White Supremacy: Like Manna to the Left

By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/10/white-supremacy-like-manna-to-the-left/
August 10, 2019


Atlanta 2017 (AP/Todd Kirkland)

Since the world has not heard enough about “white supremacy” lately, I thought I would say a few words about this neglected subject.

Please don’t turn up your nose and say “but ‘white supremacy’ is just a malignant fiction, a fantasy conjured up by the Left in order to beat up on conservatives, Trump supporters, etc.”

This is true. “White supremacy” is in this respect like “climate change”: a bugbear, a horror tale utterly without substance but scary—Oooo so scary!—nonetheless. In Through the Looking Glass, Alice scoffs when the White Queen tells her that she is more than 100 years old. “I can’t believe that!” says Alice.

“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

The whole “white supremacy” meme is a bit like that. The number of real, honest-to-goodness, card-carrying, union-affiliated “white supremacists” is vanishingly small. They could be crowded into a middle-school gymnasium in a small town with room left over for the cheerleaders and a popcorn machine. The idea that white supremacists or the ideology of white supremacism represent a threat to American society is preposterous. Everyone knows this, the pathetic commentators on CNN and MSNBC just as much as the gesticulating clowns running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Yet they keep screaming about “white supremacism,” hoping, I believe, that if they keep repeating the mantra, their incantation will bring the longed-for object into being.

A Religious Fervor

Indeed, it is one of the signal ironies of the campaign against the phantasm denominated “white supremacism” that the people shouting the loudest against it say they abominate everything about white supremacism—“racism,” Donald Trump, etc.—when, in fact, they crave its advent with a fervency that makes St. Theresa look blasé.

You see this every time there is a public act of violence. When the news breaks you can discern a sharp intake of breath on the part of the Confraternity of Leftist Pundits. “Please Comrade God,” you can almost hear them pray, “Please let the perpetrator be a pasty-faced, Trump-voting, Christian white guy.”

Usually, it isn’t. But every now and then their prayers are answered, as they were, sort of, just recently when some wacko who doesn’t like Mexicans murdered 22 people in El Paso. Central Casting is going to have a hard time making the chap in question out to be a “white supremacist,” however, since he was just a mix of nasty congeries of bizarre ideas. But at least he was white. So was the Dayton, Ohio, shooter, who murdered nine people, but he had the misfortune to be a registered Democrat and avid Elizabeth Warren supporter and espoused various left-wing causes, so the less said about him, the better.

Pop quiz: who is James T. Hodgkinson? Can you say without Google’s help? Stumped?

He was the fellow who, in 2017, went to a congressional Republican baseball practice and shot five people, including Steve Scalise, a congressman from Louisiana, who nearly died. You don’t hear much about Jimbo because he was an avid Bernie Bro and Trump-hater. Doesn’t fit the narrative, you see, so (if I may invoke Lewis Carroll again) he has been transformed into a Cheshire cat creature, disappearing bit by bit from the public record.

From Two-Minutes to an Endless Loop of Hate

Here’s another irony about the whole “white supremacist” wheeze. The politicians and their mascots in the commentariat keep screaming about “hate,” but it takes but a moment for anyone to see that the vast majority of hatred is emanating from the supposed opponents of “white supremacism.” So it is that ready-made presidential candidate impersonator “Beto” O’Rourke compares Donald Trump’s campaign events to Nazi rallies or Joaquin Castro, manager of his brother Julián’s presidential campaign, publishesthe names of Trump donors and invites the public to harass them.

Readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will remember the daily ritual in which the inhabitants Oceania are required to watch a film depicting the hated Emmanuel Goldstein, enemy of the state. In Orwell’s novel, the hate-fest was only two minutes long, whereas the supposed anti-white supremacist fanatics have their propaganda on an endless loop.

Back in May, PJ Media’s Sarah Hoyt put her finger on what the rallies against “white supremacism” are really all about when she noted that “We Don’t Have a Problem with White Supremacy. We Have a Problem with Leftist Supremacy.” Bingo. “The left is obsessed with white supremacists,” Hoyt observed, “the way that children are obsessed with Santa Claus, and for more or less the same reasons.” Santa doesn’t exist, but the presents pile up every December 25 because the right people have a stake in perpetuating the myth of his existence.

