The Wrong Crowd to Sell Weaponized Racism To

On August 4, 2010, the Tea Party Express organization held a press conference in Washington, DC. At this conference a number of black conservative leaders and thinkers hosted reporters from a number of media outlets.

Those assembled -- including, among others, Alan Keyes, Star Parker, and the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson -- discussed their involvement in the Tea Party movement, and answered questions regarding the charges of racism lobbed against the movement.

In recent weeks, a growing collection of smoking guns regarding the American far left, the Tea Party and weaponized racism have become apparent.

Journolist member Spencer Ackerman declared that questions regarding Reverend Jeremiah Wright should be shut down with accusations of racism, and more recently former Civil Rights Commissioner Mary Frances Berry publicly mused about the success of using racism as a political tactic in order to distract Americans from real issues.

"Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats," she remarked. "There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November."

"Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness," she concluded.

As far as smoking guns go, it may be even more damning than Ackerman's.

It's with this candour in mind that one turns to a question asked at the Tea Party Express press conference by Joyce Jones of Black Enterprise when she recycled the claims of the Democrat Congressional Black Caucus that they had been serenaded with racial epithets by Tea Party protesters.

"John Lewis put his life at considerable risk and danger so you could stand here and speak about freedoms," Jones began. "I want to know why it's so impossible for you to believe that someone did spit on him or call him the N-word?"

"Why would he lie about that when he's experienced so much worse?" she asked.

William Owens responded very simply: there is no evidence. So Jones asked a follow-up:

"Why is his word not good enough?" Jones asked.

"On the stage of public opinion, evidence is paramount," Owens explained. "It's one person's accusation against another. It was so public it should not be a difficult time to find evidence, and there is none."

Jones' explanation that she was there quickly faltered in the face of an admission that she didn't hear the epithet spoken, but that "there were crowds" present.

Alfonzo Rachel then responded by asking why the word of others aren't accepted with the same value -- including the word of those accused. Jones effectively had no answer.

The episode serves as a reminder of the McCarthyite tactics adopted by those executing Spencer Ackerman's and Mary Frances Berry's game plan.

When Senator Joseph McCarthy orchestrated his reign of terror over the United States, he orchestrated a rhetorical environment in which denials were treated as admissions of guilt, and only admissions were accepted. In a perverse distortion of any reasonable standard of evidence, McCarthy allowed his own suspicions to stand as evidence, and abused the powers granted to him to pursue his own personal anti-communist crusade.

Those working so hard to brand the Tea Party with accusations of racism -- to the extent that they have to distort and fabricate evdience -- are utilizing the same tactics. The question of Joyce Jones -- why the words of Represenatives John Lewis and Emanuele Cleaver aren't simply accepted despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary -- is a stark reminder of that.

Needless to say, black conservatives are clearly the wrong crowd to which to attempt to peddle weaponized racism.

That in itself should speak volumes.

Who Weaponized Racism? Part IV

It is still worth repeating, and will remain worth repeating until the culprits come clean. The far left weaponized racism.

And MSNBC has been at the very forefront of it.

Consider this particular episode from earlier this year when Dylan Ratigan exploded on Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, demanding that Williams answer a question about whether or not the Tea Party accepts "racist and Nazis".



Not getting the kind of answer he wanted -- instead being challenged about NBC's record with anti-Semitism -- Ratigan screamed himself hoarse while Williams tried, in vain, to give the following answer:

"We don't embrace racism."

Ratigan then entitled himself to a comically self-righteous flourish after cutting off Williams' microphone so that he couldn't answer the question.

But Ratigan must have simply forgotten himself.



After all, Dylan Ratigan was on MSNBC's Morning Meeting when the network aired selectively-edited footage of a man with an AR-15 assault rifle at an Arizona town hall meeting at which President Barack Obama was present.

The suggestion was that a racially-motivated assassination attempt on Obama was imminent.

The problem was that the man pictured on screen is actually a black man. In fact, he was interviewed by CNN on the very same day.



When Spencer Ackerman suggested, via the Journolist news group, that liberals arbitrarily accuse conservatives of racism in order to deter them from criticizing Barack Obama and his policies, it was one thing. Ackerman was at the time employed by the Washington Independent, and would later go on to be employed by Wired, where he continues to enjoy employment despite his obvious contempt for journalistic ethics.

But it's clear that MSNBC has been following Ackerman's play book and they aren't, by any means, alone.

The weaponization of racism has, in fact, been pervasive and well orchestrated across a variety of forums across a variety of media. Those complicit -- as evidenced by Dylan Ratigan, Janeane Garofalo, Spencer Ackerman and others -- have been utterly shameless about the socially irresponsible and ideologically selfish things they have done in the name of politics.

It's time for those who aspire to being responsible voices among the left to start denouncing the weaponization of racism. Given the stakes, they cannot afford to wait indefinitely.

Who Weaponized Racism? Thredux

It's still worth repeating: the far left did.

And they aren't even ashamed of it.

Worth revisiting is the sad, sad story of Janeane Garofalo. Following the smoking gun provided by Spencer Ackerman -- who has yet to stand up and account for his ruthless and ideologically selfish exploitation of the subject of racism -- it becomes clear what it was Garofalo was doing when she appeared on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC program in 2009.

She was deploying weaponized racism. Like Ackerman, not only has she yet to show any remorse for her actions, but she was rather shameless about them when later confronted.



"Let's be very honest about what this is about," Garofalo began -- a rather ironic remark coming from someone who was being as dishonest as she was at the time, and has continued to be. "This is not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don't know their history at all."

