Kwanzaa (Updated)

(Originally posted here Dec 25, 2010 at 06:21)

  • [What’s The Bottom Line?] This holiday season, spend your time celebrating real holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah, not a fake holiday invented by a Marxist, racist, violent criminal.

Kwanzaa: Racism in Disguise

Preface

This was a “clarification letter” written to my son’s fifth-grade teacher. The in-class activity was to break the kids up into groups and learn about the various holidays, so I politely asked that my son sit in on the Hanukah or Christmas table, as he had been assigned to the Kwanzaa table. I gave some reasoning behind this decision – as I often do about most decisions I make (my wife would beg to differ).

The reason I felt it necessary to clarify the original letter was because the teacher gave the original letter over to the Principle, and I heard through the grape-vine that the Principle called the letter, ergo me, racist. While I sympathized with the Principle a bit… because, well, I “look” like a racist (shaved head and all)… I just couldn’t let this pass by. I am sure that this sixties – Berkley attending – gentleman had gotten away with such a canard before, he unfortunately hadn’t researched his statement in my particular case enough.

First of all, while I look like a racist, I in fact have a wonderful black grandmother. Not only do I have a black grandmother, I also grew up in Detroit, where white kids at the public school and in my neighborhood were a minority. I didn’t just “have a black friend,” I, in fact, had very few white friends… my friends in other words had “a white friend.” Not only did the cultural and geographic peoples and places have an impact on me, but so to did theology. You see, I am a young earth creationist.  Young earther’s believe that Adam and Eve were the originators of the human population and that from these first persons came the darker (say, Ethiopians) and person’s like myself (Irish).  The Hebrew word for “Adam” is rooted in the word meaning “red-clay.” In fact, out of the 220-or-so stories of a world-wide flood from various cultures (Australian, southern/central/northern Native-Americans, Chinese, Russian, Welsch/British, etc., etc.) about half have a creation story of the first man being made as being red in color.

Not only did this principle not know my history or theology, he apparently didn’t realize that I quoted mainly from either black authors as well as from the L. A. Times for the letter. In fact, after having a sit down meeting with my son’s fifth-grade principle, I realized that he had not even read the original paper, he just assumed that any person who spoke out against Kwanzaa (whether rationally or illogically) was a bigot.

Unfortunately this old-school “sweeping-under-the-carpet” argument that I’m sure guided this gentlemen through many a brushing off of a parent just didn’t work in this case.

I made sure he read this second letter.

Enjoy, Papa Giorgio

Kwanzaa ~ Not Just Another Holiday!

A Letter from a Concerned Parent

(Fifth-Grade/2002 ~ updated 11-11-05)

Who Created Kwanzaa?

Kwanzaa was invented by Ron Kerenga in 1966 as a means to foster and help the Black Nationalist movement in their goal to segregate and separate the races. Ron Kerenga, thus, views people of Jewish decent, much like the Nation of Islam, as “devils,” to be stamped out like weeds. His views towards whites are very similar ~ racist, in-other-words. Let’s look at some of this history.

Kerenga founded and led the United Slaves, a Black Nationalist organization, which got into gun battles with the Black Panthers on occasion with people murdered as a result.

The biggest dispute between the United Slaves and the Panthers was for the leadership of the new African Studies Department at UCLA, with each group backing a different candidate. Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter verbally attacked Karenga at the meeting, which infuriated Karenga’s followers. After the meeting ended, two United Slaves members, George and Larry Stiner, reportedly confronted Huggins and Carter in a hallway, shooting and killing them.[1] [2]

In 1970, Kerenga and two of his followers were arrested by authorities for the torture of two of his female followers, Debra Jones and Gail Davis. Kerenga did time in prison for disrobing these two women at gunpoint and having them beaten severely. Kerenga told them that “Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what we know,” whereupon he forced a hot soldering iron into the mouth of one while the other had a toe squeezed in a vice.

The Los Angeles Times described the events:

“Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electric cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes at gunpoint. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.” [1]

Karenga was sentenced to one-to-ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment. At his trial, the question arose as to Karenga’s sanity. The psychiatrist’s report stated:

“This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and illusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment.” The psychiatrist reportedly observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons, and he believed he’d been attacked by dive-bombers.

Eight years later, California State University Long Beach named Karenga the head of its Black Studies Department. By this time, Karenga had “repented” of his black nationalism and had become just a harmless garden variety Marxist. This must be our esteemed university system’s idea of repentance![3]

How terrifying for these two women! According to the July 27, 1971 Los Angeles Times, a psychological profile of Kerenga described him “as a danger to society who is in need of prolonged custodial treatment in prison.” The profile noted that Kerenga, while legally sane, was “confused and not in contact with reality.”

The “seven principles” of Kwanzaa that Kerenga created as part of the Nguzo Saba are little more than Marxism transposed into afrocentric key.[4] Therefore, the Kwanzaa celebration, unlike – for instance – the Martin Luther King holiday, celebrates separatism and Black Nationalism. It would be the same as the school teaching and celebrating a holiday created by the Ku Klux Klan, or an offshoot thereof. (I would just as vehemently speak out against this as well, for when the school sets its seal of approval on a celebration, you teach all its goals and aims ~ whether religious or political.)

Created Equal

My point is that I teach my children that all men are created equal and that all men are equal in the eyes of God. This is what Christmas is all about! Jesus came to save the world (John 3:16-17), God’s Word has always stated that He has “made of one blood [i.e. from one man, Adam] all nations of men” (Acts 17:26, cf. 1 Cor. 15:45). Kerenga created Kwanzaa to shun the world and display racism as their main goal for the holiday season, in place of Christmas. In fact, when asked why he designed Kwanzaa to take place around Christmas, Karenga explained, “People think it’s African, but it’s not. I came up with Kwanzaa because black people wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods would be partying.” Great values!

Again, trying to tie in African culture and beliefs with this holiday celebration is a stretch, to say the least. Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by a revolutionary Marxist and racist man – Kerenga – who took here and there from the African culture as well as the Menorah from Judaism[5], and created a new celebration with socialist/Marxist overtones.

I have long-standing family friends who are native-born Africans (Kenyans), who have given their entire life to the mission field. They vehemently oppose this holiday because it creates subversion between the races when love is needed most. Neither do they find a connection with it and African culture. Mason Weaver points out the bottom line:

Professor Ron Karenga made up Kwanzaa in 1961 to counter the Western celebration of Christmas. Dr. Karenga made up a word, made up its definitions and then made up the elements we recognize today as “traditions.” First, “Kwanzaa” does not spell “first fruits” in Swahili or any other language. When I interviewed Dr. Karenga a few years ago, he admitted that the word was changed from the Swahili word “Kwanza” to “Kwanzaa” because he needed seven letters to represent his seven children. Because I spoke Swahili (and he apparently did not) Dr. Karenga was forced to admit that the word “Kwanza” was a Swahili adverb for “first,” and he added the extra “a” and “fruits” because it fit his story. And for all of you who wish to celebrate “first fruits,” the proper Swahili noun would be “Limbuko,” which would have given Dr. Karenga his seven letters for his children had he understood the language. (from Chapter 7 of It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation)

(Updated quote) Ann Coulter, likewise, points out the bottom line:

It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga — a.k.a. Dr. Maulana Karenga — founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. He was also a dupe of the FBI.