Another curious feature of the hysteria over the made-up tort of white supremacism is that its very frenetic quality, instead of highlighting its disingenuousness and absurdity, tends instead to function as a sort of camouflage. Parsing the psychological dynamics of this phenomenon would doubtless take us into deep waters—I’m not at all sure I can explain it—but the Freudians would probably explain in terms of the idea of projection: concealing one’s own unpalatable impulses from oneself by attributing them to another.

Perpetuating the Noxious Myth

There are two reasons that anti-Trump ideologues love the fairy tale of white supremacism. One revolves around the word “white.” Incessantly repeating “white” helps to create a semantic nimbus of racialism. You don’t even need to accuse anyone of particular impermissible acts. All you need to do is utter their names in conjunction with the phrase “white supremacist” and little flecks of racial suspicion adhere to them like iron filings coating a magnet.

Donald Trump is quite right when he denies being racist. He has taken many positions on many issues over his career, but never has he displayed any racist attitudes. (The same can be said, by the way, about the spurious charge that he is anti-Semitic.) But the charge of white supremacism is so precious to anti-Trump stalwarts because it enables them to inject the smudgy ink of racism into a discussion where it is totally out of place. As American society becomes ever less racist, any possible shards of racialist thinking are gathered up like manna for grateful consumption by those who have a stake in perpetuating the noxious myth that America is a uniquely racist society.

The unstable edifice of racial accusation can be kept upright only by constant pressure, like those inflatable toy castles at children’s birthday parties. Turn off the machine pumping in the air and the plaything collapses in upon itself.

The acolytes of white supremacy—by whom I mean not the relatively few who actually espouse it, but the great many who claim to have uncovered it everywhere—are right that the motor of their heart’s desire is hatred, but once again the hatred resides not in the objects of their obloquy but rather in themselves. In this respect, they are unconscious followers of the Roman poet Martial. “Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare / Hoc tantum possum dicere: non amo te.” My unauthorized translation:

I do not like thee, Donald Trump.
Don’t ask me why, you have me stumped.
But this I know, you awful frump:
I do not like thee, Donald Trump.

America Is Drowning in the Left’s Lies About Trump

By Dennis Prager

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/06/america-is-drowning-in-the-lefts-lies-about-trump/

August 6, 2019

Protest in San Jose, 2016 (Reuters)

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, never said there were “fine” Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen.

This is one of the two great lies of our time—the other being that all Trump supporters are racists—and perhaps in all of American history. I cannot think of a lie of such significance that was held as truth by so many Americans, by every leading politician of one of the two major political parties and disseminated by virtually the entire media.

The major news media need to understand these are important reasons that half of America considers them frauds. And we get no pleasure from this fact. The reason we don’t recoil when the president labels the mainstream media “fake news” is that we know the charge is true. Has one major media news outlet yet apologized to the American people for preoccupying them for nearly two years with the lie of “Trump collusion” with Russia? Has one Democrat? Of course not. Because with regard to the Trump-Russia collusion issue, the news media were never driven by a pursuit of truth; they were driven by a pursuit of Trump.

In my last column, I offered a way of proving Trump supporters are not racists. The timing was, unfortunately, perfect. I could not anticipate how two horrific mass shootings would enable the left—the press, the Democrats, academics and Hollywood—to scream even louder than before that Trump and his supporters are racists and that their racism is why such shootings are taking place.

This is all predicated on what may be the most glaring lie of all: that, after the Charlottesville demonstrations, President Trump said Nazis are “fine people.”

The president never said there were fine Nazis. The left-wing assertion that the president of the United States said there were fine Nazis will long endure as an example of something that has been true since Lenin: Truth is not a left-wing value. Truth is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value. But it is not left-wing value. A leftist says whatever is necessary to gain power.

By remarkable coincidence, this week’s PragerU video is titled “The Charlottesville Lie.” It proves the president never said Nazis were fine people. When Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he was referring to people demonstrating in Charlottesville for and against tearing down a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, not to Nazis and antifa.

The video is presented by CNN political commentator Steve Cortes, a voice of courage in the herd known as the mainstream American media. At this moment, of PragerU’s 325 videos, Cortes’s “The Charlottesville Lie” is the one I most want Americans to watch.

The harm that the media and others on the left have done and continue to do to this country by charging the president with praising Nazis and other white supremacists is incalculable. It has only served to inflame and divide Americans: the tens of millions who believe the lie and the tens of millions who know the truth.

