3 Reasons Why I’m Joining the Republican Party Today

I’ve resisted this for awhile. The past three years I’ve readily identified as an ideologically conservative, pro-Tea Party, ex-leftist. But I resisted joining the Republican Party, preferring to focus on the war of ideas, the battles of Left and Right, Marxist vs Classical Liberal, rather than Democrat vs Republican.

When Mitt Romney secured the nomination I naively thought, “well, he’s got that corporate competence. Surely they’ll be as smart at growing a campaign as they would building a business, right? Even if they can’t articulate Americanism at least they’ll maximize on the basics of Get Out the Vote and fundraising and all the boring, professional stuff, right?”

Wrong, as Bethany Mandel reports at Commentary. Turns out we’re not looking just at the broader cultural problem of a 5% raise in nonreligious voters, but also a Republican Party unable to compete in the technological arms race or even run a competent Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation:

The story of how monumental a failure Project ORCA was on Election Day was first reported by a volunteer, John Ekdahl, on the Ace of Spades blog. After tweeting the article, I was contacted by several other volunteers who were eager to explain in greater detail just how many things went wrong with Project Orca on Tuesday.

I spoke with one volunteer in a rural Virginia county who had a similar experience to the blogger on Ace’s site. Shoshanna McCrimmon signed up to volunteer on Romney’s website several months ago. She was contacted by Dan Centinello of the Romney campaign and underwent online and phone training that lasted for several hours in order to volunteer locally on Election Day. Because of secrecy concerns, the application itself was inaccessible until the morning of the election. From the outset there were failures of organization.

…..

Was ORCA’s failure the reason why Romney lost Virginia by almost 116,000 votes, Ohio by 103,000, Iowa by 88,000 or why Florida is still, days later, too close to call? It’s impossible to know what a Romney campaign with working GOTV technology would have been able to accomplish. Ekdahl explained that with the failure of Project ORCA’s organization and its later meltdown on Election Day “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc.” The possibility that all of the efforts of Romney’s campaign, all of the enthusiasm, went unharnessed and dormant on Election Day when they could’ve at least led to a closer election result, if not a victory, is becoming beyond frustrating for thousands of his staffers, for the millions of Americans who gave their time and money to elect Mitt Romney president as they come to learn just what a disaster ORCA seems to have been.

This is my tipping point. Will it be for anyone else?

1. Today I’m joining the Republican Party because I recognize that it’s not enough to take back the culture. We could spend four years pushing the culture and expanding the base and then it would be all for naught because incompetent GOP establishment hacks cannot run a campaign.

2. Today I’m joining the Republican Party because over the coming years as ideological factions compete for influence the antisemitic elements within the party — Ron Paul’s Paleo-Libertarian, Old Right, Anarcho Capitalist, Conspiracy Theory cult coalition — threaten to gain greater power.

3. Today I’m joining the Republican Party because as I’ve returned to Bible-based religion and a faith in God during the past year I’ve come to understand the story of the ancient Israelites rebelling against slavery and idolatry as the basis for Western Civilization, our ancestors’ flight from Europe, and the founding of this nation. The Republican Party was founded as the anti-slavery Party. It still is today.

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shutterstock images courtesy patrimonio designs limited /

Quantifying the ‘Contrarian’ Narcissism of the 3rd Party Voter

Yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic and protege of Andrew Sullivan, offered an explanation for why he chose to spend months blasting Mitt Romney as more evil than Barack Obama but will still vote for Gary Johnson instead. He titled the piece “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama“:

Tell certain liberals and progressives that you can’t bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes gay rights, or who doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, and they’ll nod along. Say that you’d never vote for a politician caught using the ‘n’-word, even if you agreed with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand. But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can discern Mitt Romney’s flaws, which I’ve chronicled in the course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama.

Don’t they see that Obama’s transgressions are worse than any I’ve mentioned?

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.

Nope.

Emphases added. In the first three paragraphs Friedersdorf references himself five times — all without need.

How much more does Friedersdorf talk about himself as he lays out the case that the death of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (in the drone strike that killed his Jihadi father) morally disqualifies Obama from a second term in office? The 1798-word piece contains 35 variations of I. Among the most narcissistic passages:

If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn’t as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don’t know. I can imagine he’d kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn’t kill any. I can imagine that he’d kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

One should also note that in his explanation for why not to vote for Obama the only killings that Friedersdorf mentions as a concern to him are those done by America to defend itself. So little surprise that he never gets around to the question of which candidate will do a better job protecting American lives.

How Critical Race Theorists Define ‘Rule of Law’

– Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic

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Stories also at PJ Media, which of course have nothing to do with a presidential administration, political party, activist movement, and Department of Justice united under such a definition:

• The Obvious Reasons Why Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Regime Is Anti-Democratic, Anti-American, and Antisemitic

• The Democratic Party and a Second Holocaust

• Sluts on Parade: SlutWalk SF 2012

• (Exclusive) Internal DOJ Documents Argued for SC Voter ID Approval … but Obama Appointees Overruled

• The Hatred of Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Aurora Mass Murderer’s Self-Description of His Political Views Revealed

Apparently the shooter is a “No Labels” kind of guy. TMZ found his Match.com page:

The profile also describes his religious views as “agnostic” — not uncommon for a science-minded, Ph.D. student.

TMZ earlier uncovered a profile on AdultFriendFinder.Com revealing the shooter sought casual sex hook-ups.

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More coverage at PJ Lifestyle:

Jail Employee: James Holmes Shows No Remorse

The Aurora Shooting Victims

What Does Israel’s Prime Minister Have to Do With the Horrific Dark Knight Shooting?

Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn

10 Tips for How to Talk to a Marxist Who Thinks He’s a Liberal (If You Must)

Over at PJ Lifestyle today I have a review of Dennis Prager’s book Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. My piece is titled 7 Reasons Why The Right Should Not Seek to Convert The Left. Within the review I make my case through a series of excerpts from a debate I had with a history grad student. I decided to convert these excerpts into a graphic presentation with my suggestions for how to engage with those who think they’re liberals but actually rely on Marxism for their world view. I hope everyone enjoys it.

 *Apologies to Ann Coulter for borrowing her title.

Paying the Price For Keynesian Quackery

David P. “Spengler” Goldman today in a must-read post on the European economic collapse:

The Obama administration, George Soros, the International Monetary Fund, and liberal opinion in general believe that no crisis should be wasted: an enlightened supranational bureaucracy should emerge as the ruler of Europe.

I find this repulsive for the most elemental of reasons: the further that government is removed from the electorate, the more prone it is to abuse. The Brussels bureaucracy is responsible for the catastrophe in the first place, and one doesn’t normally give the gasoline monopoly to a bunch of arsonists.

As an old investment banker, though, I think that consolidating all the European scams into supranational entities will fail disastrously. The lifeboat itself will sink under the weight. Some of the scams are simply too outrageous to be rescued. The same Keynesian quackery that has kept the US in recession for the past four years festers among the Eurocrats.

image element courtesy shutterstock/Daniel Alvarez

Memo to Meghan McCain: Al Sharpton is an Antisemite With Blood on His Hands

Meghan McCain opens her column “Cut It Out, Internet Bullies!” at The Daily Beast:

Last week, I went on Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show PoliticsNation to talk about extremism in the Republican Party. As a socially liberal Republican, this happens to be a topic I know a lot about. On the show, I told Sharpton that many Republicans treat me like a freak, especially the extreme-right members of my party. I went on to say that I don’t understand the appeal of extreme bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Going on Al Sharpton’s show to talk about “extremism in the Republican Party” is as offensive as appearing on a David Duke program to talk about fire safety and tying proper knots. Last summer Jeff Dunetz at Yid With Lid remembered the 10 year anniversary of the Crown Heights riots, an antisemitic pogrom provoked by the MSNBC host and Democratic Party consigliere who earns kinder words from McCain than the “extreme bloggers” who tweet things she doesn’t like.

Breitbart’s Legacy: Vetting Obama Also Requires Confronting the Conspiracy Theories

At Breitbart.com the Vetting continues: Editor-In-Chief Joel Pollak: “Exclusive Document Debunks Myth About Obamas Columbia Years”

**OBAMA COLUMBIA DOCUMENT RELEASED**

Breitbart News’ discovery of the 1991 biography distributed by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, which stated (incorrectly) that Obama had been “born in Kenya,” confirmed what we have been saying for months as we pursued “The Vetting” project. Much of what the country ought to know about Obama, but does not, is hidden–often in plain sight–yet the mainstream media covers it up or spins it away to protect him.

The errant biography is only the most sensational example of a pattern of behavior in which Obama and his supporters manipulate or even fabricate his life story. And because Obama and his campaign have refused to provide other, relevant facts–and because the mainstream media shows such little interest in finding them–conspiracy theories flourish.

Some of these are easily debunked by conducting some very basic research.

The image above–never before released–is from public records at Columbia University that prove that Obama did, in fact, graduate in 1983 from the Ivy League school. Contrary to some conspiracy theories, Obama was a student within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences–not the less selective, “nontraditional” Columbia University School of General Studies (which only merged with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1990).

While he was alive Andrew Breitbart rarely got the credit he deserved for standing up to the conspiracy fringe. In 2010 he took a stand against two ghosts of Conservatism Past: Birtherism (the contemporary expression of John Birch Society paranoia) and homophobia.

Vetting Barack Obama means more than just unearthing new documents from the President’s lifelong journey through the hidden corners of American socialism. The task also requires carrying Breitbart’s legacy of diligence in confronting the narratives advanced by those with less sincere motives. (How come we’ve seen conspiracy theories gain so much traction in the age of the internet? Because it’s a great business model. Conspiracy theories are second only to sex on the list of subjects guaranteed to generate web traffic.)

And so in 2012 Pollak and Ben Shapiro, John Nolte, Dana Loesch, Mike Flynn, Larry O’Connor, and the rest of the Breitbart News team follow their founder’s lead and provide an example of what it means to be journalists first, activists second: Just telling the truth about your political opponent’s history, record of expressed views, and character of the men he proclaims his mentors is more effective than trying to drop a “gotcha” story (like about cutting a gay teen’s hair against his will 50 years ago…)

But the real challenge is getting people to care once the facts are staring them in the face about the nature of who this President has chosen to empower.

Barry Rubin in March:

President Barack Obama is continuing his love affair with Turkish Islamist leader Recep Erdogan. As Erdogan continues to undermine Turkish democracy, throw hundreds of moderates into jail, destroy the nation’s institutions, help Iran, throw hysterical tantrums about how much he hates Israel, promote Islamism in the region, and is fresh from still another meeting with Hamas leaders, Obama continues to use Erdogan as his guru.

When the two men met at the Seoul, South Korea, Nuclear Security Summit on March 25, Obama practically slobbered over the anti-American ruler, calling Erdogan his “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.”

When Erdogan goes to elections or is criticized by the opposition he uses statements like this to “prove” that his policies aren’t radical or anti-Western at all. Here’s a man whose regime can help terrorist groups organize a violent confrontation with Israel, preside over a virulently anti-American media, insist Iran isn’t seeking nuclear weapons and has a wonderful government, and then be lionized by the president of the United States.

Obama adds:

“I think it’s fair to say that over the last several years, the relationship between Turkey and the United States has continued to grow across every dimension.  And I find Prime Minister Erdogan to be an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues.”

Touré: ‘There’s More to Blackness Than Bludgeoning People With Memories of Past Atrocities’

Introduction: Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice.