"This is about hating a black man in the White House," she asserted. "This is racism straight-up."

"That is nothing but a bunch of tea bagging rednecks and there is no way around it," she added, before going on to wax incoherently about the limbic brain.

The fact that the Tea Party's central message has nothing to do with race, and has never had anything to do with race, seems to mean nothing at all to Garofalo.

When later confronted about her comments, and called upon to defend them, the best Garofalo could offer up was the example of a sign featuring a pop culture reference, and would simply refuse to defend herself any further:



Perversely, Garofalo, being unable to produce any evidence for her claims, simply chose to question the motivation of Tea Party protesters, and self-indulgently allowed her suspicions to stand as evidence.

As Griff Jenkins -- the individual who confronted her -- noted, Garofalo does indeed seem bitter to be asked to defend her remarks. This is largely because they were never meant to be questioned. Aired on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Garofalo made her accusations in a forum where they were most likely to be found to be ideologically soothing.

Olbermann -- who never offered anything more than an agreeing nod -- clearly found Garofalo's remarks to be rather soothing.

People like Olbermann and Garofalo have taken a certain amount of delight in calling for the Tea Party to account for any racism -- whatsoever, on any scale -- that one may find within its ranks.

But given the consequences of sewing cynicism on the topic of racism, perhaps it's time for the far left -- from the race-baiting demagogues at MSNBC to the NAACP -- to account for the weaponization of racism.

It's time for individuals like Keith Olbermanns and Ben Jelous to start denouncing the disingenous, irresponsible and ideologically selfish weaponization of racism wherever they may find it. Olbermann can feel free to begin with Janeane Garofalo's comments on the April 16, 2009 edition of his program -- then follow that up with a denunciation of Spencer Ackerman.

Of course, no one familiar with the brand of invective typically spewed on Olbermann's program should really expect Olbermann to do the responsible thing -- although one can always hold out hope.

Who Weaponized Racism?

Use of racism as a political tactic breeds cynicism

Simple answer: the far left did.

Savvy political observers have known this for years. With the revelations emerging out of the "Journolist" story in the United States, in which a number of journalists colluded with one another to shape an ideological media narrative with the goal of electing Barack Obama as President, many more people are waking up to the weaponization of racism by ideologically-motivated individuals.

Hopefully, more people will wake up to the peril of this, and be prepared to confront them.

The smoking gun of the matter is an email by Wired blogger Spencer Ackerman, who at one point writes the following:

"If the right forces us all to either defend [Reverend Jeremiah] Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes them sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

Why did Ackerman want this to become a generial meme amongst the media? The answer is actually rather simple:

"What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [presumably, face] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically."

Meaning this rhetorically, of course, doesn't really excuse absolve Ackerman from the notion underpinning this particular comment.

Ackerman declares, simply, that in order to create an opportunity for the left to impose its agenda unopposed, it needs to make it hurt to stand up to them. The opposition is to be utterly destroyed -- and in order to do that, Ackerman recommended that he and his fellow Journolist members utilize the one issue that nearly everyone finds so repulsive that it virtually guarantees a social ostracism: that of racism.

Those observing the culture war raging in the United States -- one that Canadian pollster Frank Graves so desperately wants to bring to Canada -- have long noticed this, and have noticed the extent to which the left-wing media has twisted the narrative in order to meet their goals.

Various left-wing media commentators were more than content to lob vapid accusations of racism at the Tea Party. The New York Times took it a little further. They lobbed such accusations based on the notion that not many visible minorities were participating. Then they tailored a poll to confirm that after already reporting it as if it were fact.

The detail that their poll drastically diverged from various other polls on the racial and ethnic make-up of the Tea Party was also conveniently overlooked by many of the other organizations that reported on it.

That was, by no means, the most blatant attempt to link the Tea Party -- whose message, interestingly enough, has never had anything to do with race -- to racism. Perhaps that prize goes to the MSNBC producers who heavily edited (read: doctored) footage of a black man with an AR-15 assault rifle at an Arizona Tea Party rally in order to conceal his race. Footage of the man -- edited so that no skin would appear in the shot -- was coupled with commentary alleging that a racially-motivated assassination attempt on President Obama was imminent.

These are people who know exactly what they're doing, and they know exactly why they're doing it. And they seem to believe that no one else is smart enough to figure it out.

But the greatest danger of the tactics these individuals are emloying doesn't actually lie in false accusations of racism themselves.

Rather, it lies in the risk that cynicism on the topic of racism will proliferate -- that whenever an accusation of racism is made, people will simply dismiss it out-of-hand. Even when that the accused is actually racist.

The Ackerman tactic -- as it should henceforth be known anywhere and everywhere the topic of race is discussed -- risks providing cover for actual racists. Using racism as a political accusation allows racism to be dismissed as such.

That is the extent of the social irresponsibility of individuals like Spencer Ackerman, who couldn't honestly give a flying fuck about racism. Not really. They are more than willing to risk the breeding of widespread cynicism on the topic of racism for short-term ideological gain.

Moreover, Ackerman seems to have very little to say for himself to date. He seems rather unashamed of his actions, even in the wake of such a public revelation.

This is a point that, quite naturally, will be lost on the ideologues most eager to use accusations of racism as a weapon.

But it's time to hold the far left accountable for their blatant and shameful exploitation, for selfishly ideological ends, of what is actually a lingering social illness that still infects western society.

Who weaponized racism? The far left did.

It's time to make them wear it.