In what was ultimately a foolish gamble, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better.

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

[….]

United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (That was a big help to the black community: How many boys named “Jamal” are currently in prison?)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

Origins vs. Current Beliefs

Do the millions of black Americans who celebrate Kwanzaa think of it as the ritualization of socialism? Doubtful. Do they object to the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa symbols and products? Probably not. Do they know anything about Karenga and his past? It doesn’t seem so. When Karenga spoke at the Million-Man March, he went virtually unnoticed. However, the holiday’s origins in a terrible time and with a terrible person are certainly relevant to its legitimacy.

Neutrality?

I do not mind if the school teaches my son true history, which includes the history of Africa, as well as other Continents. However, having said this, I do not pay my hard earned tax dollars for the school to meet some need of trying to teach and include all the cultural holidays of the world, which apparently must include racist holidays founded right here in California’s radical [recent] past. That is not the schools job; it is mine, if I so choose!

This is why this subject is so “political,” you have in a sense undermined my family’s values and put it upon yourselves to teach my son “multi-culturalism” in a “politically-correct” fashion. This, then, requires the school to make value judgments on how to teach this to my child. Which is why I pointed out that by doing so, you have strayed from being neutral to taking a position on how to present other peoples cultural mores (which now includes racism as mainstream) to my child (in rejection of America’s cultural mores… which is Christmas and Hanukah, i.e., Judeo-Christian).

Back to the Original Premise!

So again, I restate my three points in the original letter[6] on why I asked to have my son join either the Christmas table or Hanukah table in class; in contradistinction to Kwanzaa or the Chinese New Year:

It [Kwanzaa] promotes and supports ethnic separation and segregation. For instance, Hallmark Cards and Giant Foods have a policy of any items related to Kwanzaa be produced and sold only by blacks (William A. Henry III, “The Politics of Separation,” Time Magazine [fall 1993]: 75).

This was also the intent of the founder of Kwanzaa, Dr. Maulana Kerenga, separation, not healing. Christmas promotes the latter.

It is not practiced equally with the traditional (Judeo-Christian) practices. For example: one public schools students and parents were asked to come in and share with the class about Kwanzaa, and other religious holiday practices of their Buddhist faith and Muslim faith as well as the traditions and practices of Hanukkah. When one parent attempted to share the true meaning Christmas, using a Nativity scene as a visual aid, the presentation was prohibited. (Ravi Zacharias, Deliver Us from Evil: Restoring the Soul in a Disintegrating Culture, p. 57).

It takes a political and moral stance. This type of multi-cultural “politically-correct” inclusive teaching takes a moral and political stance that requires value judgments to be made that are at variance with my (and many others) particular political and moral stance on afro-centric history and teaching… as well as putting one set of moral pre-suppositions (Marxism, racism, segregation) above others. Thus, taking a non-neutral position.


Notes


[1] “Kwanzaa — Racist Holiday from Hell” By Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson; FrontPageMagazine.com | December 29, 2004 –

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16474

[2] Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson (a black-American) is the Founder and President of BOND (the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, www.bondinfo.org). He is also the author of the book SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America. For more information, please call 1-800-411-BOND (2663), or e-mail bond@bondinfo.org.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Afrocentrism is a political movement that believes Greek culture was borrowed from Black Africans. Among others on the Afrocentrist side is Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern History Martin Bernal who wrote Black Athena. Among others opposing him is Mary Lefkowitz, classical scholar and author of Not Out of Africa who denies the Greeks stole culture from Black Egyptians. There are some moderate positions, but the whole Afrocentrism controversy is based on concepts of race and racism, and is therefore very difficult to discuss without enraging someone.

From: http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/afrocentrism/g/afrocentrism.htm

[5] Kerenga believes that the black race are the real Jewish peoples, much like Christian Identity – the religious movement of the KKK – believes the white race to be the true Jewish peoples. The bottom line is this: both views are founded in racist ideology!

[6] Carlotta Morrow, the main author I quoted from heavily in my first letter to the school, (a black-American woman) began her research on Kwanzaa in the early 1980’s after her sister, who was a member of Dr. Karenga’s black activist group called the United Slaves (US) Organization, denounced her faith in Christ, claiming that Christianity was a white man’s religion.

Determined to find out the teachings that persuaded her sister’s complete change in faith, she went with her sister to “the Center” to hear what was being taught. She was deeply disturbed at the “us””white man” against the attitude that seeped through the meetings, and especially at the negativity directed toward the Christian and Jewish religions.

Seeing the spiritual and racial harm being subtly encouraged, Carlotta began her trek in learning, researching and exposing the real truth and spiritual seductiveness of the principles behind Kwanzaa.

She has had articles on Kwanzaa appear in the Southern California Christian Times, the Twin City Christian Magazine of Minnesota, Tout Timoun Nou Yo also of Minnesota, (a quarterly for families with children adopted from Haiti) and has been a guest on radio talk shows in the Southern California area which included an on-air discussion with Dr. Karenga on the Mason Weaver Show of KPRZ in San Diego, where the author resides.

In case you have never seen or heard Mason Weaver, he has a website called The Mason Weaver Show, as well as writing a book entitled It’s Okay To Leave the Plantation. Carlotta’s site is below.

* Following are some highly recommended resources for the historian/sociologist at heart:

1)  Tunde Adeleke, The Case Against Afrocentrism (Jackson, MS: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009);

2)  Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York, NY: Verso, 1999);

3)  Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History (New York, NY: Basic Books);

4)  An audio chapter from Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

5)  Race and Culture: A Worldview (This is really part of a trilogy). Dr. Sowell’s page at Amazon can be found here;

6)  Video of the American Black History videos:

http://videorow.blogspot.com/2010/08/amercias-racial-history-in-black-and.html;

7)  Many, many links to much more here.


UPDATE


(Updated via GATEWAY PUNDIT)

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 as a holiday celebration of African culture and heritage but there’s more to the story. See below.

The Hill reported:

Obamas extend Kwanzaa greetings

President Obama and first lady extended their “warmest wishes” to those celebrating Kwanzaa, the week-long holiday as it began Saturday.

“Today begins a week-long celebration of African-American heritage and culture through family and community festivities,” the couple said in a statement.

“Kwanzaa’s seven principles – unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith – are also shared values that bind us as Americans.”

Ann Coulter recently wrote about the origins of Kwanzaa at Townhall:

Happy Kwanzaa! The Holiday Brought to You by the FBI

I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanza-reform, and we are not that observant. Kwanzaa, celebrated exclusively by white liberals, is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Everett — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police.

In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.

Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names.

And hasn’t that been a huge help to the black community?

THE LID has a good post on Kwanzaa: “Kwanzaa: A Fraud Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By Criminal Madman”

Those who are around my age woke up one December and discovered that the “holiday season” of Christmas and New Year’s became a trio, with the addition of something called Kwanzaa.  Oh, sure there were rumblings of a new holiday. But strangely in this country where political correctness is on overload, a day invented in 1966 by a rapist who ran a Black separatist group is considered by some as a holiday on par with Christmas, or New Year’s. Kwanzaa is exclusively an American holiday and is not celebrated in any other part of the world (including Africa). The name Kwanzaa comes from a phrase of Swahili origin, “Matunda Ya Kwanza”, and translates as “First Fruits of the Harvest.” That’s right it’s supposed to be spelled with only one “a,” the very name of this supposed holiday is a typo.