Part 1: Why Black Jesus Wears a Hoodie Today

Part 2: Spiritual Liberation Comes Through Worshiping Skin Color

“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.”

 images courtesy shutterstock: Jovanovic Dejan, Daleen Loest

Obama and Romney Discuss the Merits of Stating One’s Honest Position on Gay Marriage

Touré: Spiritual Liberation Comes Through Worshiping Skin Color

Introduction: Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice.

Part 1: Why Black Jesus Wears a Hoodie Today

***

The song running over the credits of 1999′s sci-fi epic The Matrix from Rage Against the Machine, “Wake Up.”

I love the Matrix for giving us Black people being brilliant & in leadership positions. The Oracle, Morpheus…

— Touré (@Toure) May 17, 2011

In Afrolantica Legacies Derrick Bell utilized many occult themes — from racializing the legend of Atlantis, to extraterrestrial encounters with the sexy alien goddess Chiara, to a continued reliance on conspiracy theories, the man who blurbed books by both Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama knew his esoterica.

And in Bell’s follow-up we understand why. After a small radical publisher released Afrolantica Legacies in 1998 a more mainstream, respectable house — Bloomsbury — blessed the world with his next book in 2002, Ethical Ambition: Living a Life of Meaning and Worth. The chapter on spirituality includes the passage in the above illustration.

Bell rejected the principles of ethical monotheism that make up the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its political expression in classical liberalism. Instead of understanding human nature as flawed and man as separated from God he embraced the Gnostic conception: “To know self at the deepest level, they believed, is to know God.”

The practical result of this is self-worship, a form of idolatry and the practice the second of the 10 Commandments confronted.

Why Black Jesus Wears a Hoodie Today

Introduction: Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice.

Post-Modern Blackness in Theory and Practice

My previous blogging series explored Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies and its connections to current events and the Obama administration’s public policies.

Bell was born in 1930, and his generation would go on to lead the ’60s campus revolts and the various components of the New Left. (See Ron Radosh’s memoir Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left for the stories of Bell’s radical peers.) By the early 1970s this Silent Generation cohort produced not only their pivotal works (Bell’s Race, Racism and American Law came in 1973) but also the children who would some day gain the name Generation X.

Touré was born in 1971, and now 40 years later you can read how his generation of writer-activists has updated Bell’s political theology.

My motives for reading Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness remain as selfish as for Afrolantica Legacies: I want to know “what it means to be black now.” Or rather: who counts as black today? Do those with one African-American and one Caucasian parent count as black? What about one grandparent?

What do those in multi-racial families need to know in order to raise the next generation of mixed race children? How do you explain “blackness” and “whiteness” to a child who falls into neither category?

Video: WLBT-Jackson on DOJ Employee’s “Disgusting and Shameful” Facebook Post

Based on the reporting of PJ Media’s J. Christian Adams.

I Don’t Expect to Read Anything More Badass Than This Paragraph All Year

Ann Coulter quotes from the book Negroes With Guns by Robert F. Williams in her column recounting the courageous battles Southern blacks fought to defend themselves against the KKK with the help of the National Rifle Association:

In the preface to “Negroes With Guns,” Williams writes: “I have asserted the right of Negroes to meet the violence of the Ku Klux Klan by armed self-defense — and have acted on it. It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must act in self-defense against lawless violence.”

How Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert Reacts to the Call for a Second Holocaust

MJ Rosenberg might have left David Brock’s Media Matters for America, but Breitbart.com Editor-At-Large Ben Shapiro has discovered another progressive with a long history of shilling for genocidal antisemites, emphasis and graphic added:

Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert, one of the faces of the organization, has a dicey record when it comes to Israel and the Jews. On September 11, 2001, he wrote a piece for Salon.com defending American Muslims from the supposed anti-Muslim hysteria brewing. In that piece, he recounted a Muslim rally in Paterson, New Jersey:

“We won’t rest until all the Jews are dead,” said a burly young man. “Shame on America,” said another bitter-faced youth. “For helping Israel to kill Palestinians,” said a third.

In the wake of the WTC attacks, however, those brash sentiments were muted.

“We won’t rest until all the Jews are dead” is not a “brash sentiment.” It is open genocidal anti-Semitism. But not to Eric Boehlert, apparently.

Boehlert’s bias in favor of anti-Jewish terrorists didn’t stop there. In 2002, he wrote a piece for Salon.com in which he lamented the fate of Professor Sami Al-Arian, former North American head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is the same Al-Arian who proclaimed, “God cursed those who are sons of Israel … Those people, God made monkeys and pigs … Let us damn America, let us damn Israel, let us damn them and their allies until death.” When Al-Arian was suspended from his teaching post at Florida Atlantic University, Boehlert defended Al-Arian as an “innocent professor.”

In Professor Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies, his chapter “Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews, and Games Scapegoats Play” defended and downplayed the antisemitism of Nation of Islam cult leader Louis Farrakhan. Similarly, President Barack Obama describes Recep Erdogan, the Islamist, antisemitic leader of Turkey as, a “friend and colleague….We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues.” And of course, we have to continue to remind on the subject of a certain video tape that’s racking up quite a late fee:

These aren’t anomalies. This is the Democratic Party today.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Barack Obama?

As a transition from my previous series on Afrolantica Legacies to the next sequence of blogging on political books and their relation to current events, consider this excerpt from The Derrick Bell Reader in which the founder of Critical Race Theory defines the controversial term.

Just as important as what Bell says is how he says it. “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” is a familiar formulation, that intentionally inspires readers to imagine the ideology — and those who promote it — as a wolf.

From pages 78 and 79 (next page) with illustrations added by me:

The Hatred of Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

 From March 19 through April 13 I blogged through Afrolantica Legacies, analyzing the arguments and connecting them with current events in the political culture. This compilation collects and re-edits those 21 posts. It’s 9800 words and features more than 30 photographic excerpts from the book.

