Disney Goes Woker!

Retitled Snow White and the 7 Magical Creatures.
Wonder what would happen if a white guy played
Shaka Zulu in a movie? Almost as ludicrous as German
Max Von Sydow playing Jesus - a Jew if you remember.
Jesus with a  German accent! What happened to the
uproar about cultural appropriation?

 

Well, Disney goes even more woke with a version of Snow White that should be retitled Snow "Brown" and the 7 "Magical Creatures". So long Caucasian German princess. Goodbye 6 of the 7 dwarfs. That's put 6 diminutive actors out of a job. Kind of sucks, but then it was Peter Dinklage's idea. Sucks for him, though. No work for Dinklage either. And he'd have made a lovely Grumpy.

Seems there's only one race going to be canceled in the New Disneyworld Order. Seems a little lop-sided to take one culture's children's stories and "appropriate" them wholesale. There are plenty of stories in every culture that could benefit from the Disney touch. They've already demonstrated that they don't have to depend entirely on the Brother's Grimm. They did Jungle Book, Mulan, Lion King, Kung Fu Panda, Coco and others. Plenty of great stories there. 

It seems a shame that a message is being sent to the kids of one culture that their traditional stories aren't good enough unless they are adjusted to a different, less objectionable ethnicity than their own. Seems, if not racist, at least...........well no. It's definitely racist. But then what do you expect from the staunch allies of the party that fully embraced progressivism in the first place? The party of Jim Crow, the KKK, the Civil War, slavery, lynchings, segregation and separate but unequal. Seems they need at least one race to discriminate against. But like their white supremacist political roots, they have to divide the dominant new "minority" into liberal whites and conservative whites.

And apparently it's us conservative honkies that are the source of everyone's problems.

© 2023 by Tom King

Switch the Names of the Parties and Who Do You Think Would NOT Have Lived this Down

History Note:

1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre

In 1868, St. Bernard Parish was home to one of the deadliest massacres in Louisiana history. The St. Bernard Parish massacre occurred during the Reconstruction era, days before the Presidential election of 1868. As black men gained the right to vote, white Democrats of the parish feared losing their majority. Armed groups mobilized to violently silence these recently emancipated voters to win the election in favor of Democrat Horatio Seymour over Republican Ulysses S. Grant. A Seymour victory meant the end of Reconstruction over the South and the return of Louisiana to home rule. Many freedmen were dragged from their homes and murdered. Others fled to the cane fields to hide from the perpetrators.

The use of violence to suppress Republican votes was successful. Grant only received one vote from St. Bernard Parish, despite having a Republican majority. The reported number of freedmen killed varies from 35 to 135; the number of whites killed was two (one was killed in an attempt to help the victims)

© Excerpt from Wikipedia  

The mass murder of blacks by Louisiana Democrats has practically disappeared from history. If you asked most college students these days, which political party was responsible for the massacre, who do you suppose they would say was to blame?

You KNOW who would be blamed....

The Presuppositions of the System: Keeping People Passive

My Facebook account is restricted again*. I've discovered a new thing you can't talk about. As I've scanned the net lately, there has been a burst of actual disinformation. Even Wikipedia has been hit with efforts to show that Republicans and Democrats "switched" policies, especially on the subject of race. The discredited Big Switch Theory which posits that the entire Democrat Party suddenly saw the light in the 60s and rejected their racist past and Republicans suddenly embraced it, has risen from the almost dead and is bleeding into the history books and encyclopedias. 

The trouble with this narrative is that Republicans have continued until the present day to promote racial equality. They were solidly in favor of the Civil Rights Bill. Democrats had to be bullied into it by LBJ who told them that if they did, that then the n!@#$% (his word) would vote for the Democrat Party for the next 200 years. Democrats at the time referred to it as the "Nigger Bill" among themselves. I used the word deliberately for its shock value so as not to gloss over the cold-bloodedness of the Democrats of the time. They appear hardly on the verge of a sudden conversion to racial holiness. 

Of 60 openly racist Dixiecrats in the House and Senate, 59 of them remained in office for 10 to 30 more years. The only one that went Republican did so after it was revealed that he had a black girlfriend and a daughter by her. So he had already decided black people, at least black women, weren't so subhuman.

The alterations to Wikipedia entries, blogs, articles and historical websites have tended to push the narrative of so-called Republican racism back to the 1920s, adding all sorts of sinister behavior to "facts" about Republicans and to minimize Democrat support for racism in the 20th century. The strategy seems to be to recast Democrats as actually heroes, standing against racism in the early Progressive era. There's little historical evidence for that. The one major Democrat figure who began eliminating racial segregation after WWII was Harry Truman. Eisenhower continued to press against the racist policies of the day. Kennedy pushed for Civil Rights. Both Truman and Kennedy wouldn't last 10 minutes in today's Democrat Party which has doubled down on racial paternalism in a thinly veiled pseudo-egalitarianism that still maintains it's old white superiority over minorities who they firmly believe need the protection and guidance of the white plantation owner class of Democrat.

Noam Chomsky explains above how that tactic works. A big part of the tactic is to limit what you can talk about. At this point Facebook is limiting any talk of mid 20th century Democrat racism or the racist history of the Democrat Party. Part of this complex power grab is a strategy to hide Democrat racism and to find anything they can dig up to paint Republicans as the new racists and thus insure for themselves the power to effectively protect their own wealth and power.

 © 2022 by Tom King

* I've been released from one of 5 types of restriction. The other 4 appear to be designed to prevent my infecting others with my disinformation (which although true makes Democrats look bad). I'm spending more time on other social media and I don't care what Facebook is doing toward cracking down on conservative thought. Like the Democrat party, I think the technocracy is over-playing its hand. It's a rerun of 1860 except this time the South has developed a little sense. 2024 will be an interesting year.

Time for Some Reparations.........for Christians

"

The infamous booing of the use of the word God

 I am warming to this whole idea of reparations.  I think there are three groups that I believe have a case for demanding reparations, or at least filing a lawsuit.  They are in order of victimhood.