Kwanzaa runs from December 26th-January 1st. It’s supposed to be a week-long holiday honoring African culture and traditions but is tainted by its founder and original purpose.

The man who created the holiday, Maulana Karenga was convicted in 1971  of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded. A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times related the testimony of one of the women:

“Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”

Karanga was convinced that the women were trying to poison him. He and three members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent “crystals” of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.

Now I am not a doctor, nor have I ever played one on television, but this Karenga guy sounds like a paranoid psycho.

Somehow I cannot see rational people wanting to observe a holiday created by such a sick violent man (but then again, Al Sharpton led two anti-Semitic pogroms and he is considered a civil rights leader). Especially this year when sexual assault of women has been in the headlines almost consistently for months, why would anybody want to celebrate a holiday invented by a man who tortured women?

Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.

When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to

“give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”

Arguably, this holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas has the totally opposite purpose. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide. Or as the then 16-year-old Rev. Al Sharpton explained the feast would perform the valuable service of “de-whitizing” Christmas.

Heck even the scam’s creator, Maulana Karenga admitted it was a fraud.  In 1978 he told the Washington Post’s Hollie West:

“I created Kwanzaa,” laughed Ron Karenga like a teenager who’s just divulged a deeply held, precious secret. “People think it’s African. But it’s not. I wanted to give black people a holiday of their own. So I came up with Kwanzaa. I said it was African because you know black people in this country wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods (blacks) would be partying!”

The late Tony Snow laid out what was so wrong about the holiday 33 years after it was founded:

There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “God Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

() Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

So what is Kwanzaa? It’s the ultimate fraud.  It is a holiday created by a man responsible for violently torturing two women–and it has a fascist goal of separating the races……..

(THE REST IS WORTH READING)

THE FEDERALIST as well opined in 2020:

Spanning from Dec. 26 to the first of January is Kwanzaa, the invented African American holiday celebrated solely by white liberals and clueless public school teachers. Overblown by leftist claiming the holiday has immense cultural significance, a survey by the National Retail Foundation discovered only 1.6 percent of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa.

The “holiday” was created in 1966 by Ron Karenga, who renamed himself Maulana. Karenga, the founder of the United Slaves, a violent rival organization to the Black Panthers, created the holiday for black Americans and derived the name “Kwanzaa” from the Swahili phrase “matunda y kwanza,” meaning “first fruits of the harvest.” That’s about the extent of the deep African roots the official Kwanzaa website claims.

The history of the holiday and Karenga has been seamlessly suppressed by leftists who find the facts inconvenient. Since few know its origins, the current definitions of the celebration are usually nonsensical and made up, much like the holiday itself.

The Guardian asserts Kwanzaa is simply an “opportunity [for black people] to celebrate themselves and their history rather than indulge in the customary traditions of a white Christmas.” The Los Angeles Times says it is “a way to honor African heritage and bring Black families and communities together.”

FrontPage Magazine’s Paul Mulshine writes that “the history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp.” Indeed, CNN informs readers that Kwanzaa’s violent, racist founder was “a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach,” omitting his criminal and misogynistic past.

Kwanzaa, the “African feast,” really has “nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with California in the 1960s,” writes Mulshine. He contends it was made up to divide Americans, not unite them.

Mulshine explains that the paramilitary organization Karenga ran in Los Angeles in the late 1960s was involved in murder and torture: “In 1967, Karenga was accused of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, [United Slaves] got involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two Panthers in a shootout at the student center.”

Karenga himself is a convicted torturer. Here is an excerpt from an article about the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two members of his group:

‘Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of [United Slaves], also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.

Karenga served only four to five years in a state prison.

Karenga is currently a black studies professor at California State University, Long Beach where the administration is apparently untroubled by the fact that this radical racist is also a convicted torturer of women. Despite the troubling past of Kwanzaa’s founder, leftists continue to shove this fake holiday down America’s throat every Christmas.

Woke liberals preach that Christmas in the classroom is intolerant and isolates students who don’t celebrate it. Yet Kwanzaa is permitted because the left argue it is a “cultural” holiday. Tons of teacher aids on the web provide elementary instructors with Kwanzaa coloring prints, songs, games, and crafts. But Kwanzaa isn’t actually a cultural holiday. It is best described as a political product of the 1960s, which should qualify it as inappropriate to impose on young and impressionable students.

The seven pillars of Kwanzaa (unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith), said College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany, “reads like a communist manifesto.”

Patrick S. Poole also noted that the pillars’ claimed “cooperative economics” is an obvious Marxist reference. Poole noted the principle of “collective work and responsibility” is “why Masai and Zulu tribesmen still live in grass huts, wear animal skins and must walk everywhere.”

“It is a good thing that today we do not have to grow our food, build our houses and tend to our own lands,” wrote Poole. “Division of labor and specialization has fueled the prosperity and progress in the West that all Africans envy. And yet it is the express denial of these important economic tools that Kwanzaa lauds.”

“Karenga said [Kwanzaa] practitioners believe one’s racial identity ‘determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding,’” wrote Ann Coulter.

Incoming Vice President Kamala Harris recently shared a “Happy Kwanzaa” video in which she says her favorite Kwanzaa pillar is self-determination, or “kujichagulia.” Harris says kujichagulia means “be, be and do. Be the person you want to be and do the things you want to do and do the things that need to be done” — whatever that means.

[….]

This holiday season, spend your time celebrating real holidays like Christmas or Hanukkah, not a fake holiday invented by a Marxist, racist, violent criminal.

An Historian Flubs on recent and Civil Rights Era History

My attention was first brought to this via TWITCHY, where they document other errors on top of this one. But I wanted to expand the area a bit the quote was in to show just how racially biased this author is. As a favored lefty professor of mine says… “to be on the side of the angels.”

LEGAL INSSURECTION’S post is an interesting read as well, where he notes:

  • Cooney’s book is virulently anti-white in passages. If I were a parent with a child at UCLA or one who was considering that school as an option, would I really want said child to go to a school where racist screeds are an acceptable form of scholarship?

Here is the fuller quote for those that want the before-and-after sentences:

There can be no better image of the shifting sands beneath our feet than a Black Lives Matter demonstration in St. Louis, Missouri. It passed the marble-clad home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two wealthy White lawyers each aiming their precious firearms directly at the crowd: an AR-Is rifle in the arms of Mark, in a pink polo shirt, and a tiny silver handgun held by Patricia, in a striped Hamburglar top. The couple had the weapons cocked and ready to shoot because they believed that the BLM marchers would break into their home, take their things, and do them grave harm. This visualized death threat directed at the protestors was their right, they believed, their privilege to show to society.

Or consider I7-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semi-automatic weapon to kill two Black men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while waging a glorious race war on behalf of his inherited White power. That’s not to mention the White people who rallied behind him to post his bail. Fear has gripped the patriarchy, and the threat of righteous violence—or the lethal use of it—is the patriarchy’s response.


Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 341.