Typical of the former is author Wajahat Ali, whose attack on supporters of the president recently appeared in The Atlantic, which identifies Ali as “the lead author of … Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Ali has the audacity to write: “I feel compelled to ask Trump supporters: Is it worth it? How many have to suffer for you to feel great again?” The Atlantic is proud to publish such hate-inducing mendacity.

And the left accuses conservatives of hate.

Aside from the clear evidence that the president never called Nazis “very fine people,” isn’t the very idea preposterous? Trump has a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son-in-law and Jewish grandchildren. Nazis want Jews dead. How do all the New York Times columnists, CNN anchors and correspondents and Democratic officeholders who say the president called Nazis fine people and who believe the president is a white supremacist reconcile those two facts?

They don’t—because they can’t, and because they can get away with saying anything they want. When a nation’s media and one of the two dominant parties are in lockstep, they can lie all they want.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said, referring to El Paso: “(Trump) has created a national emergency of rampant white nationalism across the country. … I think we need to blame President Trump and the rhetoric he’s used since he got elected.”

Beto O’Rourke, in an obscenity-laced statement against the president the day after El Paso:

“He’s not tolerating racism, he’s promoting racism. He’s not tolerating violence, he’s inciting racism and violence in this country. We shouldn’t be asking if … he’s responsible for this when we know the answer.”

Meanwhile, half a day later, there was another mass shooting at a popular nightspot in Dayton, Ohio, resulting in nine deaths, including the shooter’s sister. Not much political hay against the president is being made of that one because, according to early reports, the shooter was a leftist, antifa-supporting Democrat who said he’d be happy to vote for Elizabeth Warren.

It is worth recalling that after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the American media blamed the assassination on right-wing bigotry that, they said, permeated Dallas. That Kennedy was murdered by a communist quickly disappeared from media descriptions of the assassination. Today, it is all but unknown to the American people.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. And President Trump is not a white supremacist. No matter what the press says.

P.S. I just learned that within hours of PragerU posting “The Charlottesville Lie,” Google placed it on YouTube’s restricted list—just two weeks after a Senate hearing at which a Google representative swore under oath that Google doesn’t censor on the basis of political views. The ease with which the left lies is breathtaking.

What’s Really Behind the ‘White Supremacy’ Terrorism Scare

By Julie Kelly
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/05/whats-really-behind-the-white-supremacy-terrorism-scare/
August 5, 2019

The anti-Trump forces, now stripped of their Russian collusion ammunition, have invented another imaginary threat they hope to weaponize against the president: The public menace posed by “white supremacist” terrorism.

Much like the collusion conspiracy theory—which relied on random incidents, fictional villains, unconvincing evidence, and the Bad Orange Man in the White House—there is little substance to this purported danger.

Unironically, the whole ruse is being pushed by the same people who foisted the Russian collusion hoax on the American people for three years in the hopes of prompting President Trump’s impeachment and removal. The political agenda behind this manufactured white supremacy crisis is equally sinister because its specific purpose is to influence and undermine the 2020 elections.

The “white supremacy” canard is intended to further demonize Trump; falsely defame his supporters as white supremacists; and pressure nervous voters into defeating Trump and Republican candidates next year. The strategy is as cynical as it is pernicious.

Let’s clear one thing up before I get into the details: There is no systemic threat posed by white supremacy. Domestic white terrorists are not the same as, let alone worse than ISIS Jihadis. There has been no massive “surge” in white supremacy activity, as I wrote in November. These groups remain fringe, disorganized, and unrespected.

In his Senate testimony last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray was intentionally vague when questioned by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) about the supposed rise of white supremacy.

“In terms of number of arrests, we have, through the third quarter of this fiscal year, had about, give or take, a hundred arrests in the international terrorism side, which includes the homegrown violent extremists,” Wray explained. “But we’ve also had about the same number, again, don’t quote me to the exact digit, on the domestic terrorism side. And I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence but it includes other things as well.”

Some version of what you might call white supremacist violence? Even giving Wray the benefit of the doubt, that means the FBI investigated roughly 50 or so cases of some version of white supremacy. Not exactly solid evidence to justify a law enforcement, political and media war against white supremacy.