1. Black folk. No other group in American history have been persecuted, abused and enslaved like African-Americans. The treatment was horrific and went on for many many years after the Civil War. This mistreatment was committed by an organized party of Americans who should be forced to pay reparations for their past crimes.
2. Illegal Immigrants. This group of people have been lured to the United States, shoved into villages of tar paper shacks without running water, electricity or sewerage (colonias). They have been employed to do menial hard labor and exploited mercilessly for ages. Again this system has been perpetrated for profit by an organized party of Americans who should be forced to pay reparations for this ongoing crime.
3. Christians. Bible-believing Christians have been the target of hate speech, loss of employment, marginalization and libel by media personalities and public figures. This has been perpetrated by a specific party of Americans in an attempt to oppress this American minority group

Chief Cochran

Case in Point:  Kelvin J. Cochran was fired from his job as fire chief of the city of Atlanta, Georgia. The reason? On his own time and not in any connection with the city, Cochran wrote a book that mentioned in a couple of paragraphs, the Biblical position on homosexuality. The chief was investigated and the panel found he had committed no acts of discrimination. Cochran had worked for President Obama as United States Fire Administrator, the highest fire-fighting position in the country. The man was the poster boy for tolerance. He started programs in every administration position in which he served to end racial and sexual intolerance, sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis of race and sexual preference.

Didn't matter; they fired him anyway.

Apparently if you are a Christian and you write a book for a Men's Bible Study group that mentions that homosexual behavior is considered a sin, you have committed the unpardonable sin in a Democrat run town like Atlanta. Chief Cochran's beliefs are, according to mayor Kasim Reed, unforgivable in a liberal Democrat-run city. Public officials who use political correctness as a bludgeon against conservatives (which this guy is not) and against Christians (which this guy is), cannot allow such ideas to creep in to society. The good old Washington Post claimed Cochran's actual sin was "distributing the book to employees" and offered vague "proof" that some employees of the Atlanta Fire Department had "seen" the book and complained. No mention was made as to whether those employees were Christians or in the Chief's off work men's Bible study group. Just the fact that some copies of the book found their way into the hands of some employees apparently was enough to get the chief accused of brainwashing his employees into.........what? Lynching some queer folk? Everything the chief did in his official capacity spoke against discrimination on any basis other than competence as a firefighter - not that requiring competence might not set off some social justice warriors, though. The courts have since ruled against the city in Cochran's favor.

To say homosexual behavior is a sin is unforgivable to the "progressive" left. It doesn't matter whether you discriminate against such people or not. Believing something the left wishes to promote in order to consolidate their power, is a thought crime. Apparently, the narrative is that one cannot believe homosexual behavior is wrong and just go out and suddenly want to lynch gay people. It matters not that we horrible Christians work alongside people every day who, according to the Bible, are sinning by committing adultery, being disrespectful to their parents, stealing, killing, lying, coveting, failing to keep the Sabbath, worshiping idols or kneeling to graven images, or claiming to be a Christian and thinking you can speak on his behalf (taking his name in vain). Evidently, only certain types of sin make us go crazy. Well that's a stupid idea with no basis in fact.

Hosing black folks on orders of which party do you suppose?

Do some despicable people mistreat others, lynch, murder and mistreat people on the basis of their race, religion or sexual orientation? Yes, of course they do. We call those people "bullies". They are an ongoing problem. If they aren't beating up black folks, they beat up on gay folks, or kids who go to church or Italians, or Irish, or Hispanics or old white people or whoever is the target du jour.  Right now, conservative Christians seem to be popular with bullies.

We, Christians, manage to get along with all kinds of sinners every day. We believe that Jesus tells us to treat others the way we want to be treated - no exceptions. If you can't do that, then you're going to hell. It's not negotiable. No unrepentant bullies allowed in heaven.  yet, the narrative that's being promoted is that unless you say LGBTQLSMFT or whatever, is okey dokey, you must be discriminating an you are an intolerant bigot. 

But progressives demands we all treat the alternative gender community as "special", rather like many of us treat developmentally disabled folk. That seems to me to be downright paternalistic. I know I'd get pretty sick of people running around telling people to mind their P's and Q's every time I stepped to within earshot. I'm not a child and neither are the people who engage in alternative sexual practices. If you wish to sin, do so. Don't stomp your feet like a child and demand that people pat you on the head and tell you what a good boy (or girl or transgender, lesbian, gay, queer, etc.) you are. If you want to demand something, demand to be treated like a fully functioning grownup with the right to commit any sort of sin you want to. It's a free country, or at least it is where the PC police aren't running things..

The Washington Post, a Democrat Party mouthpiece claims this never happened.

What I'm thinking is that we should start calling people bigots who discriminate against blacks, illegal immigrants, and Christians. We should all claim collective victimhood and sue the crap out of the Democrat party. To be fair, the Washington Post, good leftist newspaper that it is claims it really was Republicans more than Democrats who supported the Klan and Jim Crow laws. They go to great lengths in a recent article to absolve the Democrat party of all association with the 1924 Democrat Convention, nicknamed the Klanbake, in the media and among loyal Klan members who were rather proud of the impact they had on the convention. I grew up in the South where Republicans were called "nigger-lovers". And we were. I know I was. Jesus told me to love everybody. He never mentioned anything about skin color.

I really do think black folk in particular ought to sue the party responsible. So which party was responsible primarily for slavery, Jim Crow laws, separate bathrooms and fountains and rampant discrimination that continued for 100 years past the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Which party fought a bloody Civil War to protect its "right" to hold it's fellow human beings in bondage for fun and profit?  Who could it have been?
 In fact, anybody who has ever been discriminated against by officials of the Democrat part should all get together and sue the Democrat Party for reparations. I think that would be just a lovely idea!

© 2018 by Tom King

Trump Catches Flack for Potential Johnson Pardon

Jack Johnson in his prime

President Trump is getting flack from the left for considering a pardon of black boxing great Jack Johnson who was convicted of transporting a (white) woman across state lines for immoral purposes under the Mann Act. Although the law was created supposedly to stop forced sexual slavery of women, the phrase "immoral purpose" in the statute allowed an extremely broad application of the law. A later United States Supreme Court ruling in Caminetti v. United States (1917), held that "illicit fornication", even when consensual, constituted an "immoral purpose."* Johnson had beaten white opponents and even married a white woman, unforgivable sins in the Democrat South. So when he crossed a state line with a white woman (the woman he later married), he was arrested and prosecuted. Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury in June 1913,^** despite the fact that the incidents used to convict him took place before passage of the Mann Act., eventually serving time in Leavenworth. Several Republican congresses have sent bills to various presidents urging a pardon for Johnson, even after a movie about him came out. Even Democrats urged President Obama to pardon Johnson posthumously, but he refused. 