Here is the other glaring rewriting of history by a historian:

Here is that section — and BTW, no source (FOX NEWS, Kara McKinney, etc), had the page numbers to this section:

If we are to change the patriarchy from within, we’ll have to use dif­ferent tactics from the ones we’ve tried before. Consider the example of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose radical inclusion of all manner of people is the jujitsu move against a more powerful opposition. We all remember that the fight against separate-but-equal segregation — at lunch counters, elementary schools, universities, and public spaces — [<p. 349 | >p. 350] made Rosa Parks a hero when she took a seat in the White section of a public bus and started the Montgomery bus boycott. But the people who led the charge in the I96os were male civil rights activists — Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lewis. In the 1960s, patriarchy combated patriarchy.


Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Books, 2021), 349-350.

TWITCHY continues with its refutation:

She could have, you know, just checked Wikipedia before writing the book:

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake‘s order to vacate a row of four seats in the “colored” section in favor of a white passenger, once the “white” section was filled.

Kara McKinney’s point about National Geographic having better editor’s should not be lost on the reader. Here is NAT GEOS PAGE on this historical event:

  • Nonetheless, at one point on the route, a white man had no seat because all the seats in the designated “white” section were taken. So the driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the “colored” section to stand, in effect adding another row to the “white” section. The three others obeyed. Parks did not.

…AND…

CHARLIE KIRK reiterates the windfall surely to come to Kyle:

….During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said.

During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Rittenhouse said his legal team is in the process of going after individuals who slandered and defamed him in the media.

When Carlson asked Kyle if he planned to hold “liars to account” who defamed him, Rittenhouse responded, “I have really good lawyers who are taking care of that right now.”

“So, I’m hoping one day there will be some, there’ll be accountability for their actions that they did,” Rittenhouse said…..

At least she got the “Semi-Automatic” part of the AR-15 correct. Lol.

Larry Elder rips media for playing the race card in Rittenhouse trial

 

People Never PAID 90% in Taxes (Economic Myths)

This is posted for adding to a conversation from FACEBOOK where I repeatedly noted no one ever paid 90% in taxes after it was brought up by my antagonist — hoping the operative word “PAID” would sink in — (conversation reproduced at the end of this post for clarity — JUMP.) Other Posts that discuss related issues:

90% MYTH

(From the video):

  • “economic historian Phil Magness, of the American Institute for Economic Research, says that progressives miss an important fact: The high tax rates that America had in the past actually didn’t bring in much revenue. When rates were at 70 percent, Magness tells John Stossel, ‘A millionaire on average would pay 41 percent’.”

Even “CheckYourFact” says this:

  • While the top marginal income tax rate was over 90 percent [92%] while Eisenhower was president, few people were subject to that rate due to deductions and other tax loopholes. Top income earners paid much lower average tax rates.

(MISES.ORG has an excellent article dealing with the 90% issue, as well as GREY ENLIGHTENMENT)

ALMOST CLASSICAL notes this in their “The 90% Tax Rate Myth” post:

So, let’s get more complicated. When there was a 94% top rate in 1944-45, there were so many deductions and exclusions that the taxable income was not comparable to someone’s entire income. First, the top rate started at $200,000, which today is equal to $2,413,059.90 — so the maximum EMTR would apply only to incomes of $2.5 million. But, that’s still taxable income, not earned income.

In 1944, you could deduct business meals, all business travel, all forms of interest payments, and much more. You could even deduct spousal travel expenses on a business trip! (Why travel alone?) Companies could also “loan” or “provide” almost anything to an employee, from an apartment to standard benefits. It was possible to shelter tens of thousands of dollars from taxable income. Three-martini lunches and expense accounts were important realities, skewing tax calculations.

As a result of deductions and exclusions, even the theoretical maximum Real Rate of taxation at 60% in 1944 overstates taxation dramatically. The reality? On earned income, the richest U.S. taxpayers paid close to 40 percent of their earned incomes in taxes in 1944. We simply didn’t count much of the compensation as taxable income.

Allow me to introduce you to Hauser’s Law. Published in 1993 by William Kurt Hauser, a San Francisco investment economist, Hauser’s Law suggests, “No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.” This theory was published in The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 1993. For a variety of reasons, we seem to balance tax collections within a narrow range.

Since 1945, U.S. federal tax receipts have been fairly constant in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with taxes ranging from 15 to 20 percent of GDP. The graph is as follows:

When people demand higher taxes on the rich, usually phrased as paying a “fair share,” they are ignoring how our tax system has functioned historically. We could create more brackets, to tax the top 1% at a higher rate once again, but the net increase in tax revenues wouldn’t be dramatic. Why not? Because government spending is near historical highs: we are spending at near-WWII levels. It would be nearly impossible to tax enough to pay the federal bills, and doing so would likely crush the economy….

CREATING MORE REVENUE

So, what did JFK’s “the rising tide lifts all the boats,” Reagan’s tax cuts and Bush’s tax cuts show? (See: John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan Proved Tax Cuts Work“) That lower taxes brings in more revenue.

  • Should tax rates be higher? It’s the million dollar question! Up? Down? No change? Where in the world should taxes go? In election years, the question of tax rates fills the airwaves. In non-election years, the question of tax rates, again, fills the airwaves. So what’s the answer? UCLA Professor of Economics Tim Groseclose explains his research on the topic. Basically, there’s a certain point at which higher tax rates actually reduce the amount of revenue the government collects. What’s that point? When are tax rates too high? Learn a valuable lesson in economics, and public policy.

Which is why either a national sales tax or a flat tax would help fuel our GDP engine more. Thomas Sowell further explains via an excerpt (my scan from my book) of the “conclusion” of Thomas Sowell’s “The World of Numbers.” You can listen to the entirety of chapter 4 read via MIKE READS: Chpt 4(a) | Chpt 4(b).

I will also emphasize AEI’s PARTIAL QUOTE from my expanded quote — it has changed a bit due to my having the revised edition (as usual I add the references for people to further follow the rabbit trail):

THOMAS SOWELL

  • Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities: Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2019), 110-114; (references), 255-257.

IMPLICATIONS

The emphasis on complex statistical analysis in economics and other fields— however valuable, or even vital, such statistical analysis may be in many cases— can lead to overlooking simple but fundamental questions as to whether the numbers on which these complex analyses are based are in fact measuring what they seem to be measuring, or claim to be measuring. “Income” statistics which lump together annual salaries and multi-year capital gains are just one of many sets of statistics which could stand much closer scrutiny at this fundamental level— especially if laws and policies affecting millions of human beings are to be based on statistical conclusions.

What can be disconcerting, if not painful, are the simple and obvious fallacies that can pass muster in intellectual circles when these fallacies seem to advance the prevailing vision of what is called “social justice.” Among prominent current examples is French economist Thomas Piketty’s large international statistical study of income inequality, which was instantly acclaimed in many countries, despite such obvious and fundamental misstatements as one pointed out by Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard:

Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.” But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”66

In addition to speaking of percentages as if they represented a given amount of income or wealth over the course of a century, Professor Piketty also made such assertions as that, in income, “the upper decile is truly a world unto itself,”67 when in fact just over half of all Americans are in that upper decile at some point in their lives.68 When Piketty said that the top one percent sit atop the “hierarchy” and “structure of inequality,”69 he again verbally transformed a changing mix of people in particular income brackets into a fixed structure rather than a fluid process, in which most Americans do not remain in the same quintile from one decade to the next.