But that is precisely what the Left and the NeverTrump Right now are demanding after the horrific mass shooting in El Paso, Texas over the weekend, when an alleged white supremacist murdered at least 22 people at a shopping center; most of the victims are presumed to be Hispanic and law enforcement officials are investigating whether a manifesto posted online was authored by the shooter.

The editors and writers of National Review are comparing the threat of domestic white terrorism with the threat of international Islamic terrorism while blaming Trump for it all. “It’s time to declare war on white-nationalist terrorism,” wrote David French, a NeverTrump promoter of the white supremacy fallacy. “It’s time to be as wide awake about the dangers of online racist radicalization as we are about online jihadist inspiration. And it’s time to reject the public language and rhetoric that excites and inspires racist radicals.”

This, according to French, would include comments made by the president related to immigration policy or criticism of Central American migrants breaking U.S. law to enter the country illegally. In his call for war and his argument that Trump has been breeding white terrorists, French posted this tweet by Trump in support of his claim: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”

His editors evidently agree with French’s hysteria, insisting that the country should “crush” the evil of white supremacy; Rich Lowry suggests that the FBI should go after white supremacists just like it went after the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.

What could possibly go wrong with a plan to ramp up an agency populated by partisan holdovers from the Robert Mueller-James Comey era? In fact, in a rambling op-ed in the New York Times the morning after the massacre, Comey warned the president, “because of what you have done, you owe us more than condolences sent via Twitter. You must stop trying to unleash and exploit the radioactive energy of racism.”

Democratic presidential candidates quickly exploited the El Paso atrocity and lined up to condemn Trump.

“Donald Trump is responsible for this,” blasted Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Democratic activists compared the shooter to Fox News’ host Tucker Carlson. “If you work for Fox News, advertise on Fox News, or support Fox News in any way, you are enabling the spread of White Nationalism in America and probably making a pretty penny doing so,” tweeted former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer on Monday morning.

The former president chimed in late Monday afternoon: “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racists sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us,” warned Obama in a lengthy screed posted on Twitter. Trump’s predecessor then compared Trump’s language to previous political leaders responsible for the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide and Balkan ethnic cleansing.

What should frighten every American is that the emerging proposals to mitigate “white supremacy” include a jaw-dropping array of strong-arm tactics that will, in short order, violate the free speech rights of millions of Americans as the government and news media malign anyone they identify as sympathizing with “white supremacy.”

If these measures are enacted, they will give legal and political cover to social media platforms to ban Trump officials, his supporters and perhaps even the president himself—they may extend to anyone in the Republican Party. Guns will be confiscated, careers ruined, and reputations irreparably destroyed. It will be the Kavanaugh hearing and show trials on steroids.

Conservative news and opinion outlets such as this one could be placed on some kind of watch list, or worse, shuttered altogether simply for challenging immigration policy or defending the president. Private companies and financial institutions could be warned against doing business with the Trump campaign or Republican candidates and lawmakers. Donors could be censured under the guise of aiding and abetting a domestic enemy.

MSNBC already is advocating on behalf of taking that path: “Because you keep writing checks to this president, it’s on you . . . because you are funding this white supremacist campaign . . . It is your money that is funding this white supremacy,” claimed Joe Scarborough on Monday’s show.

Pending approval of a catalog of harsh policy prescriptions, the Democrats, the news media and NeverTrump Right will continue openly to brand any voter planning to reelect Donald Trump as a white supremacist. The social shame will be as destructive as any measures that could be taken by any law enforcement agency.

And while the Trump haters scream at shadows and unleash the dogs of war, the real danger—how we address the mental, emotional and social defects in a generation of isolated young men—will be ignored just so #TheResistance can move poll numbers before November 2020.

Our inner cities will continue to burn as urban violence destroys families and neighborhoods. The opioid epidemic, a true systemic threat to domestic tranquility, will rage throughout blighted communities unabated. Just like Russian collusion, our ruling class will busy themselves chasing apocryphal demons while America’s legitimate problems go unresolved.

Who, exactly, are the real political terrorists in this scenario?