The ever-progressive New York Times at the time wrote this of a fight between Jack Johnson and a white opponent. "If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors."

Johnson was hardly a moral man or a terribly admirable man. He grew up in a mixed race community in Galveston, Texas where whites and blacks mingled freely. White moms gave him cookies and he failed to learn as a child that he was inferior to whites. This put him at odds with much of society during the Jim Crow era during which he regularly beat white opponents. Perhaps Trump should pardon him for that. It is, after all, difficult to accept being abused and looked down on because you believe you are as good as Democrats and white folk and refuse to step and fetch-it for "progressives" who think people of your color are racially inferior and need to be "taken care of" (See progressive movement founding father HG Wells' "History of the World").

Johnson's conviction was certainly racially motivated and I agree with Sylvester Stallone who has urged Donald Trump to pardon Johnson. The law was not kind to uppity black folk in those days and Johnson's pardon is long overdue. Someone should have done it a long time ago. It was a monstrous miscarriage of justice

© 2018 by Tom King

* https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-passes-mann-act
** "Cleveland Advocate 2 October 1920". Dbs.ohiohistory.org. Retrieved September 30, 2014.

It's Over When the Fat Divas Kneel...

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm about done with the NFL!  They have, I believe, reached a tipping point beyond which there may be no return and no forgiveness. Football fans tend to not be precious snowflakes, though some of the players appear to have gone over to the flakey side.

Even my beloved Dallas Cowboys took a knee in a copout gesture, then stood for the national anthem with arms locked. I'm a more than a little disappointed in Jerry Jones the Dallas owner, but then that's not anything new with me.

What the heck is there to protest? The biggest complaint from a black person I've heard is that they were stopped by cops for being the wrong color. So what? I've been stopped for being white while driving in a black neighborhood in South Dallas. Two cops stopped my wife and I - one black cop and one white one. They said we were not the sort of people usually driving in that neighborhood - meaning we where white.  These guys are making tens of millions per year. They are in no way oppressed and, truth is, there is nowhere near the oppression in America that this protest seems to believe there is.

Most of this racism rabble-rousing is a product of 8 years of Barak Obama's efforts to secure all-power for the Democrat Party. It is critical for progressives to stir up feelings of resentment, anger and rage. It matters not if the object of all this unfocused rage is anything real, just so it's rage against anyone or any thing that supports the Constitution and the rights outlined in it.

You want to get mad about slavery and racism, how about getting mad about sex-trafficking? It's vastly more common in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe and South America. There's actual slavery still common throughout the Middle-East and parts of Asia. Get mad about places where there is real misery.

And how about giving white people a break okay? We're trying. How long are those of us who stood with Civil Rights marchers and who have spoken out against racism all our lives going to be called racists? You want to end racism? Then let it end for crying out loud. If you treat others, including white people the way you want to be treated, you marginalize actual racists and take away their power. By making the pitiful handful of actual racists into a national bugaboo, all you do is give them power they don't deserve and you foment a race war.

I'm tired of watching my country slide inexorably toward Marxism. It always ends up badly and always people wind up dying in large numbers. Inevitably, abuses like racism, sexism and oppression comes in spades at the hands of the Dear Leaders that inevitably wind up in charge of the whole shootin' match. As someone who has always treated my black brothers and sisters with respect and as equals, I find it hard to feel all warm and fuzzy about being told I'm a congenital racist by a bunch of overpaid over-sized, steroid stuffed spoiled brats who's sole claim to the moral high ground is that they play a children's game professionally.

I miss the days of Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi, Bob Lily and Jethro Pugh, Don Meredith and Bob Hayes, Roger Staubach and Drew Pearson, Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris, Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith. The NFL used to teach us that racism was stupid. Now it berates fans like the league is some bitchy old nanny. We come to the stadium to see a ball game, not to be scolded like naughty children. They should remember that before they become bankrupt and go away altogether and we're forced to watch soccer or golf.

© 2017 by Tom King

The Fourth at Pimlico - Answering the Race Question

Arlo Guthrie once opined that, "It's the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement and all you gotta do to join is sing it when it comes 'round on the guitar."  Arlo had an objection to the Vietnam War so he made fun of those who were carrying it out. Arlo's was a slightly different objection to the one I had. Arlo wanted us to come home. I wanted us to go ahead and win it. Arlo got his wish. I didn't. Two million South Vietnamese died at the hands of their new government after we abandoned them. So much for peace and love.

Now we have a new war going and I'm rapidly becoming sick of it. It's not a war of liberation in Afghanistan or some skirmish in Yugoslavia to distract from the president's having got caught with his pants unzipped and an intern under the Oval Office desk. It's an uncivil war being fomented by idiots on the extreme ends of both political ideologies and it's time to apply a little ridicule and bring this to an end. Arlo had the right idea for how to go about ending a war, even if he was misguided as to how to do it so two million people wouldn't be exterminated.

It's time to make fun of the race war! A friend the other day claimed white people like me don't understand racism. "Have you ever been pulled over by a cop for being white?" he asked.

Well, yes, I have. It was 1am and my wife and I were cruising through South Dallas. Two cops, one black and one white pulled us over for being white and driving through a black neighborhood. I was polite to the officers and so they didn't search my car. Had I been a bit belligerent or been unable to produce ID, I'd likely have had to pop the trunk. They apologized and admitted they'd stopped me for being white in a black neighborhood.  In our battered, 1963 Ford, we apparently looked suspicious.