Such misstatements are different expressions of the same fundamental misconception. As an empirical study of the 400 richest Americans pointed out, Piketty “naively assumes that it’s the same people getting richer.”70 But the majority of the 400 richest Americans have earned their fortunes in their own lifetimes, rather than being heirs of the 400 largest fortunes of the past!71

Such misconceptions are not peculiar to Professor Piketty. Nor are these the only problems with his statistics. But that such simple and obvious misstatements can pass muster in intellectual circles is a problem and a danger that goes far beyond Thomas Piketty.

Whether income differences are measured before taxes or after taxes can change the degree of inequality. If inequalities are measured both after taxes and after government transfers, whether in money or in goods and services, that can reduce the inequality considerably, when high-income people pay higher taxes and low-income people receive most of the government transfers.

Statistics on tax rates themselves can be grossly misleading when changes in tax rates are described in such terms as “a $300 billion increase in taxes” or “a $300 billion decrease in taxes.In reality, all that the government can do is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react. There have been times when higher tax rates have produced lower tax revenues, and other times when lower tax rates have produced higher tax revenues,72 as well as times when tax rates and tax revenues moved in the same direction.

During the 1920s, for example, the tax rate on the highest income Americans was reduced from 73 percent to 24 percent— and the income tax revenue rose substantially73— especially income tax revenues received from people in the highest income brackets. Under the older and much higher tax rate, vast sums of money from wealthy investors were sheltered in tax-exempt securities, such as municipal bonds. The total amount of money invested in tax-free securities was estimated to be three times the size of the annual budget of the federal government, and more than half as large as the national debt.74

Such vast and legally untaxable sums of money caught the attention and aroused the ire of Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, who declared it “repugnant” in a democracy that there should be “a class in the community which cannot be reached for tax purposes.”75 Failing to get Congress to take steps toward ending tax exemptions for incomes from particular securities,76 Secretary Mellon sought instead to lower the tax rates to the point where it would in fact lead to collection of more tax revenues.

Tax-exempt securities tend not to pay as high a rate of return on investments as other securities, whose earnings are taxed. It made sense for wealthy investors to accept these lower rates of return from tax-exempt securities when the tax rate was 73 percent, but not after the tax rate was lowered to 24 percent. In terms of words on paper, the official tax rate on the highest incomes was cut from 73 percent to 24 percent in the 1920s. But, in terms of events in the real world, the tax rate actually paid— on staggering sums of money previously untouchable in tax shelters— rose from zero percent to 24 percent. This produced huge increases in tax revenues received from high-income people, both absolutely and as a percentage of all income taxes collected.77

This increase in income taxes collected from high-income taxpayers was a result of the plain fact that 24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing. Tax rate cuts in some later administrations also led to increases in tax revenues!78 For example, a front-page news story in the New York Times of July 9, 2006 said: “An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the projected budget deficit this year.79

However unexpected this increase in tax revenues may have been to the New York Times and others decrying “tax cuts for the rich,” this was precisely the kind of outcome predicted and expected by others in various administrations over the years, who had urged that tax rates be cut, in order to get money disgorged from tax shelters and invested in the market economy. This included people in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, where there were similar outcomes.80 But the very possibility that tax rates and tax revenues can move in opposite directions is seldom mentioned in the media— a crucial error of omission.

These are not simply arguments about history. Among the consequences in our own time is that proposals to reduce income tax rates are automatically met with objections to reducing income tax revenues. In the Wall Street Journal of January 31, 2018, for example, economist Alan Blinder objected to tax rate cuts on grounds that “the deficit is already too large!”81

This is in defiance of what the New York Times reported about the unexpected reduction of the deficit by increased tax revenues during the administration of President George W. Bush. It is also in defiance of a record-breaking budget surplus after tax rates were reduced in the 1920s— a surplus large enough to allow about one-fourth of the national debt to be paid off.82 Like many others, Professor Blinder proceeded as if it were axiomatic that tax rate reductions mean tax revenue reductions.

There is, of course, no guarantee of what any given tax rate reduction will lead to in a given set of circumstances. But Professor Blinder’s assertion was not based on any argument that a tax rate reduction under particular current circumstances would lead to a reduction in tax revenues. There was in fact no argument whatever on that point, nor apparently any sense of need to make such an argument. Similarly, a twenty-first century book on President Calvin Coolidge likewise asserted that, as a result of the tax rate cuts during his administration, “the bounty that the rich enjoyed sapped the U.S. Treasury of funds it might have used for other ends.”83 Thus a record-breaking budget surplus under President Coolidge was verbally transmuted into a deprivation of funds, with the turn of a phrase.

All the voluminous and detailed statistics on tax rates and tax revenues published by the Internal Revenue Service, going back more than a hundred years, might as well not exist, as far as many of those with the prevailing social vision are concerned. This is ultimately not a question about history, but about what such heedlessness implies for the present and still more so for the future.

REFERENCES

66 Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), p. 99.

67 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 252.

68 Thomas A. Hirschl and Mark R. Rank, “The Life Course Dynamics of Affluence,” PLoS ONE, January 28, 2015, p. 5.

69 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 278.

70 Robert Arnott, William Bernstein, and Lillian Wu, “The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer,” Cato Journal, Fall 2015, p. 461.

71 “Spare a Dime,” a special report on the rich, The Economist, April 4, 2009, p. 4.

72 See, for example, Phil Gramm and John F. Early, “The Myth of American Inequality,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2018, p. A15. See also Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy, fifth edition (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 426-427, 428.

73 Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,” Journal ofEconomic History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 286; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s,” The Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3 (May 1971), p. 432; Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America, sixth edition (Herndon, Virginia: Young America’s Foundation, 2010), pp. 108, 115, 116.

74 Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 109.

75 Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), p. 170.

76 Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 289.

77 Burton W. Fulsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 116. The share of income tax revenues paid by people with incomes up to $50,000 a year fell, and the share of income tax revenues paid by people with incomes of $100,000 and up increased. At the extremes, taxpayers in the lowest income bracket paid 13 percent of all income tax revenues in 1921, but less than half of one percent of all income taxes in 1929, while taxpayers with incomes of a million dollars a year and up saw their share of income taxes paid rise from less than 5 percent to just over 19 percent. Gene Smiley and Richard Keehn, “Federal Personal Income Tax Policy in the 1920s,”Journal ofEconomic Histoy, Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 1995), p. 295; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s,” The Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3 (May 1971), pp. 432-434.

78 Alan Reynolds, “Why 70% Tax Rates Won’t Work,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2011, p. A19; Stephen Moore, “Real Tax Cuts Have Curves,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005, p. A13. Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz argued that the tax rate cuts during the Reagan administration failed: “In fact, Reagan had promised that the incentive effects of his tax cuts would be so powerful that tax revenues would increase. And yet, the only thing that increased was the deficit.” Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), p. 89. However, the tax revenues collected by the federal government during every year of the Reagan administration exceeded the tax revenues collected in any previous administration in the history of the country. Economic Report of the President: 2018 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2018), p. 552; U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 2, pp. 1104-1105. The deficit reflected the fact that there is no amount of money that Congress cannot outspend.

79 Edmund L. Andrews, “Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Curbs U.S. Deficit,” New York Times, July 9, 2006, p. Al.