As a 28-year-old student at Harvard Law, Barack Obama supported the activism of Professor Derrick Bell and urged his peers to open their hearts and minds to the words of Critical Race Theory‘s founder.

But what did Bell believe and how could his ideas have any relation to the president’s policies today?

The answers to these questions reside in Bell’s 1998 book Afrolantica Legacies, published by Third World Press.

The myth of the rise and fall of Afrolantica — a kind of Atlantis where only African Americans can live — opens the book and provides Bell with a way to tie together his essays, fictional dialogues, and political parables written through the ’80s and ’90s. From seven of these essays, Bell extracts these principles to serve as “rules of racial preservation”:

Afrolantica’s Haunting Conclusion: ‘Let’s Get Back to the Struggle’

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Part 17: Doing the State Some Service

Part 18: Why Derrick Bell Saw Thurgood Marshall As a Sex Slave

Part 19: The Black Sedition Papers Conspiracy

Part 20: Strange Sex & Human Sacrifice in Bluebeard’s Castle

This is how Derrick Bell concludes Afrolantica Legacies, a final discussion with the idealized female version of himself, Geneva Crenshaw:

“Let’s get back to the struggle” are the final words in a book in which Bell has:

A) Named his utopia “Afrolantica” and decreed it a land where only African-Americans could survive. Thus, in Bell’s imagination utopia is a world without Jews. Bell described the sensation of living in such a place “a euphoria of Freedom.”

B) Defended Louis Farrakhan, antisemitic conspiracy theorist and leader of the Nation of Islam, and promoted the blood libel of Jewish control of the economy.

C) Urged Jews to remain loyal to the progressive cause above defending themselves from antisemitism.

D) Named the Stalinist artist Paul Robeson — who lied to the world about the Soviet murder and torture of Russian Jews — one of our “greatest heroes.”

The word “struggle” finds itself featured prominently in other genocidal antisemitic movements. The infamous title of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography:

Also, the term “Jihad,” defined courtesy of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan:

What were these men, scattered across cultures but united in antisemitism, struggling with “inside ones self”? Warning: the graphic answer on the next page quotes from material containing profanity and disturbing content.

Afrolantica, Part 20: Strange Sex & Human Sacrifice in Bluebeard’s Castle

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Part 17: Doing the State Some Service

Part 18: Why Derrick Bell Saw Thurgood Marshall As a Sex Slave

Part 19: The Black Sedition Papers Conspiracy

The last of Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies explicitly labels the law professor’s life program as a faith:

To illustrate his political dogma, Bell uses another literary reference. He titles the essay “Bluebeard’s Castle: An American Fairy Tale” and borrows Bela Bartok’s opera. The plot summarized via Wikipedia:

The basic plot is loosely based on the folk tale “Bluebeard“, but is given a heavily psychological reworking—some would say psychoanalytic or psychosexual, (see Bruno Bettelheim and The Uses of Enchantment).

Place: A huge, dark hall in a castle, with seven locked doors.

Time: Not defined.

Judith and Bluebeard arrive at his castle, which is all dark. Bluebeard asks Judith if she wants to stay and even offers her an opportunity to leave, but she decides to stay. Judith insists that all the doors be opened, to allow light to enter into the forbidding interior, insisting further that her demands are based on her love for Bluebeard. Bluebeard refuses, saying that they are private places not to be explored by others, and asking Judith to love him but ask no questions. Judith persists, and eventually prevails over his resistance.

The first door opens to reveal a torture chamber, stained with blood. Repelled, but then intrigued, Judith pushes on. Behind the second door is a storehouse of weapons, and behind the third a storehouse of riches. Bluebeard urges her on. Behind the fourth door is a secret garden of great beauty; behind the fifth, a window onto Bluebeard’s vast kingdom. All is now sunlit, but blood has stained the riches, watered the garden, and grim clouds throw blood-red shadows over Bluebeard’s kingdom.

Bluebeard pleads with her to stop: the castle is as bright as it can get, and will not get any brighter, but Judith refuses to be stopped after coming this far, and opens the penultimate sixth door, as a shadow passes over the castle. This is the first room that has not been somehow stained with blood; a silent silvery lake is all that lies within, “a lake of tears”. Bluebeard begs Judith to simply love him, and ask no more questions. The last door must be shut forever. But she persists, asking him about his former wives, and then accusing him of having murdered them, suggesting that their blood was the blood everywhere, that their tears were those that filled the lake, and that their bodies lie behind the last door. At this, Bluebeard hands over the last key.

Behind the door are Bluebeard’s three former wives, but still alive, dressed in crowns and jewellery. They emerge silently, and Bluebeard, overcome with emotion, prostrates himself before them and praises each in turn, finally turning to Judith and beginning to praise her as his fourth wife. She is horrified, begs him to stop, but it is too late. He dresses her in the jewellery they wear, which she finds exceedingly heavy. Her head drooping under the weight, she follows the other wives along a beam of moonlight through the seventh door. It closes behind her, and Bluebeard is left alone as all fades to total darkness.

For his essay Bell casts America as Bluebeard and black Americans as Judith. Then he labels all the great Civil Rights victories (the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) as akin to doors in Bluebeard’s castle: false improvements leading toward a truth too evil to comprehend.

Afrolantica, Part 19: The Black Sedition Papers Conspiracy

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Part 17: Doing the State Some Service

Part 18: Why Derrick Bell Saw Thurgood Marshall As a Sex Slave

The previous chapters revealed Afrolantica Legacies’ reliance on a conspiracy theory world view.  In the second chapter’s Marxist parable of the Citadel, Derrick Bell imagined a conspiracy to allow the advancement of a handful of “lowlanders” in order to deceive the masses. In the third chapter Bell defends the antisemitic conspiracy theorist Louis Farrakhan and advances his own version of the “Jews control the economy and will run you out of business if they want to” conspiracy. And yesterday the excerpt from the fifth chapter showed Bell’s embrace of Robert L. Allen’s conspiracy theory that whites in America had effectively “colonized” the black community, installing fake black leaders who would actually sabotage black interests.