There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings

By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/

July 31, 2019

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter narrative has been impervious to the truth, however. Police departments are under enormous political pressure to hire based on race, despite existing efforts to recruit minorities, on the theory that doing so will decrease police shootings of minorities. Buttigieg came under fire from his presidential rivals for not having more black officers on the South Bend force after a white officer killed a black suspect this June. (The officer had responded to a 911 call about a possible car-theft suspect, saw a man leaning into a car, and shot off two rounds after the man threatened him with a knife.) The Obama administration recommended in 2016 that police departments lower their entry standards in order to be able to qualify more minorities for recruitment. Departments had already been deemphasizing written exams or eliminating requirements that recruits have a clean criminal record, but the trend intensified thereafter. The Baltimore Police Department changed its qualifying exam to such an extent that the director of legal instruction in the Baltimore Police Academy complained in 2018 that rookie officers were being let out onto the street with little understanding of the law. Mr. Biden’s criminal-justice plan would require police hiring to “mirror the racial diversity” of the local community as a precondition of federal funding.

This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.

The persistent belief that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective reporting. In 2015, the year the PNAS study addressed, the white victims of fatal police shootings included a 50-year-old suspect in a domestic assault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran at the officer with a spoon; a 28-year-old driver in Des Moines, Iowa, who exited his car and walked quickly toward an officer after a car chase; and a 21-year-old suspect in a grocery-store robbery in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped on a bike and who did not remove his hand from his waistband when ordered to do so. Had any of these victims been black, the media and activists would probably have jumped on their stories and added their names to the roster of victims of police racism. Instead, because they are white, they are unknown.

The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops unwilling to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. Last month, viral videos of pedestrians in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn assaulting passive New York Police Department officers showed that hostility toward the police in inner-city neighborhoods remains at dangerous levels.

The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of black-on-black victimization. Blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of non-Hispanic whites, overwhelmingly killed not by cops, not by whites, but by other blacks. The Democratic candidates should get their facts straight and address that issue. Until they do, their talk of racial justice will ring hollow.

Was Thomas Jefferson On The Duke Lacrosse Team?

By Ann Coulter
https://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2019/07/03/was-thomas-jefferson-on-the-duke-lacrosse-team-n2549523
July 3, 2019


Statue of Thomas Jefferson on the University of Missouri campus

While tearing down everything that's great about our country, the left has always permitted us to celebrate patriotic holidays.

But this year, on the week that we commemorate the unveiling of the Declaration of Independence, Nike yanked a Betsy Ross tribute sneaker off the market because the American flag didn't sit well with Colin Kaepernick.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is telling wild, provable lies about America's border agents.

This Fourth of July, let's look at the tactics used by the left to blacken the reputations of American heroes. To wit, the lie that the principal author of the declaration, Thomas Jefferson, fathered a child with his slave, Sally Hemings.

The charge was first leveled in 1802 by a muckraking, racist, alcoholic journalist, James Callender, who had served prison time for his particular brand of journalism. He had tried to blackmail Jefferson into appointing him postmaster at Richmond. When that failed, Callender retaliated by publicly accusing Jefferson of fathering the first-born son of Sally Hemings -- or, as the charming Callender described her, "a slut as common as the pavement."

No serious historian ever believed Callender's defamation -- not Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, Douglass Adair or John Chester Miller. Not one. Their reasoning was that there was absolutely no evidence to support the theory and plenty to contradict it.

The Jefferson-Hemings myth was revived by feminists trying to elevate the role of women in history. Modern pedagogy requires that no period of our past be taught without turning it into a lecture on racism, sexism or homophobia.

Fawn M. Brodie got the ball rolling with her 1974 book, "Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History," which used Freudian analysis to prove Jefferson kept Hemings as his concubine and fathered all six of her children.

Brodie's book was followed by Barbara Chase-Riboud's 1979 novel "Sally Hemings," a work that imagines Hemings' interior life. When CBS announced plans to make a miniseries out of the novel, Jefferson scholars exploded, denouncing the project as a preposterous lie. The miniseries was canceled.

Finally, a female law professor, Annette Gordon-Reed, wrote "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," which accused professional historians of racism for refusing to defer to the "oral history" of Hemings' descendants.

She said "racism," so the historians shut up.

In 1998, a retired pathologist, Dr. Eugene Foster, performed a DNA test on the Y-chromosomes of living male descendants of Sally Hemings, as well as those from Jefferson's paternal uncle. The Y-chromosome is passed from male to male, so, if the story were true, Hemings' male descendants ought to have the Y-chromosome of the Jefferson male bloodline.