I don't believe in "races" as generally defined by political ideologues. Genetically speaking, there is but one race here at the top of the mammalian intellectual pyramid as far as I'm concerned.  That's the human race. Oh, for sure we have different breeds like dogs do.  Dogs come in chocolate, white, brown, spotted and striped varieties. Humans come in black, brown, tan, pink and varying shades of white (if you are an albino and lack any pigment whatever), off-white, tan, and red. Someone the other day accused me of being "born white".  Actually, I wasn't. I was born red. I was really unhappy that the doc dragged me out of my nice warm place and whacked me on the butt. I screamed at him till I turned a nice cherry red color. My tint actually changes with the seasons. I run from an off-white in winter to a pale red in spring and fall when my allergies kick in. In the summer I'm a nice tan color. There's a skylight over my shower, so I get some very nice all over sun if I shower between 10am and 2pm.

I think I'm going to initiate my own little anti-racism movement and here's all you've got to do to join. If you'd like you can wait till it comes 'round on the guitar. Here's what I propose. When you fill out your next government or medical form or some survey, and they ask what "race" you are, give them a smart-alec answer.  Here are a few suggestions:

Race (check one):

• NASCAR
• Formula I
• The Mile Relay
• The Third at Belmont
• The Fourth at Pimlico
• The 200 Meter Free Style
• Slot Cars
• Hot Dog Eating
• Kayak slalom 
• Steeplechase
• The 220 High Hurdles

Or perhaps we should all just tick off the "Other" box and simply write Human.

© 2017 by Tom King

Exploiting the Injuns - Again!

Liberal environmentalists hijack Native American issue.
That's them back there in the crowd..

Well, once again, the white man is exploiting the first peoples.  And where better to do so than in the hills of South Dakota where we're seeing video after video of poor downtrodden native Americans, often in colorful Injun dress, weeping over the evil being done to them by the terrible white Republicans who want to poison their water and take their land?

Okay, before you start in on me, I can use the word "Injun" - it's allowed. If black people can use the n-word to refer to themselves, then I can use the "i" word. I have way more Cherokee blood in me than Elizabeth Warren has in her pasty white self. One of my great grandmother was half or a quarter native American and she wasn't the only one. I know this because the racist side of my family didn't allow you to talk about it. They would marry Injun women; they just didn't like to talk about it. 

I use the word "Injun" because it was often used to refer to my ancestors by the sorts of white supremacist racists that created the KKK, Jim Crow laws, hosed Dr. Martin Luther King, and fought a bloody civil war to preserve their right to oppress black people. Instead of Injuns, however, or "redskins", today's racists refer to them in a paternalistic effort to protect their delicate feelings as "native Americans" or "first peoples". Today's racists have a much better public relations/propaganda department than the pre-1960s Democrats did.

Honestly, you should be very wary of stories like the one about the oppression of first Americans in the Dakotas. Environmentalist groups jumped on the Native American connection to the pipeline story because it was great propaganda for the progressive/socialist/environmentalist cause. Slate inadvertently lifted the lid on the environmentalist agenda in a recent article. The environmental lobby is on the case. Busloads of outside agitators have been brought in specifically to initiate a confrontation with police and generate footage for the media. The actual "peaceful" protestors have been caught up in violence initiated by white racist outside agitators from the radical environmentalist movement who view native Americans as a simple, therefore easy to manipulate, people and useful for propaganda purposes.

It's not that the tribes don't have a complaint. They clearly do and as in past cases the native Americans have a legal remedy and have won their cases where they were in the right. Let's face it, Americans really feel guilty about how some (not all) of our ancestors treated the first peoples (see I too can be politically correct). But there are better ways to solve this problem than to turn it into a referendum on whether or not we should use fossil fuels. That's not a native American issue. It's the issue du jour for liberal white progressives seeking to push a complex socialist agenda of their own. Given the history of socialism's treatment of native peoples, the native American community might want to choose their allies a little more carefully.

Some facts you should know.

1. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved this pipeline project after doing an environmental impact study as well as an archaeological study, but, due to objections from the native American community have initiated a review of the both impact studies before the pipeline crosses the river. This was worked out after the tribes filed complaints and made requests to halt the project till further studies could be done. General Custer did not ride in and lead the bulldozers at sword point through Indian villages and burial grounds as some of the more hysterical headlines would lead you to believe. Even Slate admitted that there were better ways for the tribes to negotiate this issue. 
2. The pipeline is not on reservation land, but crosses the river above the reservation. Pictures of bulldozers ripping up Indian burial grounds are largely fake. They are pictures of bulldozers gleaned from the web of construction projects hundreds and even thousands of miles away or along other areas of the pipeline project not disputed.
3. The pipeline is a safer alternative for transporting oil (fracked or otherwise) than transporting it on trains. Trains derail with alarming frequency as our transportation infrastructure has deteriorated under a Democrat administration obsessed with social programs designed to attract new Democrat voters. And derailed oil cars make a frightful environmental mess.
4. Fracking gets brought up because it's the latest environmentalist buzz word for generating nameless horror out of nothing. The oil being pumped out of the ground is by no means largely fracked.
5. The violent agitators who have triggered the government response are largely white outside agitators shipped in for just that purpose. It's an old communist revolutionary's trick.
6. The complaints about violent government and police thuggery are coming from the same people who want to disarm the entire populace leaving only those same government "thugs" they are complaining about to be the only ones with weapons against an unarmed and helpless "proletariat". This is not about government bullying. It's about furthering an agenda in which the political elites have enough power to bully everyone without fear of pushback. They just need us to vote the right way and images of oppressed peaceful native Americans is a handy tool to get us to do that.

White liberal environmentalists provide paternalistic
support for poor helpless native Americans.
At least that's what they want you to believe.

I use the term proletariat because progressive socialist elitists see people as a big old stupid herd to be controlled for their own good. This generation of collectivists is a little more subtle than their racist forebears, the eugenicists and Democrats. They are still intent on separating us by race, but they are calling it multiculturalism and asking us to herd ourselves into separate racial pens. It's a sort of political breeding program designed to weed out the troublesome.

The collectivist left and their environmentalist toadies are pressing for a society in which only the self-styled smart leaders have guns and troops while we give up our own means of self-defense should our leaders dare to impinge upon our liberties. What a wonderful world that will be!  The progressive dream is a world in which the ignorant masses are herded into cities where they can be watched by an armed government, onto public transportation where their movements can be tracked, into government healthcare monitored by the IRS in order to better decide who is worth spending healthcare dollars on, and into government jobs (all jobs are to eventually become government jobs).  The idea is that we will all be generally treated as nearly the same as possible, much like your mother tried to do when you were a toddler. 