For the sixth Afrolantica Legacy Bell goes all in on imaginary conspiracies.

Bell titles his Critical Race Theory fiction “The Black Sedition Papers” and describes a plot to use a series of studies by various “race traitors” to blame black Americans for their proletariat class status:

“Under the ground rules, the papers are to focus on black pathology, describing it in detail and condemning those afflicted with it.”

In the essay’s conclusion, Bell imagines an academic friend investigating the Black Sedition Papers conspiracy and reporting back to him on a text suspected of being part of the evil white scheme. He then lays out the strategy I’ve employed in this analysis of Afrolantica Legacies.

Afrolantica, Part 18: Why Derrick Bell Saw Thurgood Marshall As a Sex Slave

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Part 17: Doing the State Some Service

Following his full-throated defense of the Stalinist singer Paul Robeson, Derrick Bell chose to provide another icon with a less flattering portrayal. To illustrate the fifth Afrolantica Legacy, Bell borrowed Margaret Atwood’s “classic” 1986 Marxist feminist-dystopian novel The Handmaiden’s Tale. Throughout the essay Bell compares Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall to the novel’s protagonist Offred, a women kept as a sex slave in a nightmare future.

He does this to demonstrate that even though — in his view — Marshall’s Civil Rights victories failed to lift up black Americans, and even though racism will endure forever, we should keep up the hope like the hero of the novel and carry on in the “struggle” regardless because:

Bell needs an explanation for how the apparent improvement in black lives over the last 50 years is actually an illusion. He needs to reveal Marshall’s life work as fraudulent. He does so via a conspiracy theory mirroring the parable of the Citadel in the second Afrolanica Legacy.

From Page 130 Bell embraces the thesis of Robert L. Allen’s 1969 book Black Awakening in Capitalist America:

“… what we deem as progress measured by the number of blacks who have moved into management level positions, is quite similar to developments in colonial Africa and India. The colonizing countries maintained their control by establishing class divisions within the ranks of the indigenous peoples. A few able (and safe) individuals were permitted to move up in the ranks where they served as false symbols of what was possible for the subordinated masses.”

Juan Williams in June last year — responding to Ann Coulter’s book Demonic — discussed the divisions within the Civil Rights movement over tactics:

The left often has a simplistic view of the civil rights movement as monolithic. The truth is that Marshall and King represented very different approaches to ending the bitter history of segregation. Marshall favored using the law while King favored bold demonstrations to gain media attention.

History tells us that both the demonstrators and the lawyers played vital roles in bringing about the end of segregation in America. But Marshall’s more conservative view of how to create lasting social change is often forgotten because he never wore a dashiki or patronized the idea of race riots as helpful to achieving racial equality. He was seen by many of the 60’s activists as a boring, law and order, establishment judge who deeply believed in the Constitution, loved America and was a social conservative.

Afrolantica, Part 17: Doing the State Some Service

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Following the long defense of Louis Farrakhan’s antisemitism in the previous chapter, Derrick Bell presents an essay illustrating the fourth Afrolantica Legacy, another of the dogmas in his political religion:

For his proletariat martyr Bell names one of the saints of the faith. His title: “Paul Robeson: Doing the State Some Service.”

Here’s an excerpt from page 111:

There’s something chilling about Bell arranging his chapters in this way. The previous essay “Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews and Games Scapegoats Play” defended Louis Farrakhan and denied his antisemitism. Now in this chapter Bell holds up the Stalinist icon Paul Robeson as “one of our greatest heroes.”

Robeson too, had his own history of supporting lethal antisemitism. Wikipedia summarizes and even generously provides the justifications of Robeson’s defenders:

In June 1949, during the 150th anniversary celebration of the birth of Alexander Pushkin, Robeson visited the Soviet Union on a major tour including a concert at Tchaikovsky Hall. Concerned about the welfare of Jewish artists, Robeson insisted to Soviet officials that he meet with Itzik Feffer a few days earlier.^[14] Robeson had first met Feffer on July 8, 1943, at the largest pro-Soviet rally ever held in the United States, an event organized by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and chaired by Albert Einstein. Robeson then also got to know Solomon Mikhoels, the popular actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. Mikhoels also headed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union with Feffer as his second. After the rally, Robeson and his wife Essie had entertained Feffer and Mikhoels.

According to an account by Paul Robeson Jr told to Robeson biographer Martin Duberman,^[15] in the 1980s, Robeson was disturbed as to why he could not find his many Jewish friends when he returned to the U.S.S.R. in June 1949. After several inquires, Feffer was brought to Robeson’s hotel room by the State Police. He and Feffer were forced to communicate through hand gestures and notes because the room was bugged. Feffer indicated that Mikhoels had been murdered in 1948 by the secret police^[16] and intimated that he also was going to be killed. Feffer in fact was executed along with 14 other Jewish intellectuals three years later.^[17]

…

Upon returning to the United States, he denied any persecution of Jews and other political prisoners, stating that he “met Jewish people all over the place… I heard no word about it.”^[17] Historians Martin Duberman, Philip S Foner, Marie Seton, Paul Robeson Jr and Lloyd Brown concur that Robeson had a long standing mistrust of the US government and that he felt that criticism of the Soviet Union’s internal affairs by someone of his immense international popularity would only serve to shore up reactionary elements in the U.S. .^[28] Robeson is on record numerous times as stating that he felt the existence of a major socialist power like the USSR was a bulwark against Western European capitalist domination of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

According to Joshua Rubenstein’s book, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, Robeson also justified his silence on the grounds that any public criticism of the USSR would reinforce the authority of anti-Soviet elements in the United States which, he believed, wanted a preemptive war against the Soviet Union.^[28] A large number of Robeson biographers, including Martin Duberman, Philip S Foner, Marie Seton, Paul Robeson Jr and Lloyd Brown also concur with Robeson’s own words, that he felt that criticism of the Soviet Union by someone of his immense international popularity would only serve to shore up reactionary elements in the U.S., the same elements that had lifted his passport, blocked anti-lynching legislation, and maintained a racial climate in the United States that also allowed Jim Crow, impoverished living conditions for all races and a white supremacist domination of the US government to continue.