What the DNA tests showed was that Hemings' firstborn son, Tom -- the Tom whose alleged paternity was the basis for Callender's accusation -- was not related to any Jefferson male.

Foster's study did establish that Hemings' last-born son, Eston, was the son of some Jefferson male, but could not possibly say whether that was Thomas Jefferson or any of the other 25 adult male Jeffersons living in Virginia at the time, eight of them at or near Monticello.

For Eston to be Jefferson's son, we have to believe that five years after being falsely accused of fathering a child with Hemings, Jefferson decided, What the heck? I may be president of the United States, but I should prove Callender's slander true by fathering a child with my slave!

It would be as if five years after the Duke lacrosse hoax, one of the falsely accused players went out and actually raped a stripper -- in fact, the same stripper.

Nonetheless, Nature magazine titled its article on the study "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." Hundreds of newspapers rushed to print with the lie, e.g.:

"Study: Jefferson, Slave Had Baby" -- Associated Press Online, Nov. 1, 1998

"DNA Study Shows Jefferson Fathered His Slave's Child" -- Los Angeles Times, Nov. 1, 1998"

Jefferson Exposed" -- Boston Globe, Nov. 3, 1998

Two months after these false "findings" had been broadcast from every news outlet where English is spoken, Foster admitted that the DNA had not proved Jefferson fathered any children by Sally Hemings, merely that he could have fathered one child. Only eight newspapers mentioned the retraction.

The science alone puts the odds of Thomas Jefferson fathering Eston at less than 15% -- less than 4%, if all living Jefferson males are considered, not just the ones at Monticello.

All other known facts about Jefferson make it far less probable still.

There are no letters, diaries or records supporting the idea that Jefferson was intimate with Hemings, and quite a bit of written documentation to refute it, including Jefferson's views on miscegenation and his failure to free Hemings in his will, despite freeing several other slaves.

In private letters, Jefferson denounced Callender's claim -- a denial made more credible by his admission to a sexual indiscretion that would have been more shameful at the time: his youthful seduction of a friend's wife.

None of the private correspondence from anyone else living at Monticello credited the Hemings rumor, though several pointed to other likely suspects -- specifically Jefferson's brother, Randolph.

Eston was born in 1808, when Thomas Jefferson was 64 years old and in his second term as president. His brother Randolph was 52, and Randolph's five sons were 17 to 24 years old. All of them were frequent visitors at Monticello.

While Jefferson was busy entertaining international visitors in the main house, Randolph would generally retire to the slave quarters to dance and fiddle. One slave, Isaac Granger Jefferson, described Randolph in his dictated memoirs thus: "Old Master's brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night."

There is not a single account of Thomas Jefferson frequenting slave quarters. Nor did Jefferson take any interest in Hemings' children. Randolph did, teaching all of Hemings' sons to play the fiddle.

Randolph was an unmarried widower when Eston was conceived. After Randolph remarried, Hemings had no more children.

In response to DNA proof that only one of Hemings' children was related to any Jefferson male -- and her firstborn son was definitely NOT fathered by any Jefferson -- the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the Monticello Association and the National Genealogical Society promptly announced their official positions: Thomas Jefferson fathered all six of Hemings' children! Guided tours of Monticello today include the provably false information that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings' children.

So now you, at least, know the truth -- not that it matters in the slightest. Happy Fourth of July!

Ann Coulter's Latest Book Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind is available on Amazon

Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, R.I.P: Triple Murderer Who Fooled Hollywood

(With the release of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review box set I thought it prudent to present another angle on the subject of Mr. Dylan's song "Hurricane" - jtf)


By Larry Elder
https://www.creators.com/read/larry-elder/04/14/rubin-hurricane-carter-rip-triple-murderer-who-fooled-hollywood
April 24, 2014


Hurricane Carter with Denzel Washington (Reuters)

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter has died. Sympathetic obituaries say things like "wrongfully convicted" or "exonerated." But the black middleweight-title-contending boxer was neither.

Carter, in 1966, murdered three people. But Hollywood later made a movie, "Hurricane," in which Denzel Washington brilliantly portrayed Carter as a wrongfully convicted near-saint, hounded mercilessly by a determined, racist detective. Excellent moviemaking, but it adds more sludge to the widely held notion of the "racist criminal justice system" that supposedly "warehouses" black males for no reason other than wrong place, wrong time, wrong skin.