Our elite smart people leaders believe that equality and fairness is the equivalent of sameness. It's the best they can do in order to be able to manage something as complex as a nation's people and economy. It's an old plan that dates back to ancient times. You have a noble special class that runs things and a vast peasantry to do the work. Unfortunately for the peasants, what this ancient scheme always winds up doing is creating a vast shared misery for the peons who serving the lords and ladies of the elite classes in their shiny castles.

The left is using our emotions and propaganda stunts like this one and the black lives matter riots to gradually nudge us into the corrals and sheep pens they are building for us. Even more ironic, they are using our own money to do it. Our taxes are building the social slaughterhouses they will use against us to make us less troublesome. The self-styled intelligent environmentalist elite wish to vastly reduce the number of people on the earth. Ideally, there would be enough left in the collectives to serve the needs of the leader class and leave vast stretches of the planet to return to "nature", the new god that they claim to worship.

In reality, in the narcissistic world of the "progressive", the only gods they worship are themselves. It dates back to Eden and the first lie. "Eat of this fruit and you will be like gods," said Satan, who was, by the way, the first "progressive" and the first socialist. He has always disagreed with God on the issue of free will. Throughout history, the dark one has shown that he believes that external control of the human race is essential to peace and safety and his own twisted idea of perfection.

In concert with Lucifer's original population management theories, the progressive movement seeks to create a heaven on Earth without the bother of, as Donald Trump memorably put it, "....having to bring God into it." The model embraces Darwin's survival of the fittest evolutionary model, BF Skinner's idea that external rewards and punishment, properly applied, can make people into whatever we want, and Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Basically the Marxist theory is this:

• Some people are genetically better than others and should rightfully rise to a position of leadership over the masses. (Darwin) These persons should work to eliminate genetic types that are proven to be undesirable through abortion, population control, and in extreme cases, genocide.
• It is possible to make people better through the application of law and by other external means. (Skinner). That's why socialism is always big on re-education camps, for if you disagree with the collective, you by definition, don't understand the goodness and wisdom of the collective (i.e. government).
• If you provide people's basic needs in an orderly way, they will naturally be happy and seek to be productive for the good of the collective. (Maslow) This belief explains why it's always a mystery to socialists when the worker class quits doing any sort of quality work and the economy collapses. The basic food, housing and crappy medical care was, according to the ideology, supposed to make the masses happy, productive and content.

We face a looming future in which for the next four years we are likely to be led by either an open socialist or a closet socialist, both of whom are anxious to test the power of government to do what they believe God has failed to do - create an Earthly Utopia. Either way the power of the government will grow stronger. The power of the people to exercise self-determination will fade away.

I believe we are in the final days of Earth's history. I am not afraid. Even so, come Lord Jesus is my prayer. I am ready to become a citizen of a New Earth in which freedom, love, joy, peace and plenty reign and death is no more - a land without governors, presidents, senators, congressmen, regulators and tax collectors. For eternity, no more filing 1040s. How cool is that?

God bless you all.

© 2016 by Tom King

Why the "Star Spangled Banner" is NOT Racist!

Enough blood's been shed for your freedom - stand up out of respect!

There are four verses to the national anthem. None of them are racist. For the most part we stop singing after the first anyway, but there is no other reason for this than that a national anthem should not delay the baseball, football or basketball game, nor delay the president's speech or the flyover by the Air Force.

Lately, however, a line from one of the unsung verses has been used as an excuse for sitting down during the playing of the anthem by Americans concerned with institutionalized (you guessed it) RACISM in America.  Before you make assumptions about racism in our nation's anthem, you should perhaps read it for yourself.  Here's the "offensive" verse.

TRIGGER WARNING:  The Star Spangled Banner was written by a man with some education who used words and grammatical constructions suitable for reading by other educated folk - high school or maybe college level for our latest flocks of high school graduates more probably. So if you read at a fourth grade level, the only thing you are going to pick up in this verse of the anthem is that it uses the "S" word and will merrily jump to conclusions from there. I have added explanatory comments in italics for those of you from Rio Linda.

Verse 3

• And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, (he means the British Army)
• That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
• A home and a Country should leave us no more? (he means they want to defeat the USA)
• Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.(i.e. patriot blood has purified the stain on America's honor left by the British attacks)
• No refuge could save the hireling and slave (he's not talking about black people - see below)
• From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,(from getting their fuzzy butt's kicked)
• And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
• O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

 YES!  The infamous third verse of the national anthem does use the "S" word. In their desperate search for trigger words that wound their delicate sensibilities, the precious snowflakes who make up the Progressive Left automatically assume that when Key said "SLAVES" that the verse is racist. 

IT IS NOT! 

The slaves in question (and hirelings) that Francis Scott Key was referring to were not American negroes enslaved throughout the South.  Key was talking about the mercenary and conscripted forces of the British Army who were conscripted out of their colonies and conquests. None of these "slaves" to the British were American Negroes nor can be understood as such. Scott never meant for the term "slaves" to be construed this way.

Don't you love the way progressives get all animated over trigger words like "slave" as though only black people can be slaves?  I mean, how racist is it to assume that only black people can be slaves? This meaning was not inherent in how we used the word slaves back in Key's day. In the early days of the United States, anyone who was compelled to obey a tyrant, would be considered a slave no matter what color they were. The British Army often used conscripted troops, but to the American way of thinking, no one who served a tyrant, however willingly, could be consider any less than a slave.

The US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are not documents that allow much room for slavery anyway. Despite compromises within the Constitution over how to count slaves in apportioning congressional districts, there was such a disconnect between the high language of the preamble and the Bill of Rights that the abolition of slavery was an inevitability, built into the bones of the document itself.