80 James Gwartney and Richard Stroup, “Tax Cuts: Who Shoulders the Burden?” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review, March 1982, pp. 19-27; Benjamin G. Rader, “Federal Taxation in the 1920s: A Re-examination,” Historian, Vol. 33, No. 3, p. 432; Burton W. Folsom, Jr., The Myth of the Robber Barons, sixth edition, p. 116; Robert L. Bartley, The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again (New York: The Free Press, 1992), pp. 71-74; Alan Reynolds, ‘Why 70% Tax Rates Won’t Work,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2011, p. A19; Stephen Moore, “Real Tax Cuts Have Curves,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2005, p. A13; Economic Report of the President: 2017 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 2017), p. 586. See also United States Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income 1920-1929 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922-1932).

81 Alan S. Blinder, “Why Now Is the Wrong Time to Increase the Deficit,” Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2018, p. A15.

82 The national debt, which was a little over $24 billion in 1920— the last year of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration— was reduced to less than $18 billion in 1928, the last year of President Calvin Coolidge’s administration. U. S. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics ofthe United States, Part 2, p.1104. See also David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge (New York: Times Books, 2006), p. 67.

83 David Greenberg, Calvin Coolidge, p. 72.


CONVERSATION


 

“The Medias” Change Elections By Many Millions Of Votes

This is with a HAT-TIP to MOONBATTERY:

  • Google is the main villain. The company is fundamentally ideological (as this site has been documenting) and has already used its massive power to shift millions of votes. Ever more energized to impose its extreme political views, Google threatens to reduce democratic elections to a farce.

Here are two videos with descriptions:


SOCIAL MEDIA BIAS


Dr. Robert Epstein told Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Tuesday that Google can manipulate votes by using tools that they have at their disposal exclusively, and that no one can counteract them. Epstein warned the senator of big tech election meddling during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on “Google and Censorship through Search Engines” on Tuesday.

More from BREITBART:

Dr. Robert Epstein’s testimony before the Senate concerning Google’s search manipulation and its impact on elections.

More from PRAGER U:

The media has a bias sway as well. Here Larry Elder notes the 8% to 10% advantage the Media give to Democrats typically. He offers some poignant examples to prove his point of media bias.


NEWS MEDIA BIAS


I was in a conversation with a younger person when they said that Fox News was biased. I mentioned that when you remove the “opinion pages” from Fox, they are slightly biased to the rightas much as CNN (once their “opinion pages” are removed) is biased to the left.

No kidding, twice they mentioned Sean Hannity, and I pointed out these were the opinion pages then they f-i-n-a-l-l-y started tracking with me. I then mentioned that what they said is like someone coming up to me and telling me “the New York Times opinion pages lean left.” Or, “the Wall Street journal opinion pages lean right.”

Bias - CBS NBC MSNBC FOX Media

Fox News: Enraging Liberals for 10 Years (L.A. Times):

….What explains all this hysteria? Success, of course.

The propaganda charge is unfair, at least when it comes to the network’s presentation of news. In the 2004 presidential race, Fox pollsters consistently underestimated President Bush’s support. In its final preelection poll, Fox had Kerry winning by a couple of points, one of the only polls to show the Democrat on top. I’m not sure a right-wing fifth column would do that.

A recent comprehensive study by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri-Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Milyo found Brit Hume’s “Special Report” — Fox’s most straightforward news show — more centrist than any of the three major networks’ evening newscasts, all of which leaned left.

The program is a model of smart news television….

Book: Liberal Media Distorts News Bias: Drudge, Fox look more conservative against mainstream’s liberal bent (US News and World Report):

In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called “Fox Effect,” which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that “all” mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant. [Read Fox’s Huckabee slams MSNBC’s Matthews, Scarborough over bias.]

“Fox News is clearly more conservative than ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and National Public Radio. Some will conclude that ‘therefore, this means that Fox News has a conservative bias,'” he writes in an advance copy provided to Washington Whispers. “Instead, maybe it is centrist, and possibly even left-leaning, while all the others are far left. It’s like concluding that six-three is short just because it is short compared to professional basketball players.”

What’s more, he says, “this point illustrates a common misconception about the Drudge Report. According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias. The problem, I believe, is that such commentators mistake relative bias for absolute bias. Yes, the Drudge Report is more conservative than the average U.S. news outlet. But it is a logical mistake to use that to infer that it is based on an absolute scale.”

And in further analysis sure to enrage critics of conservative media, Groseclose determines that Drudge, on a conservative to liberal scale of 0-100, with 50 being centrist, actually leans a bit left of center with a score of 60.4. The reason: Drudge mostly links to the sites of the mainstream media, with just a few written by Matt Drudge himself. “Since these links come from a broad mix of media outlets, and since the news in general is left-leaning, it should not be surprising that the slant quotient of the Drudge Report leans left,” he writes. [Read Poll: Fox, O’Reilly most trusted news sources.]

Above Video Description:

UCLA Professor Tim Grosclose has a new book out Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. In his book, he outlines what conservatives have known for years, that the mainstream media has turned more and more leftist which in turn promulgates, influences, rewords, redefines, and imposes leftist doctrine.

From the book:

Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see….

That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal.

NATIONAL REVIEW wraps this up in a bow nicely for us:

An interesting study in this regard was recently done by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago. They devised a method of measuring press bias based on the way members of Congress cite various think tanks. By looking at their rating on a liberal/conservative scale based on votes, they were able to determine which think tanks were viewed as conservative or liberal. They then looked at how often these think tanks were cited in the media.

The conclusion of the Groseclose-Milyo study is unambiguous. “Our results show a very significant liberal bias,” they report. Interestingly, they found that the Internet’s Drudge Report and “Special Report” on Fox News were the two outlets closest to the true center of the political spectrum, despite being widely viewed as conservative.

Groseclose and Milyo also look at the political orientation of journalists relative to the population. They note that just 7 percent of journalists voted for George H.W. Bush in 1992 versus 37 of the voting public. This means that journalists are more liberal than voters in the most liberal congressional district in the U.S., the 9th district in California, which contains the city of Berkeley. Even there, Bush got 12 percent of the vote, almost twice his support among journalists….

Federal Law and 2nd Amendment Age Restrictions

  • It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence [sic] of it, and consequently that the Citizens of America (with a few legal and official exceptions) from 18 to 50 Years of Age should be borne on the Militia Rolls, provided with uniform Arms, and so far accustomed to the use of them, that the Total strength of the Country might be called forth at a Short Notice on any very interesting Emergency, for these purposes they ought to be duly organized into Commands of the same formation.

— George Washington, Letter to Alexander Hamilton (Mount Vernon) | Friday, May 02, 1783

Second Militia Act of 1792 (WIKI)

  • The second Act, passed May 8, 1792, provided for the organization of the state militias. It conscripted every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45 into a local militia company. (This was later expanded to all males, regardless of race, between the ages of 18 and 54 in 1862.)

Larry Elder interviews Law Professor (UCLA) Eugene Volokh about the proposed age limits to purchasing long-guns. In fact, in a recent article by Larry, he notes the law regarding the age one is in the militia:

……The second point, often ignored, is the very purpose of the Second Amendment. It is to prevent government tyranny through the power of a citizens’ militia. Since many on the left denounce President Donald Trump as a “tyrant” or a “dictator” or a “Hitler,” they might find that the Second Amendment could come in handy. As to why a 19-year-old can legally get a gun, the Second Amendment refers to a “well-regulated militia” as necessary for our freedom.

And yes, a 19-year-old is part of the militia.