And recall in the previous Afrolantica post, one of my translations of a statement by progressive Jews who Bell had quoted to try and mask his antisemitism: “Translation: defending the progressive faith is more important than defending the Jewish faith. When the two conflict, Jews should embrace the former.”

National Review Fires John Derbyshire Over Racist Column

Editor-In-Chief Rich Lowry:

His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” — WFB

Afrolantica, Part 16: The Progressive Faith Vs The Jewish Faith

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

After “The Citadel,” the third Afrolantica legacy comes in “Shadowboxing: Blacks, Jews and Games Scapegoats Play,” a chapter I discussed previously in Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism. (The shootings of four Jews in Toulouse, France seemed an appropriate time to highlight the lethal effect of tolerating antisemitic ideologies.)

And so having already diagnosed the antisemitic views in the chapter, now let’s consider Bell’s bigotry in the context of his Marxism.

Why the indifference to antisemitism? For the same original reason as Karl Marx himself, because Judaism disrupts the establishment of utopia.

Here’s how Bell chooses to conclude the chapter on page 108, with a quotation from Albert Vorspan and David Saperstein:

Let’s translate the quote line by line:

We can find no safety in turning inward upon ourselves, severing our links with the general community.

Translation: More lethal antisemitism will come if Jews continue remaining Jews. Jewish identity must be watered down.

We can find safety only if we help America deal not only with the symptoms — hatred, rage, bigotry — but with the root problems of our society — slums, powerlessness, decay of our cities, and unemployment, which spawn the evils of bigotry and conflict.

Translation: To end antisemitism we must end crime and to end crime we must end economic inequality. (Vorspan and Saperstein appear to share Bell’s contention discussed in Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers.)

Our task as Jews must go beyond the defensive job of countering the attacks of anti-Semitism to helping bring about a just and peaceful society.

Translation: defending the progressive faith is more important than defending the Jewish faith. When the two conflict, Jews should embrace the former. And today in America the majority do.

The Huffington Post reported this week on continued Jewish support for Bell’s admirer, President Barack Obama:

More Jews (46 percent) named a “commitment to social equality” as the factor most important to their Jewish identity, followed by 20 percent who said “support for Israel” and 17 percent who said “religious observance.”

…

The poll also showed Jewish voters’ strong support for Obama. Twice as many said they would vote for Obama over a GOP candidate. That level of support is nearly unchanged from the same point during Obama’s first presidential run.

Kenneth Wald, a political science professor who studies Jewish voting patterns at the University of Florida, said he has heard the political chatter that U.S. Jews are so upset with Obama’s treatment of Israel that they will move away from their traditionally Democratic leanings and vote for a GOP challenger — but the survey doesn’t find evidence for that.

“About three out of four American Jews voted Democratic in 2008,” Wald said. “Something relatively similar is likely to occur in 2012.”

I would like to wish my Jewish friends a happy Passover this weekend. Thank you for keeping your tradition alive in spite of all the threats lined up against you and all the challenges that remain ahead.

Afrolantica, Part 15: The White Bourgeoisie Conspiracy to Dupe the Black Proletariat

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

On Page 72 Derrick Bell continues his Marxist parable, the ruler of the citadel conspires to dupe the lowlanders into believing they’re free when actually their oppression continues:

“By admitting a few of them slowly, we will appear fair and open-minded.”

“We will win… by admitting the error of our past policies. Only by ostensibly renouncing them, will we ensure their continued viability.”

Hmm… An advocate for the antisemitic cult leader Louis Farrakhan draws on conspiracy thinking to explain how so many black Americans could rise up in incorrigibly racist America. Surely no connection exists between the two opinions?

Stay tuned here at PJ Tatler for more on Bell’s attraction to conspiracism in the concluding installments of this guided tour through Afrolantica Legacies.

Related: Shelby Steele at the Wall Street Journal yesterday:

In fact Trayvon’s sad fate clearly sent a quiver of perverse happiness all across America’s civil rights establishment, and throughout the mainstream media as well. His death was vindication of the “poetic truth” that these establishments live by. Poetic truth is like poetic license where one breaks grammatical rules for effect. Better to break the rule than lose the effect. Poetic truth lies just a little; it bends the actual truth in order to highlight what it believes is a larger and more important truth.

The civil rights community and the liberal media live by the poetic truth that America is still a reflexively racist society, and that this remains the great barrier to black equality. But this “truth” has a lot of lie in it. America has greatly evolved since the 1960s. There are no longer any respectable advocates of racial segregation. And blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites.

Afrolantica, Part 14: The Marxist War Within the Multi-Racial Family

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

On page 61, the second Afrolantica Legacy begins, a parable titled “The Citadel” told to Professor Derrick Bell by his female idealization of himself, the civil rights lawyer-activist Geneva Crenshaw. (We also learn that actually Geneva was the alien prophetess Chiara from the previous chapter.) The story serves to illustrate the second of Bell’s dogmas: “Service in the cause of truth and justice is no less worthy of praise because it is misunderstood, misused, or condemned.”

The story depicts a world of class conflict: the rich residents of the Citadel oppress the noble commoners who live in the hills below, the so-called lowlanders. The Citadel’s current master, the iron-fisted Xercis, encounters opposition from his idealistic daughter Tamar who longs to end the abuse of the lowlanders.