In fact, years later at the outbreak of the Civil War, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens in his famous "Cornerstone Speech", argued that secession was necessary to preserve the South's "peculiar institution" (slavery). Stephens argued that the US Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of races". He claimed that because the Negro wasn't equal to the whites, the South must, therefore, secede or see slavery inevitably abolished. Yes, it took a while, but, in the end, the purpose of the Founders, equality of all men, was achieved. Though the principle of racial equality was established, again it took more bloodshed, and once again, the blood of patriots helped wash away the stain upon our national honor - or at least should have.

Once again, however, people in power wish to preserve the appearance of a gulf between Americans based on race as a way to keep a racial minority bound to the Democrat plantation. These "progressive" leaders attempt prove that there is such a gulf by claiming racism is so bad that black college students, for instance, should be segregated by skin color to protect them from having their feelings hurt.

Does anyone besides me hear the echoes of ancient bigotry in a policy like that. And we conservatives are faced with it on the extreme ends of our own political ideology. The alt/right Americans (many of whom support Donald Trump) who call decent Christian conservatives "cuckservatives" and race traitors are no better than their paternalistic elitist brethren on the left. They've swung so far to the right they have bumped butts with the racist Progressive left around on the far side of the Earth. That we listen to either of these groups with other than contempt and laughter worries me.

It tells me Jesus is not too far from making a second appearance to the squabbling children of Earth. And as to whether any of this stuff is going to get better or not, I don't think so. Just remember. The Second Coming is a rescue mission and not an occupation or conquest. We're going to leave it all behind to burn itself down. We'll be coming back later to replant and rebuild.

I'm really looking forward to that.

© 2016 by Tom King

An Open Letter to Ruth McCambridge

Deja Vu all over again?

Ruth McCambridge, editor of Nonprofit Quarterly, gets a lot of hate mail, particularly since NPQ stopped talking about Donald Trump. She got this delightful missive the other day from a Trump supporter and shared it on her email newsletter today.

• “Notice Ruth, the writer of this, is a JEW and we know they are rarely honest. They are mad cause they can’t buy or control Trump.”

Since many on the left think conservatives love Trump (and Ruth is unabashedly left-leaning, which I can respect), I decided to respond to her letter.  My own letter is appended below.

Dear Ruth,

I am not surprised that you have been targeted with racist hate-mail from Trump supporters. As a conservative, I find Donald Trump to be appalling, perhaps even more than I find Hillary Clinton's and Bernie Sanders' open socialism objectionable, I find Donald Trump to be even more of a threat to the American ideal of preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As you have discovered, one of the groups Trump appeals most to are the xenophobes of both parties. He is gaining momentum by drawing from the angry fringe groups that drag down both conservatives and liberals. I think there needs to be a coming together among people with good hearts who want the best for America to oppose the extremists that are capturing what Rush Limbaugh calls the "uninformed voter". Limbaugh may make your eyes glaze over, but he does recognize the danger posed by those who refuse to engage in a debate of ideas and instead respond only viscerally without defining what they are angry about or what to do about it.

In Trump we have 1933 revisited. Hitler promised to make Germany great again. Trump promises to make America great again. Hitler tapped into the socialist sentiment and the economic woes of 20s and 30s Germany with a bunch of vague promises to take care of the German people. Trump makes the same kind of vague promises to his own followers and attracts radical right-wingers and left-wingers who hear only the angry words they too would speak if they had his microphone. Most frighteningly, he appeals to the racist tendencies in those outlying groups that accept all kinds of conspiracy theories without critical thought. The far libertarian right has gone so far out there that they have circled the planet and bumped into the loony Marxist left and there Trump has set up camp.

It's no accident that you are getting anti-Semitic hate male. Trump's support comes from a segment of the American population that mirrors the segment of Germany that propelled Hitler to power in 33.  A man like Trump purposely makes his positions so vague and changeable from audience to audience that he gets people to embrace highly-charged emotional ideas that in their cooler moments they would disavow. His "pledge of allegiance to Trump" exercise in Orlando was particularly chilling, but only to someone who actually stayed awake in high school history class.  In college we watched Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". I have little doubt that, should Trump win, someone is going to produce a film called "Triumph of the Donald". God help us if that happens.

Ruth, we may have political views that are polar opposite, but we share the same country. It would not surprise me if we shared many common beliefs as well. I want smaller, less intrusive government with power divested to the local and state as much as possible and more opportunity for individuals to succeed on their own power. I think it's more effective that way. My friends on the left want larger, more "involved" federal government that provides a universal safety net and something of a utopia on Earth. While I may disagree that any human utopia will ever work (I believe in original sin, so that's part of my intellectual makeup), it is a discussion we can have, so long as we are willing to keep it rational.

As a former community organizer, I was able to create coalitions of liberals and conservatives by focusing our attention on the issues and how to solve them. We all had to agree to leave ideology at the doors. Republicans had to learn to speak Democrat and vice-versa. We were the only initiative to get what we wanted from the newly minted Republican majority in the Texas legislature that year. We got justice by presenting the issue and a solution that worked, not by chaining ourselves to light poles in front of the governor's mansion.

We can solve problems without burning down barns if we focus on what we want to do, rather than on some notion of ideological purity. If we want to help poor people without insurance, for instance, let's do that. That's the issue. Nobody wants poor people to die from neglect of their health. You may believe in universal healthcare as the only solution as part of your ideology, but a whole lot of folk have a problem with that and the results have been uncomfortably similar to what the opponents of nationalized healthcare predicted - higher rates, poorer service. I made an eye appointment to get my free Medicaid glasses - I have to wait a month. If I pay the $78 for my contact exam, I can get an appointment in three days. When my Medicaid was canceled because one month I made some extra money to pay my landlord the back rent I owed, the Washington State Health Exchange gave me the good news that I could get health insurance through them for a mere $1,156 per MONTH. I had been forced to go on Medicaid or pay a large fine to the IRS. Now I'm on their books and either have to stay poor enough to stay on Medicaid or the IRS will force me to buy health insurance that will cost me more than I make most months (I care for a wife who is on full disability and can't be left alone).

I think there's a better way to deal with the problem that is more elegant and doesn't involve supporting a bloated federal bureaucracy and paying bureaucrats to generate paper for each other and to find out more and more personal information about me.