So, what really happened that night in Paterson, N.J., when three people were shot and killed? Why did Carter get prosecuted? Was Carter, as the media continue to say, an "innocent man" who was "wrongfully convicted"? Did the courts "exonerate" him?

In the film, Carter possesses near-sterling integrity, character pure and even noble. It shows Carter losing his middleweight title fight to champion Joey Giardello. The apparently bigoted judges gave the decision to Giardello, though the movie shows Carter pummeling him in the latter rounds.

One summer night in 1966, two black men burst into a bar in Paterson and killed three whites. In the movie, the police arrested Carter for virtually no reason. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. An evil detective, obsessed with nabbing Carter, spearheaded this travesty of justice, and Carter was convicted — twice.

Now the facts. Rubin "Hurricane" Carter was a self-admitted street thug, having spent several years in juvenile detention for muggings. On the eve of his 1964 middleweight title fight, he bragged in the Saturday Evening Post about his savagery: "I stuck a man with my knife. I stabbed him everywhere but the bottom of his feet." Carter also said he and a friend "used to get up and put our guns in our pockets. ... Then we'd go out in the streets and start fighting — anybody, everybody. We used to shoot at folks." While briefly out of prison and awaiting his second trial, Carter viciously beat the woman who had worked tirelessly to free him after the first conviction.

No evidence linking Carter to the crime?

One murder victim survived long enough to provide a sketch artist with a description. This never made it into the trial because authorities failed to obtain a "deathbed declaration" since they thought the victim would survive. She did not, and without the declaration, her testimony was not entered.

But the victim, Hazel Tanis, a 56-year-old waitress and soon-to-be grandmother, was shot four times with a .38 caliber and once with a shotgun. The New York Times wrote: "Her daughter, Barbara Burns, stayed with her for 28 days as she struggled to survive, her midsection shredded by bullets. ... Ms. Burns re-enacted her mother's begging for mercy on the bar floor: 'Why are you doing this? I'm a mother. These are innocent people.' (Co-defendant) John Artis hesitated, and Carter said: 'Finish her. Finish her.' With fresh fury, she recalled her mother's words: 'You don't look a man in the eyes and plead for your life and forget what he looks like.'''

An eyewitness ID'd the killers and their getaway car. Within minutes, the police apprehended Carter driving a car that matched the description. According to New Jersey Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine, police found two bullet shells in Carter's car, shells that fit the weapons used in the shootings.

During the first trial, Carter presented several "alibi" witnesses, who placed Carter elsewhere at the time of the crime. During the second trial, however, many of Carter's "alibi" witnesses changed their testimony, stating that Carter had bribed them.

In the movie, a Carter defender states that two "all white" juries found Carter guilty. False. The second jury contained two blacks.

Although not mentioned in the movie, Carter publicly claimed he passed a lie detector test. Not so, says Jim DeSimone, son of the now deceased out-to-get-Carter detective portrayed in the film. DeSimone says that Carter flunked a lie detector test. Moreover, the authorities offered Carter, on the eve of the second trial, a chance to take a second test. Pass it, they said, and we drop the charges. Carter refused.

Did the boxing judges steal the middleweight title from Carter in an act of racism?

His opponent, Giardello, shown handed a victory he did not deserve, sued the movie for defamation. He received a settlement, including changes in the film. At his death in 2008, a Los Angeles Times obituary read: "Most contemporary observers and boxing historians agree (the Carter fight) was a hard-fought contest won by Giardello.

Finally, was Carter "exonerated"?

Judge Lee Sarokin set aside Carter's second conviction after nine years. He ruled that the prosecution erred in advancing a motive theory not, according to the judge, supported by the evidence. The prosecution, noting that Carter had already served 19 years and that several witnesses were then deceased, declined to try him a third time. That is not "exoneration."

Don't think there will be a sequel.

Larry Elder is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an "Elderado," visit www.LarryElder.com. Follow Larry on Twitter @larryelder. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Bob Dylan and Hurricane Carter (Ken Regan)

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Media missed the real story of the late Hurricane Carter-

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2014/04/spare_us_the_lies_about_the_late_hurricane_carter_mulshine.html