Section 311 of the U.S. Code Title 10 (as last amended in 1958) says: “(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and … under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.”……

An Updated Dallas Willard Tribute (Critique Expanded)

(JUMP TO Richard Foster’s crap!)

A fellow bibliophile passes (updated tribute).

….Because Dallas wrote on spiritual formation and taught philosophy at the University of Southern California, one might think he came from a background associated with richness of education and culture and resources. In fact, he grew up in very poor circumstances in rural Missouri. His mother died when he was two; her last words to her husband were: “Keep eternity before the children.”

Because of impoverished conditions, Dallas grew up in a circle of different families; electricity did not come until he was mostly grown up.

He read a book by Jack London once that contained a passage describing the world from an atheistic point of view. Dallas said that he’d never known books could contain such thoughts and ideas, and his mind was never quite the same after that awakening. He was nine years old at the time.

He became an insatiable reader. He attended Tennessee Temple and did graduate work at Baylor before receiving his Ph D in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then teaching for nearly 50 years at USC, where for a time he was director of the philosophy department. His particular area of study was the philosophy of mind and logic, and he is regarded as a leading translator and authority on the work of the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. He was, along with scholars like William Alston and Alvin Plantinga, a significant influence in a renaissance of evangelical thinkers in contemporary academic philosophy.

His home, like his mind, was furnished mostly with books. He had a secondary library that occupied a second house; a tertiary library that filled his office at USC. After his diagnosis, a group of us packed up well over 100 boxes of books that only made it to his quaternary library in a nearby garage, books in multiple languages stretching from Homer to the present….

(Christianity Today)

Take note that while a solid believing Christian can glean some practical wisdom and life organizing skills from Dallas Willard… this same Christian should be wary of Dallas’ theological bent. Dallas was off in his theology…he was a UNIVERSALIST in the mold of other Emergent theologians:

The short video (above) gives a critical eye into some thoughts of Dr. Willard, as well as this article by Bob DeWaay. SOLA SISTERS has some good commentary to “garnish the above:

Dallas Willard and popular author John Ortberg have teamed together to create a new product being launched right now called Monvee.  What is Monvee? Monvee, which bills itself as “the future of spiritual formation,” is an online assessment tool that is used to “handcraft” a personalized plan for spiritual development for its participants.  That sounds great, except that there’s a problem.  And that problem, one of them anyway, is Dallas Willard.

Dallas Willard, for those who don’t know him, has been a darling of the evangelical world for years.  He has been a prolific writer in Christendom, churning out very popular books such as The Divine Conspiracy (Christianity Today‘s Book of the Year in 1998), The Spirit of the Disciplines, Hearing God, Renovation of the Heart, and, most recently, The Great Omission.  But Dallas Willard, though he is identified as an evangelical, is anything but orthodox in his views.  In a recent interview, Willard made these shocking statements:

“Now, I believe that everyone who deserves to be saved will be saved no matter where they are or what they do.” 

“(God) is open and in touch with everyone in the world, and for all who seek them with all of their heart—and that is defined in terms of coming to love Him, and not just have the right beliefs about Him—but coming to love Him, and loving their neighbor as themselves.”

And then on Dallas Willard’s own website, he makes this universalist statement:

“I am not going to stand in the way of anyone whom God wants to save. I am not going to say ‘he can’t save them.’ I am happy for God to save anyone he wants in any way he can.  It is possible for someone who does not know Jesus to be saved.”

In these statements, Dallas Willard – a professing Christian, might I remind you – is making the classic argument put forward by all skeptics who don’t want to believe Jesus when Jesus said these words: “I am the way, the truth and the life, no-one comes to the Father but by me.”  And that argument is this: what about the “good Buddhist” or the “good atheist?” I know that it feels good and more loving to think that God will save people, who to our eyes anyway, appear to be good, decent, moral people.  Our error comes when we view this problem with human eyes, and not with God’s eyes.  More importantly, we use our own standards for “good” to gauge a person’s “goodness” or “worthiness” rather than God’s holy standard.

[….]

So my final question is, if Dallas Willard is a Universalist, as it appears to me, where does that leave John Ortberg, his partner and co-creator of Monvee?  And what does that make Monvee…..a good thing or a bad thing?  We’ll look at that in more detail in an upcoming post.

The following [long] audios comes by way of Chris Rosbrough from PIRATE CHRISTIAN RADIO. They are — again — long, and allow the astute listener some insights into where the late Dr. Willard may have been missing the Gospel target.

But Dallas Willard is not the only person promoting some bad theology via New Age authors and books (like the below) and authors:

Dr. J.P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy for Biola, tells us in his 2007 book Kingdom Triangle that “spiritual formation should be studied…and insights gained should be implemented.” Then among the four books he would “invest” himself in “absorbing” is “Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline [which] has earned the title of a contemporary classic” (157).

Reformed theologian J.I. Packer says in the foreword of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, by Donald Whitney, said: “Ever since Richard Foster rang the bell with his Celebration of Discipline (1978), discussing the various disciplines has become a staple element of conservative Christian in-talk in North America. This is a happy thing” (9, emphasis mine).

(source)

I will explain why anyone recommending this work is either ignorant of it’s contents, or theologically soft on cults and the occult. Celebration of Discipline is a New Age book, here are some scans of a couple worrisome parts (CLICK TO ENLARGE IN ANOTHER TAB). Here are pages 27 through 28 from Richard Foster’s book:

And page 170 from the 1st printing (this was changed in later printings):

A Medical Critique of Dunn & Crowder’s “Pee Pee Miracle”

(Crossposted at THE WORD ON THE WORD OF FAITH group-blog) This is an import from my old blog as well as an updated video file of a post I did in March of 2009 in regards to a couple of heretics, John Crowder and Benjamin Dunn. A medical professor (from UCLA) we knew from a life-group my wife and myself were part of many years back responded to a question of mine in regards to a specific miraculous claims made by these two yahoos, what is known as the “pee-pee miracle.” In the following video you will see a travesty of the GOSPEL message in action.

In the background you can hear a girl laughing… I think they are laughing at the expense of these foolios. The Gospel didn’t visit those garbage people that day, entertainment did:

Video Description:

This video shows a miracle that — if true — the person receiving it would have been dead a long time ago. I asked a friend about this, he happens to be a medical doctor; OF COURSE I knew the answer, most rational people would. However, for some technical input, here is the question with the answer:

I asked this question:

  • “What would happen to a person if they couldn’t pee/urinate at all for 6-months? I know this is an odd question, but so are the people I am asking about.”

Here is his answer:

“Hi Sean…. with regards to your first question – if someone doesn’t urinate for 6 months usually they are dead. The bottom line is – they either have a urinary outlet obstruction or their kidneys have completely failed and make no urine at all. In the former case, obstruction will lead to renal failure due to the increased back pressure on the system. Anyhow, without intervention – renal failure and inability to urinate will lead to volume overload in your entire body as well as multiple electrolye abnormalities the most common is elevated serum potassium which often leads to fatal cardiac arrhythmia. I hope this helps.”

— Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCLA.

  • Music during the text section is a song by Thousand Foot Krutch titled “New Drug” found on their album, The Flame In All of Us. (Find on AMAZON)

Political Correctness Devastates UCLA ~ Who Killed the Liberal Arts?

What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains.