We could be discussing those kinds of solutions and still agree that we should find a way to care for the less fortunate in our society. As one of the "less fortunate", I don't want anyone to carry me. I spent 40 years in the nonprofit sector, started 5 agencies from scratch and discovered that they don't call 'em nonprofits for nothing. I chose that path. At the end of my life I'm scratching to make a living and keep my beloved wife alive. I'd like to do it with some dignity. Let's talk about how we can do that.

Because we have not talked about solutions and because we have spent decades tossing invective and lies back and forth across the ideological aisle at each other, we've reached a tipping point in America. If those of us who are reasonable were to join forces, we might just tip the nation back from the brink of some new brand of national socialism. Replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare is not a solution the sensible folk on either the left or right would like to see.

There is a powerful positive feeling toward Jews and Israel over here on the conservative side of the aisle. Know that we will stand with you. This is not 1933 Germany and a whole lot of us managed to stay awake in history class. We are with you. Please know that these racists are not us and we aren't even a little comfortable with them in our midst. And these folk are in the midst of both schools of thought. Neither the conservatives nor the liberals are free from these snakes crawling around on our ideological home turf. 

God go with you, Ruth.

Sincerely,

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington (late of East Texas)

© 2016

Free Racism for All - It's Easy If You Try

Racism? Doesn't that have something to do with treating
people like they are less than human? (Burundi)

In my morning reading I came across a bizarre statement. It's not the first time I've seen it, but it is no less bizarre for being repeated. The writer made the astonishing claim that black persons, in fact, all persons of color cannot be "racists". 

I weep for the children. As C.S. Lewis' Professor Digory once said, "What ARE they teaching in schools these days?" It's certainly not logic and history by all accounts.

The whole idea that a particular brand of human beings categorically cannot be racist is preposterous both in terms of its logical foundation as well as its historical accuracy. Logically, the concept that a person cannot be racist if they possess a certain skin color is, in and of itself a racist idea. Such an idea posits that there is a fundamental difference between persons of color and persons of another color which exists because of the person's race (white by the way is a color - check your crayon box). You cannot claim there is no fundamental difference between persons based on their skin color and then turn right around and claim that there actually is a fundamental difference in that persons of a certain color are congenitally unable to be racists. The ability to be or not to be a racist is a pretty fundamental difference. As to the Marxist theory that certain classes of oppressed people cannot be oppressors themselves has been shown to be a flying load of hoodoo, or would be if anyone bothered to read a non-sanitized history book anymore. Stalin's communist workers party did rather a lot of oppressing in their day as did Chairman Mao's People's Party. Several hundred million folks could tell you that if they were alive to do so (which they are not).

Hitler wasn't the only one to bury
folks in ditches (Rwanda).

The idea that black people can't be racist is a logical fallacy. For proof one need only visit the recent history of racist violence between Hutus and Tutsis in in Africa in which the protagonists took as an unquestioned truth that one tribe was racially inferior to the other and possessed of inherent evil tendencies - essentially racist beliefs.

The only problem with taking the time to explain all of this is that the Twitter generation quit reading this post back at about 140 characters. Too bad. They will miss my favorite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote.  The good Doctor, whose holiday we celebrated just a few weeks ago, famously said, "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Me too, Doc.  Me too.

Tom King
© 2016

Open Carry Advocate Told He May Trigger Violence in Black Neighborhood

© (Kangaroo Kutz Facebook page)

A video recently made the rounds on social media of an angry Akron barber confronting a young white man carrying a rifle who was walking in the neighborhood around Akron University. The Barber called the young man a "threat to me and my people", presumably because the young man was white. The video has since been taken down everywhere, but this article in the Cleveland newspaper describes the incident. I saw the video and it's likely that it was taken down because it didn't help the "all white people are racists" narrative.

The video shows an angry barbershop owner, Deone Slater, confronting police and an armed young man, David Kovacevic, shouting angrily and waving his arms around in a threatening manner. The confrontation was apparently caused by a white man legally carrying a firearm in a public place where there are commercial businesses (not strictly a "black neighborhood" as claimed by those who are angry at what he did), strolled down the street and passed a black-owned business. So let me get this straight. A white guy cannot walk peacefully in a black neighborhood with a gun as an obvious means of making a political statement because he might trigger a what? Riot? He might start indiscriminately shooting at black folks? 

Hey, I think it's stupid and provacative too, but it says something about the problem. Here the black citizen points out that the white guy is in danger from the black citizens of the hood for being provocative. I half expected him to say the white guy should also be careful not to make eye contact as well.  The angry man believes that it is not fair for a white guy with a gun to walk down the street in what he calls a "black neighborhood". He may be disappointed that only two cops show up and they don't administer a beat-down and arrest the 25 year-old on the spot. He believes apparently that a black guy with a gun peacefully walking in a white neighborhood gun would be in danger from the cops. Following his logic, white guys with guns who come near black people should get the same treatment.  


So, the white guy is in danger from the people in the 'hood and the black guy would be in danger from the cops?  Really?  That's what you want to say? What are you saying about the character of people in your neighborhood, man? Are they so explosively violent that a man walking with a gun is going to "cause trouble" just by being looked at.  Sounds like a racist statement to me.

And in this video, the cops DID show up to keep things under control. There was only one person who was angry, loud and provocative in this confrontation. The business owner would best have "protected" his business by calling the cops according to Democrats who know about such things. He seems to have done that. They came and nobody had a problem. Yeah the guy was provoking this sort of thing and the black guy obliged him - on camera no less. The black business owner inadvertently validated the point the white guy was trying to make.

What I want to know is how this one man peaceful protest (you notice he never raised his voice) is wrong and people throwing rocks at the cops and looting stores in white neighborhoods is okay. Remember that the Ferguson, Missouri protesters were rioting to defend the actions of a 6'4" 350 pound man who roughed up a clerk and stole stuff from his store a few minutes before, then reached into a cop car, tried to get the officer's gun, managed to fire a shot inside the squad car and then when told to halt, put his head down, turned and charged at an armed police officer half his size. Two very different situations. The white guy with the gun in the video successfully demonstrated his point. I'm not sure the guys breaking windows and carrying off televisions and liquor in Ferguson did as well at making theirs.