Page 67 presents one of their arguments:

“the price of maintaining power over others is the continuing risk of their revolt. But we must abide by the teaching of our forebears. Whatever its cost, we must maintain dominance.”

Bell’s fairy tale reinvents the Marxist understanding of bourgeoisie vs proletariat into Citadel vs Lowlanders. This mythology of class warfare defining human existence — life as a zero-sum game where one “side” must always lose in order for another to benefit — serves as one of the foundational dogmas of his Critical Race Theory. “Blackness” and “Whiteness” remain locked in permanent conflict and we don’t need it spelled out which side professor Bell has cast as proletariat for his morality play.

Out in the real world there exists an often forgotten piece of “collateral damage” in this class war. Genuine victims, harmed by those inflaming racial divisions.

Afrolantica, Part 13: The Roots of the War on Meritocracy

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin 

From Page 50 of Afrolantica Legacies, an alien prophetess confirms Derrick Bell’s belief that tests scores also play their part in the white supremacist conspiracy:

The source Bell cites to support Chiara’s claim that “these pen and paper tests actually measure past opportunity better than future potential”: Susan Strum and Lani Guinier, “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal,” 84 California Law Review 953 (1996).

For a summary of Strum and Guinier’s views, consider a different article with a similar title published in 2000 in the Boston Review. The subtitle summarizes their objective:

Promoting diversity in education and employment requires us to rethink testing and “meritocracy.”

Related: See part 6 of the Afrolantica series for analysis of Bell’s attacks on meritocracy.

Here’s Srum and Guinier’s argument:

We think it is time to shift the terrain of debate. We need to situate the conversation about race, gender, and affirmative action in a wider account of democratic opportunity by refocusing attention from the contested periphery of the system of selection to its settled core. The present system measures merit through scores on paper-and-pencil tests. But this measure is fundamentally unfair. In the educational setting, it restricts opportunities for many poor and working-class Americans of all colors and genders who could otherwise obtain a better education. In the employment setting, it restricts access based on inadequate predictors of job performance. In short, it is neither fair nor functional in its distribution of opportunities for admission to higher education, entry-level hiring, and job promotion.

Question: if you need a high-risk, life-or-death operation would you choose the surgeon with the highest GPA or the one who made it in via affirmative action and just barely managed to graduate?

Here are some of the books on my to-read list in the coming months that relate to this subject:

Guilty of Being a Beautiful Black Boy Who Just Wanted Some Skittles

Here’s a screen capture of how The Nation chose to illustrate their Trayvon Martin editorial:

The progressive flagship embraces the teenager and attacks those who “smear” him by reporting the police and eyewitness accounts of the crime:

The Orlando Sentinel seized on police accounts that painted Martin as the real aggressor, shamelessly reporting that he had once been suspended from school “after being found with an empty marijuana baggie.” Reporters revealed he once spray-painted a locker, and they trolled his Facebook and Twitter accounts for hints of thuggish behavior. In an emotional press conference, Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, said, “They killed my son, and now they’re trying to kill his reputation.”

Last month a white, racist vigilante gunned down an innocent, hoodie-wearing black child with skittles in his pocket. If you had a son he’d look like Trayvon.

That narrative (half of which comes via the President) works to manipulate people’s emotions and inspire them to hate Republicans.

Trayvon the troubled teen with a history of lawlessness and a Twitter account glorifying the Thug Life? The back of George Zimmerman’s skull showed injuries in the recent video? Zimmerman was a Hispanic and registered Democrat?

Can’t have that. Where’s the fundraising potential for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in that media narrative?

But it’s too late. The train has already left the station. And once an icon of Marxist Martyrdom enters the pantheon of demi-gods then they’re there FOREVER, no matter what. Ron Radosh knows this better than anyone; check out this piece from him and Steven Usdin in The New Republic. The Nation still defended the Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as recently as 2010.

Progressives knew how to give those proletariat-martyrs the imaginary idol treatment too, as Nation editorial board member Tony Kushner and HBO delivered with Angels in America:

(R-rated language warning)

Marxists have played this game for a long time — hit people in the heart hard enough and you’ll stop the blood flow to their brain.

Afrolantica, Part 12: Critical Race Theory’s Distortion of Trayvon Martin

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

On page 52, Derrick Bell’s idol Chiara, the black martyr-goddess-alien prophet, continues delivering the Afrolantica Legacies, here blaming whites for the personal failings of a minority of black Americans’ embrace of cracker culture:

“But out of their frustration and despair, many of your people are turning to violence, though mostly against one another. And many more are doing violence to themselves.”

Recall that Bell blamed disappearing industrial jobs for inspiring inner city youth to sell crack. Here he identifies abstract feelings of “frustration and despair” as inspiring the nihilism of the gangbanger lifestyle and ghetto rap culture. To Bell, all black problems stem from the ongoing trauma of living in a white supremacist society. This foundational dogma of Critical Race Theory distorts believers’ ability to interpret reality. Every piece of new information must first go through the believer’s emotional conviction that a grand conspiracy (“The Man”) exists to protect racist white criminals and oppress innocent black males.

At The Huffington Post last night:

Newly released video of George Zimmerman at the Sanford Police Department the night he shot Trayvon Martin to death show the neighborhood watch volunteer without blood on his clothing or bruises on his face or head. His clean-shaven picture seems to contrast with the violent beating he told police he endured at the hands of Martin, 17, who Zimmerman said attacked him from behind.

The video, obtained by ABC News, appears inconsistent with Zimmerman’s recently leaked statement to police that he was in a death struggle with Martin before Zimmerman shot him in the chest in self-defense. Zimmerman told investigators that Martin jumped him from behind, punched him in the nose and pounded his head into a sidewalk, according to a police report first described by the Orlando Sentinal.

So was there a racist police conspiracy to deny justice to Trayvon?

Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 11: The Brown-Skinned Joan of Arc

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

In Part II of Afrolantica Legacies, Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell presents the seven essays and parables corresponding with the seven tenets of his political faith. The first narrative, titled “Chiara’s Enlightenment” illustrates the first of Bell’s racial dogmas:

Bell’s story describes a fictional encounter between himself and an alien named Chiara from the planet Nevus. This fantastic visitor traveled across the galaxy to earth in order to assure Bell of his affirmative action ideas’ enlightenment.

This chapter showcases some of the most obvious contradictions in Bell’s political theology.

On page 43 Bell reveals his adherence to Marxist pseudo-feminism, a doctrine that rejects — contrary to Biology 101 — the significance of innate differences in the genders:

But if gender means nothing — and if sex differences are just another tool the bourgeoisie use to oppress the proletariat — then why does Bell repeat on page 46 his belief that “black women will ultimately save our people”?

Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 10: Apocalyptic Prophet of Racial War?

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

From page 33, Derrick Bell in dialogue with his idealized version of himself, the female civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, now elevated to a prophetic goddess with supernatural powers:

“The power of prophesy does not guarantee conversion.”

At some level Bell knew that his ideas had more in common with religion than legal scholarship. He saw himself as a prophet laying the blueprints for the ideal society. The 28-year-old law students who opened their hearts and minds to him did so with the same mentality as the converts at a Billy Graham crusade, feeling an emotional, religious satisfaction they had never known in a secular household.

And now today we see faith in action; the viewers of MSNBC can articulate a more in-depth understanding of the Trayvon Martin shooting than those who witnessed it.

With the racial tensions rising in Florida while antisemitic demagogues feed the flames, note how political activism and religious devotion merge. The hoodie has now become an object to aid in worship, assisting the adherent in identifying with the new martyr of the permanent-victim class, the proletariat:

In an interview last week with Ion Mihai Pacepa by Madeleine Simon:

The Communists went to great lengths to make Marxism the only religion in every country where they seized political power. One of the first things I did on that memorable day of July 28, 1978, when I became a free man, was to fall to my knees and pray out loud, for the first time in more than a quarter of a century. It took me a while. It was not easy to find the right words to express my great joy and thanks to the good Lord.

From Weasel Zippers, via Donald Douglas at American Power, the New Black Panther Party’s call for mob violence:

The way prophesies work is not that one predicts what will happen, but rather what one will make happen.

“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon…”

Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 9: The Birth of ‘Blackness’

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

From Page 28 of Afrolantica Legacies, the conclusion of Geneva Crenshaw’s response to Bill Clinton’s imaginary speech:

“Blackness is a concept distilled from the degradation of slavery and the exploitation of racism. It is a reminder that black and odious are not identical terms. The concept of blackness reassures us that we are worthy, despite the hostility to our presence we endure, the insensitivity to our pain we abide, and the inner rage we deflect — all too often on ourselves.”

Derrick Bell believed racism to be a permanent problem ingrained into the documents defining the American Idea. In this passage we begin to understand more why. His identity as a black man depends on understanding himself and “his people” as a class of permanent victims. In adopting the Marxist theology of human history as continued variations of proletariat vs bourgeoisie struggle, Bell designated his “blackness” as relegating him to a state of ongoing cultural warfare. (More on Bell’s Marxism and his embrace of Communist icon Paul Robeson in coming posts…)

Here Bell admits that the concept of “blackness” serves as an emotional crutch to “reassure us that we are worthy” and calm “the inner rage.” (Perhaps the kinds of feelings generated through knowing and admitting you’re a “nobody among world famous intellectuals”?)

Why is it necessary to carry around symbols of perpetual victimhood? Because as long as you’re a victim you’re not responsible for your situation in life and you’re powerless to fix it. Luck is all that matters, save when social justice (via affirmative action and reparations for slavery) can tip the imaginary scale back into balance.

Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 8: We Have a Right to Your Property

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

On page 22, Geneva Crenshaw (Bell’s idealized proponent of his Critical Race Theory theology) responds to the fictional speech given by President Clinton:

“…whites have chosen to protect their sense of belonging based on skin color over alliances with blacks that would have improved all of our lives.”

Thus, the capitalist system bears responsibility for a minority of minorities living in poverty. And since capitalism produces these disparities in racial achievements, capitalism itself is racist. (Bell rejects race-neutral and cultural explanations for inner city pathology.) Because free market economies lead to racist conclusions, this means that anyone who isn’t a socialist is a racist whether they realize it or not.

“We have not been passive in seeking our rights but even our best efforts seem to translate into more property for whites and more promises for blacks.”

When Bell refers to “seeking our rights” here he uses the term in the same way as Barack Obama and today’s mainstream Democrats, in the context of what government “must do on your behalf.” Rights = other people’s property that they acquired by luck and that progressives must redistribute to counteract the innate, permanent racism in American society. You have a Right for someone else to pay for your health care. You have a Right to have someone else supply your birth control pills.

Of course this political tradition has deeper roots in the Democratic Party than the Alinskyite infiltration of Obama’s cohort…

Touring Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica, Part 7: Unemployment Creates Crack Dealers

Part 1: A Guided Tour Through Derrick Bell’s Afrolantica Legacies

Part 2: A ‘Euphoria of Freedom’

Part 3: What Could it Mean to Be White?

Part 4: The Wages of Antisemitism

Part 5: Thomas Jefferson, A Symbol of American Racism

Part 6: Why Meritocracy Must Die

Just as Professor Derrick Bell blamed Jews for inspiring antisemitism, he also pointed the finger at disappearing industrial jobs to explain away inner city criminal culture:

… it is massive unemployment and not the lack of family values that has devasated so many black communities, placed one-third of young men — denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills — in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses.

After my previous post on Afrolantica Legacies featured a video of Thomas Sowell revealing Bell acknowledged his inexperience, a question came to mind: how does Bell’s affirmative action experience at Harvard mirror Barack Obama’s?