UCLA now is about as worthwhile as a local community college. You no longer go to these institutions to learn about great ideas, but now must listen to the static of EVERYTHING being made equally great by the magic wand of the left. Dennis Prager read from — and commented on — Heather Mac Donald’s Wall Street Journal article about UCLA nixing classical studies as mandatory for English lit majors. Here is some of that article as read above:

The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity
When Shakespeare lost out to ‘rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class’ at UCLA, something vital was harmed.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school’s English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.

Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

[….]

Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.”

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in “Great Books,” his 1997 account of re-enrolling in Columbia’s core curriculum. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

W.E.B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the contemporary multiculturalist’s self-definition and sphere of interest. Du Bois, living during America’s darkest period of hate, nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity with all of Western civilization: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?

No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages.

…read more…

Fox News — Democrats Fav of Big 3 (plus: Drudge Report Leans Left)

I was in a conversation with a younger person when they said that Fox News was biased. I mentioned that when you remove the “opinion pages” from Fox, they are slightly biased to the right… as much as CNN (once their “opinion pages” are removed) is biased to the left.

No kidding, twice they mentioned Sean Hannity, and I pointed out these were the opinion pages… then they f-i-n-a-l-l-y started tracking with me. I then mentioned that what they said is like someone coming up to me and telling me “the New York Times opinion pages lean left.” Or, “the Wall Street journal opinion pages lean right.” …

Bias - CBS NBC MSNBC FOX Media

Fox News: Enraging Liberals for 10 Years (L.A. Times):

….What explains all this hysteria? Success, of course.

The propaganda charge is unfair, at least when it comes to the network’s presentation of news. In the 2004 presidential race, Fox pollsters consistently underestimated President Bush’s support. In its final preelection poll, Fox had Kerry winning by a couple of points, one of the only polls to show the Democrat on top. I’m not sure a right-wing fifth column would do that.

A recent comprehensive study by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri-Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Milyo found Brit Hume’s “Special Report” — Fox’s most straightforward news show — more centrist than any of the three major networks’ evening newscasts, all of which leaned left.

The program is a model of smart news television….

Book: Liberal Media Distorts News Bias: Drudge, Fox look more conservative against mainstream’s liberal bent (US News and World Report):

In a crushing body blow to the pushers of the so-called “Fox Effect,” which claims the conservative media is dragging the left into the center, UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose in Left Turn claims that “all” mainstream news outlets have a liberal bias in their reporting that makes even moderate organizations appear out of the mainstream and decidedly right-wing to news consumers who are influenced by the slant. [Read Fox’s Huckabee slams MSNBC’s Matthews, Scarborough over bias.]

“Fox News is clearly more conservative than ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and National Public Radio. Some will conclude that ‘therefore, this means that Fox News has a conservative bias,'” he writes in an advance copy provided to Washington Whispers. “Instead, maybe it is centrist, and possibly even left-leaning, while all the others are far left. It’s like concluding that six-three is short just because it is short compared to professional basketball players.”

What’s more, he says, “this point illustrates a common misconception about the Drudge Report. According to my analysis, the Drudge Report is approximately the most fair, balanced, and centrist news outlet in the United States. Yet, the overwhelming majority of media commentators claim that it has a conservative bias. The problem, I believe, is that such commentators mistake relative bias for absolute bias. Yes, the Drudge Report is more conservative than the average U.S. news outlet. But it is a logical mistake to use that to infer that it is based on an absolute scale.”

And in further analysis sure to enrage critics of conservative media, Groseclose determines that Drudge, on a conservative to liberal scale of 0-100, with 50 being centrist, actually leans a bit left of center with a score of 60.4. The reason: Drudge mostly links to the sites of the mainstream media, with just a few written by Matt Drudge himself. “Since these links come from a broad mix of media outlets, and since the news in general is left-leaning, it should not be surprising that the slant quotient of the Drudge Report leans left,” he writes. [Read Poll: Fox, O’Reilly most trusted news sources.]…

Video Description:

UCLA Professor Tim Grosclose has a new book out Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind. In his book, he outlines what conservatives have known for years, that the mainstream media has turned more and more leftist which in turn promulgates, influences, rewords, redefines, and imposes leftist doctrine.

From the book:

Using objective, social-scientific methods, the filtering prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Instead, we see only a distorted version of it. It is as if we see the world through a glass—a glass that magnifies the facts that liberals want us to see and shrinks the facts that conservatives want us to see….

That bias makes us more liberal, which makes us less able to detect the bias, which allows the media to get away with more bias, which makes us even more liberal.

At the 2:37 mark of the above video, there is a distinction made between news versus opinion shows on Fox. When I defend the “fair-and-balanced” aspect of Fox News it is the equal number of left/right guests on shows dealing more with raw news. Here is a Pew Study that makes the same point:

Pew Study Finds MSNBC the Most Opinionated Cable News Channel By Far

A full 85% of the Comcast-owned network’s coverage can be classified as opinion or commentary rather than straight news, according to the authors of the Pew Research Center’s annual State of the News Media report.

CNN and Fox News Channel, meanwhile, fall much closer to a 50/50 distribution, with Fox News skewing somewhat more heavily toward opinion. Here are the breakdowns

Fox News CNN FAir

When professor Groseclose and other people rate and discuss the left/right bias… they are looking at the news reporting — NOT shows like Sean Hannity. And this fairness is why more Democrats trust Fox News than other cable networks.

Most Americans perceive partiality in the news media and more believe Fox News is the most trusted for accurate reporting among the major television news organizations, according to a recent poll by the Robert Morris University Polling Institute.

Fox CNN MSNBC Democrats Republicans

The poll surveyed 1,004 people nationwide with proportional contributions from each state via an online survey held May 6-13. Of those surveyed, 31.8 percent identified themselves as Democrats and 25.7 percent as Republicans.

When asked which television news stations they considered biased, 37.1 percent said MSNBC and 36.6 percent said CNN. Fox News was first with 47.8 percent.

However, Fox News was also considered the most honest network: 18.4 percent of respondents said it was the most trustworthy. MSNBC was the least-trusted network, clocking in at 4.4 percent, and CNN was declared trustworthy by 14.1 percent of respondents….

  • Robert Morris University Polling Institute Powered by Trib Total Media (2014)

According to a recent poll, likely voters get their political news primarily from cable television. Among cable channels, 42 percent, a plurality, watch Fox News for its political coverage. Only 12 percent said they watched MSNBC. What’s more, most likely voters don’t like or have never heard of MSNBC’s prime time talent.

The poll, conducted by Politico and George Washington University, used a sample split evenly between political parties – even slightly favoring Democrats in some areas: 41 percent of respondents identified as Republicans, while 42 percent said they were Democrats. Forty-four percent said they usually vote for Republicans, while 46 percent answered Democrats. Forty-eight percent voted for Obama, while only 45 percent voted for McCain.

Even among this group, Fox News is by far the most popular cable outlet. CNN comes in at second, with 30 percent. A sorry MSNBC brings up the rear…

  • Politico and George Washington University (2010) (via NewsBusters)

(The graphic is from Pew Poll [2008])

McCainNewsBias

So, Democrats and Independents trust and watch Fox more — or at more of an even split — than they do most other networks (not all) . I only post this here to make a point that I am challenged with often about… so to reference this one post. (The above and below graphics come from some Fox having the best election coverage, HERE.)

FoxBias