2005, a mob of 30 blacks attacked four white girls at Marine Park in Brooklyn, New York, shouting “black power,” according to the small weekly that covered it, and invoking Martin Luther King, Jr. Two of the victims landed in the hospital, one with a broken nose. Immediately, police denied this was a hate crime. The national news media ignored it. And again, the Rainbow Coalition took a powder.

On December 14, 2000, two black brothers, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, invaded the Wichita home of Jason Befort and his two friends, Bradley Heyka and Aaron Sandler, who were entertaining Befort’s girlfriend, Heather Muller, and Sandler’s former girlfriend (“H.G.”). (Sandler was then studying for the priesthood.) As with the carjacking in Knoxville, the black men, ending a week-long feral rampage, subjected their five white victims to an orgy of sexual torture nearly beyond description. After beating the men senseless, they forced the women to have sex, attempted to force the men to have sex with the women, then raped and sodomized the women. They robbed them and drove the naked (the women were clad only in sweaters) victims to a field and executed four of them. H.G., having been shot in the head and run over repeatedly with a truck, managed to survive. Despite H.G.’s testimony, which indicated that the brothers made numerous racial slurs while torturing and attempting to kill her, prosecutors hotly denied that this was a hate crime. Again, the national news media ignored the story.

Stories about all these crimes appeared in local newspapers and on local television news. (Even local media often omit the race of the suspect.) Somehow, these stories never rocketed to the editorial stratosphere of CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, or the New York Times. Some national-news websites published a smattering of AP stories about these crimes. Had they involved whites attacking blacks, all of these news organizations would have dispatched staff writers, photographers, producers, and cameramen to get the story.

That is exactly what happened when three white lacrosse players at Duke University were accused of raping a black stripper at an off-campus party; the national news media descended in full force. The charges smeared the team, and the Duke lacrosse season was canceled. Hundreds of stories appeared about this fictive crime—a case in which the prosecutor was forced to quit and may be disbarred for egregious ethical violations. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks unlimbered a blunderbuss and sprayed us with stories. It was time to search our souls for racism. For intolerance. For bigotry. For a crime that never happened. Of course, Durham was recently the site of a rape at an off-campus party at which men from Duke were present. The national news media ignored it, and the Raleigh News and Observer eliminated race in its description of both the party and the suspect. A black fraternity hosted the party. The suspect is black; the victim is white.

The leftists who run the national news media know what they are doing, and they won’t confront the truth about race and crime; that would require reforming their thoughts about the world and undermine their declared agenda. The news media are obsessed with “diversity,” as Bill McGowen demonstrated in Coloring the News, his book on how the media spins stories because of race. Some topics, including affirmative action, are taboo in newsrooms. For example, when the New York Times exposed rank incompetence and rampant criminality among rookies in the NYPD, it failed to disclose how or why such incompetence and criminality crept into the ranks: Hiring standards had been lowered to promote minorities in the name of “diversity.”

In journalism, the last few years have been one long chin-wag about diversity. The potentates of journalism discuss it with religious fervor. Editors receive dogmatic flyers and evangelical videotapes importuning them to hire minority applicants and interns and to attend minority job fairs. They receive surveys designed to measure the racial and sex complexion of newsrooms. The American Society of Newspaper Editors proclaims, “We count the number of journalists, their gender [sic] and race” in order to “help newsrooms think about diversity.” The society sponsors a silly project called “Time Out for Accuracy and Diversity.” Of course, accuracy never trumps diversity. The publisher of the New York Times has said that diversity is the most important issue facing his newspaper; this is how Jayson Blair, a serial liar with a long rap sheet of plagiarism and mendacity, slipped through the cracks.

This leftist obsession with diversity and race in the newsroom informs the media’s coverage of crime, particularly interracial crime. In a letter posted on the forum at Romenesko, on the website of the Poynter Institute, David Mills, a former writer for the Washington Times, hammered the Los Angeles Times for ignoring the mob melee at Long Beach. “You don’t have to be a card-carrying Klansman,” Mills wrote,

to point out that the LA Times surely would be treating this story differently if three black women had been attacked by 30 white teenagers hurling words like “F--- black people.” Columnists and editorial writers would be rending their garments, agonizing over the meaning of such a brutal crime. . . .

The Halloween mob assault appears to be the worst instance of black-on-white violence in Southern California since Reginald Denny took a cinder block to the head. Why is the LA Times covering it so grudgingly? The only reference to the beatings on the op-ed page came last Sunday, when Michael McGough, a senior editorial writer, wrote of this case: “I wouldn’t dare to prejudge [it] even if the facts weren’t so murky.” He then fretted that an “unintended consequence” of hate-crime laws is that “such laws could end up punishing blacks who commit violence against whites—which is a far cry from the historical experience that inspired hate-crime statutes.”

Say what? I didn’t realize that hate-crime laws were supposed to punish only white people. Presented with a shocking instance of black-on-white violence, the Times thinks the only larger issue worth discussing is whether hate-crime legislation is wrongheaded?

McGough’s point was that blacks are incapable of racism and hate crimes; they are perpetual victims. No wonder the national news media refuses to report horrific black-on-white crimes. Just as “diversity” trumps competence in the newsroom, white-on-black crime always trumps its converse.

The media’s morality play about unbridled white racism is a perilous fairy tale that justifies the media’s racial agenda not just for newsrooms but for society at large. Moreover, whites are increasingly angry about the media’s treatment of blacks and crime, which undermines what little credibility the media have and energizes unfair and unjust remarks and rage about blacks in general. This, in turn, breeds the very racial animosity the dim bulbs in the news media claim they want to erase. Yet admitting the truth would undermine the media’s hectoring, obnoxious propaganda, which insists that whites are oppressors and blacks are victims, and would deprive the race hustlers and cultural leftists of the crowning symbol that permits them to rig the courts and spin the news: the racist white bogeyman.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the May 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.