Some one will inevitably say that if a black man did the same thing in a white neighborhood (not a public street with stores and public places, but a neighborhood) there would be hundreds of cops called out and that they would shoot him on the spot. Is that white cops only or black cops and Hispanic cops too? So, let me get this straight. Would the dispatcher call all the white cops on the force and tell them they need to go down and shoot some black guy who is in the wrong place and tell the black and Hispanic cops to stay where they are so they couldn't interfere with the cops' KKK tactics?  Really? Especially when the dispatcher is just as likely to be black or Hispanic or Asian as she is white?

Hyperbole is a word that means exaggeration or over-stating your case. There's way too much of that and this kind of rhetoric only makes it worse. What needs to happen is we ALL need to work together to solve the problem. If it wasn't so scary for a white person to walk in a black neighborhood, perhaps guys like the one in the video wouldn't need to send some kind of message.

And whether anyone likes it or not, it makes white people nervous to be on foot in a black neighborhood. I broke down in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas once. While I was trying to get my car started a gang of black youths complete with do-rags and tats kept walking back and forth making all kinds of eye contact with me.

Me not wanting to have a confrontation where someone could get hurt, I put down my head, avoided eye contact and did my best to exhibit subservient body language. A couple of the fronted me wanting to know what I was doing there. Even me saying that my car broke down and I was trying to fix it seemed to provoke them. I was twice these boys' age. As their elder and someone who had never harmed them or been disrespectful to them, I should have got some respect. Instead I had to do the old slave shuffle to appease these guys and for no reason. I did the avoiding eye contact and ducking my head thing deliberately and tolerated the affront to my dignity in order not to have to possibly hurt one of them (I'm trained in self-defense and I was "armed" with a pretty well-equipped tool box just in case, but I avoided making any threatening moves. I would not have had to do that in most white neighborhoods except possibly for some deep ghetto areas with Aryan nation gangs or something.


The "neighborhood" in this video was not a deeply ethnic ghetto. It was a public commercial district next to a public university. And if the shop owner had let him pass, nothing would have happened. He could have called the cops and locked his doors till they got here. I'm sure it would have sent the same message that young black men get when white folks lock their car doors and drive away when they approach a white person's car in a parking lot. As it was Kovacevic had apparently walked around for quite a while before he got the reaction he was expecting.

Me? I think the young man's "protest" was kind of pointless and stupid and unnecessarily provocative, but then if he'd been ignored, it would also have been useless. By getting in his face and screaming at him, Mr. Slater only proved his point for him.

The same thing that happened in front of Mr. Slater's shop would have happened if he'd been a black man. If a heavily armed black man walked through a lily white neighborhood, folks would call the cops, just like they would if a heavily armed white guy in a hoodie walked through any neighborhood where there were kids. They'd call the cops if a brown man or a red man or a little green man who was armed with an assault rifle and who was unfamiliar walked down those leafy streets.

We're going to inflame a race war if we're not careful and its your innocent children and mine that are likely to get hurt. I'll refrain from the "all black people are gangsters" kind of rhetoric and I'll do it whether you tone down the "all white people are racist" rhetoric or not. It might be better, though, if we all toned it down a good bit.

The guys carrying big guns would not be doing so if the president and his supporters weren't trying to disarm the entire populace. They make speeches and write books calling for totally disarming America. This worries Americans in a time when lawless criminals are jacking up the violence to higher and higher levels.  Understandably, we want to be able to defend our homes if attacked. If those boys in Oak Cliff had decided to take me down, I might have hurt a couple of them, but I'd have lost the fight badly. Had I been carrying, I could more easily have held the whole bunch at bay, perhaps avoided a fight altogether.

That's what people like the open carry protesters are trying to say. Allow us to defend ourselves. We're afraid if you take all our guns, you won't get the ones in criminal hands. You think taking guns and ammo our of stores will stop bad guys from arming themselves? Has banning illegal drugs stopped the drug trade?

Besides, ignoring the precepts of the Constitution is a bad idea. Once they feel like they can ignore the Second Amendment and take away guns from citizens, what's to prevent them from repealing the 14th amendment? Or the First? Or the Nineteenth?

I agree with critics of the violence in our society that something must be done. I just think that what we need to do is to change the message we are sending our children. I think it's going to require all of us to to be very careful what we say in front of cameras and in front of our children. If we keep telling our kids they have no hope because they are black or poor or Latino or redneck for that matter, then we create a world in which there is no hope. And hopelessness is what breeds violence and then breeds more hopelessness.

But there is hope. Black men and women have been successful by dint of hard work and perseverance. We really are a nation in which there is opportunity to make something of yourself. Try coming out of the wreckage of Biafra and becoming a lawyer or a doctor or pro basketball player. Try it for that matter in Nigeria, the Sudan, Malaysia, Syria or Kazakhstan, especially, if you are the "wrong" race or tribe or religion. Here in America, our kids have a chance to make it. We're not perfect here, but it's getting steadily better (or at least it was).  We're moving beyond our past and we should acknowledge that. I have no desire of going back to the Old Democrat South of my youth with it's segregated schools, its rigged voting laws and its whites only signs all over the place. I hated it then and I hate it now. Only now, it's illegal to do all that stuff in the United States. That alone is cause for hopefulness.

So how about let's change the rhetoric and start talking hope and telling our kids they CAN do things instead of harping on things we think they can't do simply because they are hard. Teach our kids to be heroes like Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, the Tuskegee Airmen and countless others who challenged the system and changed it. We're with you. I stood by my black brothers and sisters back in the 60s when it wasn't popular for a white guy to do that in my part of the world. You need your brothers and sisters in Christ to keep moving forward; changing the future for our next generation. When my own kids were little, our neighborhood looked like the United Nations. Most of the kids were absolutely color blind and when racism reared its ugly head, the kids shouted it down themselves no matter what color they happened to be. That's how you defeat racism.

A color-blind world is one we all can live in. This guy with the big gun? You should let people like me who support the second amendment, but not stupidity and pointless provocation call him down. It means more coming from his own side. If you get up on your haunches, it only helps him make a point to people too dim-witted to understand anything more than hashtag slogans in a 42 character Tweet.

© 2015 by Tom King